I have always thought the gramophone an awful instrument, only fit for the rubbish heap, but to night it seemed quite different. As the gramophone played old familiar tunes, old memories were revived & every one seemed happy & contented. When we turned in at 11:45 we thought that after all the life of a polar explorer is not such a bad one.
Another source of entertainment for the hut-bound explorers was the coining of nicknames for one another. Some were mere shorthand, such as Madi for Cecil Madigan. Archibald McLean was called Dad for the simple reason that he tended to address everyone else as Dad. Other nicknames for the physician were Gee Whiz and Crusty. Eric Webb, the meteorologist from New Zealand, went by Azi, after the azimuth he wielded to measure celestial angles. Hurley became Hoyle, because of his penchant for interjecting the qualifier “according to Hoyle” in his utterances. The architect Alfred Hodgeman was addressed as Uncle Alfy and Bouncing Bertie. Bob Bage, a twenty-three-year-old engineering graduate—“the most popular man of the party,” according to one teammate—earned the sobriquets of the Gadget King and Baldy Bob. Though generally affectionate, the nicknames could verge on the cruel. The overweight Walter Hannam was not only Baby Bliss but the Fat Boy. The twenty-nine-year-old medical student Leslie Whetter, clumsy and inclined to indolence, was sometimes called Error. As mentioned in the first chapter, Belgrave Ninnis became Cherub, because of his youthful looks, and Mertz was reduced to X because his teammates found “Xavier” all but unpronounceable.
The manufacture of nicknames could take on a baroque intricacy. In reference to the forty-year-old ex-military officer John Close, Laseron explicated:
Close was a great reader of Nansen, and quoted him repeatedly. Nansen, under extreme conditions, had acquired a taste for raw seal blubber, so Close perforce had to try it, and pronounced it excellent, though we all noticed he did not tackle it again. From this grew the legend that he had an inordinate appetite, and was capable of devouring seals and penguins alive. As a result he was variously known as “Hollow-leg” or “Terror.”
Of the thirty-eight huskies that had been shipped aboard the Aurora in Australia, only twenty-eight had survived the voyage to Cape Denison. Mawson kept nineteen for the Main Base, sending the other nine along with Frank Wild’s crew to establish the Western Base. While the men were building their hut in Boat Harbour, the dogs were kept chained to rocks near the construction site. As they had ever since boarding the Aurora in London, Ninnis and Mertz cared for the animals they had come to love. Fed on fresh seal meat, the animals began to recover from the tribulations of their voyage south. They had, wrote Mawson, “an odd assemblage of names, which seemed to grow into them until nothing else was so suitable.” Those names included Caruso, Pavlova, Grandmother, Gadget, and Ginger Bitch (not to be confused with Ginger). The lead dog was Basilisk; his second, Shackleton.
Charles Laseron left a memorable vignette of the dominant husky:
Basilisk was the king of the pack. He was a fine, dignified old chap, and carried himself with a certain air of responsibility. Yet he loved to romp, and would play like a puppy with any of the chaps. He was not the largest dog by any means, but quick as lightning when it came to a scrap. He ruled very strictly, and never allowed promiscuous fighting among the others.
By early autumn, besides the two conjoined huts, Mawson’s team had built several other structures. On top of small rocky promontories about 300 yards northeast of the huts, the men put together what they called a magnetograph house and an absolute magnetic hut. Both were designed to measure the shape and fluctuations of the Earth’s magnetic field, the province of Eric Webb’s researches. The distance from the main buildings was required by the fact that nearly all nearby metal objects could distort the readings; for the construction of these stations, only copper nails could be used.
On Anemometer Hill, another promontory about 150 yards due east of the huts, the team put up sunshine and wind-speed gauges. Much closer to the huts, the men struggled to erect the wireless masts that would be essential to radio communication with Macquarie Island, 1,100 miles away. The masts were each made of four separate poles to be fixed end to end. Walter Hannam was to be in charge of this vital operation; in the end, no aspect of the AAE’s fieldwork would prove more vexing than this endeavor.
During the first months at Cape Denison, Mawson had high hopes not only for a good start on the party’s scientific programs but for sledging reconnaissances up the steady snow-packed incline leading to the polar plateau that stretched to the south. The setbacks of February and March, however, drove him beyond frustration, to an edge as close to despair as a man of his willful optimism could tolerate.
The problem was wind.
The glorious, sunny calm of the day the men discovered Boat Harbour was only a cruel climatic tease. During the rest of January, the norm was strong winds, blowing usually from the south or southeast off the high, invisible ice cap. No matter how well-built the hut, engineered so cleverly to withstand both snow and wind, the gales took their toll. During the days when the men had constructed the shelter, at least no snow fell, but, as Laseron recalled:
On the very first night we slept in the hut it snowed hard, and Murphy, whose bunk was nearest the door, woke to find himself covered with a mantle of white. . . . In the high winds it was indeed hard to keep the snow out. Though the walls of the hut were double, with a layer of malthoid [felt] between, the wind found almost imperceptible cracks and forced the fine drift through. Much of our leisure was spent at this time in pasting newspaper, nailing slats or otherwise repairing the weak places above our bunks.
The stove inside the hut burned continuously, consuming 100 pounds of coal per day. Even so, until nearly all the chinks in the walls had been plugged, it was hard to keep the inside temperature as high as 40 degrees Fahrenheit; one morning, Mawson recorded 19 degrees.
February, if possible, was even windier. Steady gales were sometimes punctuated by furious blasts. As Mawson later wrote:
One evening, when we were all at dinner, there was a sudden noise which drowned the rush of the blizzard. It was found that several sledges had been blown away from their comparatively secure positions to the south of the hut, striking the building as they passed. They were all rescued except one, which had already reached the sea and was travelling rapidly toward Australia.
Basing his experience on the winter of 1908, which he had spent at Cape Royds, Mawson was convinced that the February weather was abnormal. He told his men that conditions would soon improve. As Walter Hannam wrote in his diary, “The Doctor says that the snow or wind are not so bad in the winter. So things wont be so bad.”
In high winds, erecting the radio masts was impossible, and work of any kind outside the hut could be perilous. In his diary, Mawson recorded a solo jaunt to the meteorological screen, located only forty yards from the hut, in the teeth of an 80 mph wind. “I had to go on all fours to read the screen. In getting a slab of blubber for the fire I was knocked over eight times and quite exhausted on arrival at the Hut door.”
For Hurley, photographing in such conditions was trying in the extreme, but he was determined to capture the blizzards not only in his camera but on motion-picture film. He later recalled the ordeal:
To illustrate the pace and force of the wind I built a shelter from blocks of ice, and under its lee photographed the meteorologists as they fought their way to and from the recording instruments. . . . Frequently my fingers, which I had to withdraw from the mitt to turn the handle of the cinema camera, were frostbitten, and often, in moving from point to point, I was swept away by fierce gusts. On one occasion, when the wind attained a velocity of 120 miles an hour, I was lifted bodily, carried some fifteen yards with my camera and tripod which together weighed 80 pounds and dumped on the rocks.
According to Laseron, the men initially found it impossible to walk in a wind as strong as 60 mph; instead, they crawled on all fours.
Then with practice we learned the knack of wind-walking, leaning always at an a
ngle and bracing our feet against every projecting piece of rock and ice. In this way we could walk against a 70-miler, and could stand against 80, but when 90 and 100 miles were reached we gave up, and were content to wriggle about like snakes.
Several of Hurley’s photos illustrate the arcane art of wind-walking (see photo insert 2, plate 11). They are images the likes of which had never before been captured in the Antarctic. Because of the wind, the men began to wear crampons—sets of sharp metal spikes strapped to the sole of the boot—whenever they ventured very far from the hut.
All the men trusted Mawson’s promise that the weather would improve with the coming of winter. “Day by day throughout March,” wrote Laseron, “we looked forward to the calmer days that were to come, and it was well, perhaps, that we were spared the knowledge that this was but a foretaste of what was ahead.” By the end of March, the anemometer readings proved that the average velocity of the wind throughout the month, hour by hour, day and night, was 49 mph—a measurement that “for a sustained velocity, was almost inconceivable, and far exceeded all world records.” During several consecutive days, the wind never dropped below 70 mph.
In such wind, with the cold increasing at the end of summer, the dogs could no longer be kept leashed to rocks. Set loose, they gravitated toward the shelter of the verandas surrounding the hut. Sometimes, as the huskies ventured abroad, they would take momentary refuge in the lee of any large object they could find. “In such a position,” wrote Mawson, “they were soon completely buried and oblivious to the outside elements. Thus one would sometimes tread on a dog, hidden beneath the snow; and the dog often showed less surprise than the offending man.” Oblivious, perhaps—but occasionally the hair of a hunkered-down dog froze to the ice, and the poor beast had to be chipped loose with an ice ax.
The men also observed another husky ploy for staying warm. If a string of dogs was out walking with an explorer, then “No sooner would one halt for some purpose or another than all the dogs would squat down in a line, each in the lee of the other. As soon as number one realized he was being made a screen he got up and trotted around to the back. A moment later number two would follow him, and so on.”
During the first month and a half at Cape Denison, the vital whale boat was kept moored to an ice cliff in the harbor. Fearful for its safety, Mawson decided to haul the boat out of the water and store it on land for the winter. On March 12, he dispatched Cecil Madigan to perform this errand, but the man returned to the hut to report that the boat had disappeared. “It was no fault of the rope-attachments,” commented Mawson, “for they were securely made, and so we were left to conclude that a great mass of ice had broken away from the overhanging shelf and carried everything before it.”
The loss of the whale boat and, before that, of one of the sledges instilled in the men the fear that any object that was not tied or weighted down could be carried off by a gale. Despite the men’s precautions, Mawson wrote:
Articles of value were occasionally missed. They were usually recovered, caught in crevices of rock or amongst the broken ice. Northward from the Hut there was a trail of miscellaneous objects scattered among the hummocks and pressure-ridges . . . tins of all kinds and sizes, timber in small scraps, cases and boards, paper, ashes, dirt, worn-out finnesko, ragged mitts and all the other details of a rubbish heap.
Even more disconcerting than the raging gales were the whirlies—“whirlwinds of a few yards to a hundred yards or more in diameter.” These freakish tempests would alternate with local lulls, over which the continuous roar of distant wind sounded like a ground bass. About the whirlies, Mawson wrote, “woe betide any light object that came in their path. The velocity of the wind in the rotating column being very great, a corresponding lifting power was imparted to it.” One whirly lifted the lid of the air-tractor case, which weighed 330 pounds, into the air, then deposited it 50 yards away. An hour later, a second whirly returned the massive plank to its original position, shattering it in the process.
The winds were so constant that the rare, brief episodes of dead calm had a hallucinatory effect on the men.
On such occasions the auditory sense was strangely affected. The contrast was so severe when the racking gusts of an abating wind suddenly gave way to intense, eerie silence that the habitual droning of many weeks would still reverberate in the ears. At night one would involuntarily wake up if the wind died away and be loth to sleep “for the hunger of a sound.”
Mawson had hoped to make substantial sledging reconnaissances inland in the months of February and March, to scout the terrain upon which the next summer’s journeys would unfold, but the weather severely limited his ambitions. On February 29, he took five men and hauled a sledge up the snow ramp that backed the hut. They traveled only a mile, gaining 500 feet of altitude, before the wind forced them to leave the sledge and head back to the hut. The next day, Mawson and two of the men returned, harnessed themselves to the sledge, and pushed on to a point five and a half miles from the hut, at 1,500 feet of altitude, where they planted a marker flag and installed a thermograph to measure temperatures during the coming months.
They camped there, at the spot that would come to be called 5-mile Depot, before returning to the hut the next day. Mawson’s diary laconically noted the vicissitudes of the trip: “Heavy pulling, drift, could not eat our fill of hoosh. . . . Madigan almost fell down a nasty crevasse on the way back. We are more wary now.” But that evening, according to Eric Webb, Mawson shared his pessimism with the whole team. “I have never met such conditions of wind & temperature before,” he said at dinner. “You chaps know as much about it as I do so just get on with it!” Webb later recalled that Mawson’s speech “both shook & stimulated us.”
Indeed, life in the near vicinity of the hut could be hazardous enough. Frank Hurley had a very close call when, in a brief lull of relatively good weather, he ventured alone out onto sea ice that had recently formed to take pictures of otherwise inaccessible sea cliffs.
I had just erected my camera, when, without warning, the ice gave way beneath me. In an instant I was floundering in the sea. I threw my arms out, and saved myself from being swept beneath the ice, but the thin sheet, once fractured, would no more than barely support me, and broke every time I tried to climb out.
My predicament was desperate. I was two miles away from Winter Quarters and there was no help. The suck of the current was dragging me beneath the ice. . . . My muscles were contracting and my limbs growing numb. Fortunately I espied a heavy piece of ice that had fallen from the cliffs and was frozen in some fifteen yards ahead. Pushing my camera along on the ice, I broke my way towards it. By good fortune I found a hand-grip, and laboriously I drew myself out—a half frozen, but a wholly wiser, man.
Hurley was still not out of trouble. While he was floundering in the water, the wind had intensified, and the sea ice was breaking up and being pushed away from shore. “I went for dear life across the thin ice as fast as my stiffly frozen garments would permit,” he later wrote. Just as he reached the rocky shore, the ice broke completely and flowed fast out to the open sea. As he hurried back to the hut, “My clothes were like armour; my trousers like stovepipes. But if I expected condolences, I got none. I was received with ironical cheers and much persiflage from my comrades who had little sympathy for my recklessness.”
On another occasion, Alfred Hodgeman and Cecil Madigan left the hut in a blizzard for a routine visit to read the anemometer, a mere 150 yards away. As Mawson later recounted the event:
Leaving the door of the Hut, they lost sight of each other at once, but anticipated meeting at the instrument. Madigan reached his destination, changed the records, waited for a while and then returned, expecting to see his companion at the Hut. He did not appear, so, after a reasonable interval, search-parties set off in different directions.
The wind was blowing at eighty miles per hour, making it tedious work groping about and hallooing in the drift. The sea was close at hand and we realized that, as the wind was
directly off shore, a man without crampons was in a dangerous situation. Two men, therefore, roped together and carefully searched round the head of Boat Harbour; one anchoring himself with an ice-axe, whilst the other, at the end of the rope, worked along the edge of the sea. Meanwhile Hodgeman returned to the Hut, unaided, having spent a very unpleasant two hours struggling from one landmark to another, his outer garments filled with snow.
Like Hurley upon his return from his dunking in the sea, Hodgeman was greeted by his teammates with more jeering than sympathy. Laseron wrote in his diary, “Poor Hodgeman will never hear the end of it, though it might well have been serious.”
By the end of March, most of the penguins, so numerous in January, had fled north to their winter breeding grounds on sea ice. Likewise the seals, “no doubt disgusted with the continuous winds,” Mawson fancied. “Every one that came near was shot for food.”
By the beginning of April, Mawson realized that his prediction of better weather in the coming winter was not likely to be fulfilled. For some unfathomable reason, the climate of Cape Denison and Commonwealth Bay was utterly different from that of McMurdo Sound. In the most famous passage in his narrative of the AAE, he voiced his glum verdict:
We dwelt on the fringe of an unspanned continent, where the chill breath of a vast, polar wilderness, quickening to the rushing might of eternal blizzards, surged to the northern seas. We had discovered an accursed country. We had found the Home of the Blizzard.
Mawson and his teammates were convinced that, through sheer bad luck, they had established their Main Base in the windiest place on earth. Eighty-five years later, an international team of geophysicists would validate that hunch. The area around Cape Denison, they proved, was indeed the windiest place on earth, at least at sea level. (There are no year-round meteorological stations in places such as the summits of Mount Everest and K2.)
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 13