As winter crept over the continent, there was little for the men to do but while away the time. Mawson insisted on hard and steady work, which included hiking out to the various recording stations every day, no matter what the conditions, to record the data. Inside the hut, despite the egalitarian rotation of jobs, a quasi-military regimen obtained. Every morning precisely at 7:45, a “rise and shine” call would wake the men. Fifteen minutes later, with the ringing of a bell, breakfast was served, as the men all sat along the long, narrow table in the center of the hut. Lunch was served at 1 p.m., dinner at 6:30.
The duties of the cook, the messman (who assisted and cleaned up after the cook), and the night watchman were not simply passed on by word of mouth; typed instructions adorned the hut walls. The fussiness of these formulas testifies to Mawson’s penchant for order in the tiniest of details. The night watchman, who served from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., had as his main job keeping the fire going in the stove. But he was also charged as follows:
The nightwatchman is to sift the ashes accumulated during the day and burn them in conjunction with the blubber during the night. Coal should be used only after the cinders have been burnt. . . .
Any mess which the nightwatchman may have made is to be cleared away before 7 a.m.
The least pleasant of the messman’s chores was spelled out in another typed notice: “A final duty is that of emptying the round-house box which will be effected into the sea until freezing of the bay waters renders it no longer possible.” The “round-house box,” of course, was the communal toilet.
As always with men confined under uncomfortable circumstances, life revolved around food. A “Cook’s Notice” posted on the wall struck a note of mock formality, as if it were the bill of fare of a posh restaurant:
The “pièce de résistance” of dinner shall be as follows:—
Monday—Penguin,
Tuesday—Seal,
Wednesday—Canned meats,
Thursday—Penguin,
Friday—Seal,
Saturday—Variable,
Sunday—Mutton.
With eighteen men taking their places at the long table, meals took on the air of a festive ritual. As Mawson wrote:
No unnecessary refinements were indulged in, for example, should one desire some comestible, jam for instance, out of arm’s reach it was quite de rigueur to call out, “Give the jam a fair wind,” upon which it would commence travelling down the table in the right direction, often, however, very haltingly as it was fair game for anybody along its track who would exclaim, “on the way!”
On those occasions when a bit of wine or liquor was served with dinner, toasts echoed around the table. The most frequently uttered was “To our sweethearts and wives—may they never meet.”
Decades later, Laseron could remember some of the midwinter dinners in the hut in exquisite detail. As he wrote in 1947:
Dinner is ready, and the cook has done himself justice. No “crook cook” this, but one of the elite. The soup has not come from tins, but a ham bone, saved for the occasion, and with dried vegetables, a little emergency ration and other trimmings, it is tasty and hot. The soup finished, the cook gives the order, “Pass bowls and lick spoons.” This is necessary, as spoons are short, and must serve for the pudding course. Fried breasts of penguins come next, in appearance not unlike very dark beef and, if carefully cleaned of all blubber, quite palatable. Next is the prize piece, baked jam roly-poly, nicely browned, light as a feather, and sizzling from the oven. There are loud cheers, for the cook has excelled himself. Dessert, figs or sweets, and coffee follow, pipes and cigarettes are lit, and a haze of smoke fills the hut.
The two most precious rations for the members of the AAE were tobacco and chocolate. The monthly issue for each man was two tins of loose tobacco and one tin of cigarettes. Mawson was one of the very few members who did not smoke. Every Saturday night, each man was also issued thirty squares of chocolate. These became the men’s betting and bargaining chips, as well as their favorite sweet. The most spirited wagers came in a “calcutta sweep” on the first of each month, when the average wind velocity for the previous month would be calculated. On May 1, for instance, papers with numbers ranging from 40 to 55 were put on the table, as each man laid down two squares of chocolate for each number he bet on. When the average velocity for April turned out to be 52 mph, Bob Bage won a fortune consisting of 150 chocolate squares.
Bathing was a rare luxury. “No one washes, except in dire necessity,” remembered Laseron, “the cook guards his supply of water too zealously for that; there is no shaving, so the morning toilet is only a matter of a few minutes.” This was not strictly true. Every few weeks or months, a man might take a sponge bath in a folding canvas tub deployed within the hut. On March 15, after bathing for the first time since leaving Hobart, John Hunter confessed almost guiltily to his diary, “Three months without a bath seems quite a long time & if one did this in civilization he would be shunned by his friends.” In the same vein, the portly radio operator, Walter Hannam: “Tonight I have had a ripping hot bath which is the first since I left Hobart ten weeks ago. I feel clean and a bit sleepy.”
It was inevitable that confinement together would drive the men to buffoonery and elaborate pranks. Sometimes the AAE hijinks conjured up the Edwardian equivalent of a modern-day fraternity house. John Hunter recorded the pitched battles fought between the west end of the hut and the east end, with weapons ranging from sleeping bags and blankets to pots of water. Frank Hurley was “the life and soul of the party,” according to Laseron. “He acts the giddy goat better than anyone I know.” On March 18, “Hurley caused some amusement by putting a dead penguin in Archie McLean’s bed.” Hurley’s jests could take on elaborate dimensions. Early on, after the forty-year-old ex-military officer John Close (who would become the butt of many of his teammates’ jokes) killed a Weddell seal but recounted the battle in rather too heroic tones, his deed provoked a full-blown Hurley charade.
On February 17, after dinner, the Doctor introduced Hurley to the gathering, and said that Hurley had an announcement to make. Hurley, for the occasion, had donned an old football jersey and a pair of pants over his Antarctic clothes, and with an old straw hat he looked a typical bottle-oh! In a rather rambling speech, with much studied and picturesque metaphor, he presented a medal, made of aluminum in the form of a cross and suitably inscribed. On the obverse it bore the words “For Valour” . . . and on the reverse, “Bravado Killus Terror Weddelli Sealus Pro Bono Publichouso.”
Hurley also had the gift of a raconteur. Wrote John Hunter on March 10, “At dinner Hurley . . . amused us by telling us stories of all his love affairs,—or how he has been jilted 26 times.”
Hurley, however, was not the master raconteur among the team. That honor fell to Herbert Dyce Murphy, who had the most varied and bizarre background of all the members Mawson chose for his party. Thirty-two years old, from an affluent Australian sheep-raising family, with a year at Oxford on his résumé, Murphy claimed on his application that he had “been three times in the Arctic,” had “done some dog driving in Northern Siberia and am accustomed to boat handling of all sorts at sea and in ice.”
Taking Murphy at his word, Mawson initially planned for the man to lead the third base party on the Adélie coast, but after that part of the program had to be scrapped, Murphy, to his great disappointment, was relegated to a subsidiary role on the AAE. What Mawson probably did not know about Murphy was that he had dressed as a woman for years and acted in plays in drag, one of which prompted British intelligence to enlist him as a cross-dressing spy in western Europe during the years before World War I. By now, two biographies have filled out the flamboyant and eccentric career and life of Murphy, but in a man so gifted at telling stories about himself, separating fact from fiction is no easy matter.
His teammates in Winter Quarters valued Murphy chiefly as a spinner of tales. Laseron left a memorable encomium on the man. After dinner, as the cook clears the dishes, someone says, “
What about a yarn, Herbert?”
Herbert fidgets, looks nervously at the speaker, and deprecates his ability to tell anything that had not already been told. There is a general chorus: “Go on, Herbert, tell us about Siberia, or Melbourne, or a visit to an English country house, or Cambridge, or anything you like.” So Herbert, importuned from every side, and with a diffident little cough, begins rather haltingly. A small boy or a dog comes into the tale, a sure sign of inspiration, and he brightens. He tells of social life in Melbourne, of one of his friends who proposed to two girls in one evening, and of how both accepted him, and of the complications that followed. From this he wanders to scandals in high places, hair-raising scandals with lurid details. . . . His stories have a curious suggestion of truth; they are convincing and at the same time too impossible to be true. For Herbert is a genius, who from an ounce of fact can manufacture a mountain of entertainment. For an hour we rock with laughter.
Along with the gramophone, for music the team had an impromptu “Adélie band” exhibiting the talents of several members. The instruments were “piccolo, drum, fistagophone (Hurley’s invention), and mouth organ, etc.” Each man’s birthday was celebrated with pomp and gifts. On March 27, Archibald McLean wrote in his log, “Today is best described in other people’s diaries, being my Birthday. Many and various were the presents, and the worst ordeals were after-breakfast and after-dinner speeches.” The men also celebrated the king’s birthday on June 3, and made a grand occasion of Midwinter’s Day, for June 21 marked the beginning of the imperceptible return of the sun, as each day grew longer by a few minutes. In his diary, Mawson recorded the special breakfast and lunch served up, each an hour later than normal:
Breakfast, 9 am Cocoa
Bacon and eggs
Real bread
Honey, marmalade, butter.
Lunch, 2 pm Tea
Veget-cheeze & Soda biscuits
Cherry cake
Bacon ration
Real bread
Honey, jam, marmalade, butter.
Though he did not record the dinner menu, Mawson later fondly recalled that the meal “was a marvel of gorgeous delicacies. After the toasts and speeches came a musical and dramatic programme, punctuated by choice choruses.” Outside the hut, the wind blew at a steady 95 mph.
Seizing the flimsiest excuse to celebrate, as well as greeting unusual incidents with raucous ribaldry, did much to alleviate the grueling monotony of winter at Cape Denison. Whenever a teammate committed a gaffe or a blunder, the hut reverberated with the cry, “Championship!” As Mawson explicated:
“Championship” was a term evolved from the local dialect, applying to a slight mishap, careless accident or unintentional disaster in any department of hut life. The fall of a dozen plates from the shelf to the floor, the fracture of a table-knife in frozen honey, the burning of the porridge or the explosion of a tin thawing in the oven brought down on the unfortunate cook a storm of derisive applause and shouts of “Championship! Championship!”
Yet for all the morale-boosting the men effected with their pranks and rituals, there was no ignoring the fact that wind was the central fact of their existence. The men’s diaries often lapsed into entries veering between incredulity and despair. “I don’t know what we should do if we have a year of it,” wrote John Hunter early on, “for our scientific work is at a standstill.” “How the infernal wind rages! Will it ever stop,” Laseron inveighed after months of enduring it. Walter Hannam opened his diary entry many times with a three-word summation: “Another rotten day.” Mawson himself began his diary jotting on three successive days in late April thus: “Blizzard, blowing hard.” “Strong blizzard.” “Strong blizzard.”
During a rare lull in February, Xavier Mertz demonstrated the art of skiing, as he tried to teach the men, all of whom were novices, the art of which he was a master. The results were predictably ludicrous. His teammates preferred to use the sledges for impromptu toboggan runs on a slope just above the hut—“an exhilarating if somewhat dangerous pastime,” Laseron admitted.
On the hard ice it was practically impossible to steer, and just as difficult to pull up. We generally picked a spot where a mound of hard snow made a terminus, arriving at which we all fell off, though sometimes we would lose a passenger or two en route. One day the sledge bolted with us completely, and charged a heap of benzine cases that formed a breakwind for a shaft in the ice. It was a terrific crash, and the corner runner went completely through two of the cases.
Fortunately, none of the four men was injured. For obvious reasons—the chance of damaging a vital sledge or of seriously injuring an equally vital teammate—Mawson tried to discourage tobogganing, to no avail.
Because of the wind, chores that would normally have been routine turned into mini-ordeals. The visits to the Magnetograph House, the Absolute Hut, and Anemometer Hill were the most arduous of the daily tasks. Often the men taking the readings would return to the hut with the burberry hoods of their jackets frozen into what the men called an “ice mask.”
This adhered firmly to the helmet and to the beard and face; though not particularly comfortable, it was actually a protection against the wind. The mask became so complete that one had continually to break it away in order to breathe and to clear away obstructions from the eyes. . . . An experienced man, once inside the Hut, would first see that the ice was broken away from the helmet; otherwise, when it came to be hastily dragged off, the hairs of the beard would follow as well.
Hurley captured some memorable portraits of teammates “wearing” their ice masks (see photo insert 3, plate 1). Despite the best precautions, the men sometimes suffered superficial frostbite of the face during their brief excursions to the scientific stations. Cecil Madigan “was once observed by an amused audience toying with a lifeless cheek endeavouring to remove it under the impression that it was ice.”
Of all the crucial tasks facing the AAE during the autumn and winter of 2012, by far the most frustrating was the effort to erect the pair of radio masts, the key to communicating with Macquarie Island and thus, via relay, with Australia. The masts had been shipped aboard the Aurora in sections that on land needed to be fitted end-to-end to make a composite tower a full 120 feet in height. But the wind played havoc with the men’s best efforts to plant anchors, attach guy wires, and get the masts up. By the end of April, two sections of each mast had been fixed in place. Walter Hannam, whose principal reason for being chosen for the expedition had been to operate the radio, was initially optimistic. In early April, he wrote in his diary, “Given a few days of weather like today (delightful) the first message ought to be through by the end of the week.”
In the wind, the construction project proved so dangerous that Mawson decided not to attempt to affix the topmost section of each tower. It was not until late July that a third pole was affixed on top of the northern mast. Even this was a risky undertaking, requiring a man to be hoisted aloft to work like a telephone repairman. Because of his weight—by early July, he admitted to his diary that he weighed “something over 17 stone at present” (at least 240 pounds)—Hannam could not perform the aerial work. Instead it fell to the mechanically gifted Frank Bickerton (the man in charge of tinkering with the air-tractor), who spent three and a half hours on a bitterly cold July 26, in a 30 mph wind, wrestling the third section of the northern mast into place.
Hannam’s diary entries, laconic and brief to begin with, grew more and more dispirited. He recorded his sporadic bouts of overeating (“Had a very bad turn of billiousness [sic] with good deal of vomiting caused through eating sardines”), and admitted to feeling sleepy all the time, a condition he attributed to the Antarctic air. His most oft-repeated one-line entry, besides “Another rotten day,” was “Asleep most of day.” On May 15, Mawson told Hannam that he doubted that the radio masts would be up and working before October.
Meanwhile, on Macquarie Island, the five-man team under George Ainsworth had been having their own troubles with their radio masts, being forced
to repair them frequently after winds threatened to break their supports or snap them in half. But on February 14, they established radio contact with Sydney. The linkage worked so well that the men on the lonely island were furnished with news from home such as the victory of a horse named Piastre in the Melbourne Cup—“but as this was the first we had heard of the animal,” Ainsworth wryly noted, “nobody seemed much interested.”
From Antarctica, however, the Macquarie men heard nothing but silence, and they grew increasingly anxious about the fate of Mawson’s team. It was not until September 12 that a single faint message arrived from Adélie Land. The Macquarie operator could make out only the cryptic words, “Please inform Pennant Hills.” The man tried for hours to radio back, but got no answer. “Every effort was made to get in touch with them from this time forward,” Ainsworth later wrote, “[Arthur] Sawyer remaining at the instrument until daylight every morning.”
On October 13, dubbed “Black Sunday” by Hannam, a particularly ferocious gust completely leveled the north radio mast. The collapse made such a crashing sound that the men inside the hut at first thought that part of the roof had been torn away. On inspecting the wreckage, the men discovered the taller mast smashed to pieces, with the southern, half-completed mast looking as if it might topple at any minute. “With all the timbers broken up thus has gone our last hope of wireless communication,” concluded Mawson. “It has been a long and steady job all the winter, the operation being conducted under the most adverse circumstances—and to end like this!”
The wind record kept so faithfully throughout 1912 by the men at Cape Denison stands as a stunning monument to their year-long ordeal by blizzard. Perhaps its cruelest aspect was that the winds only got stronger during the winter. Between March and October, no month recorded an average of less than 49 mph, while May—one of the darkest and coldest months of the Antarctic year—gauged the worst. In May 1912, for thirty-one straight days, through twenty-four hours each day, the wind averaged 60.7 mph.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 14