Mawson’s next comment about Close, on July 3, hints at a long-simmering disapproval: “Close has been laid up with a severe gum boil. He should never have thought of coming to the Antarctic with such remnants of teeth.”
Mawson also taxes Close with being lazy and ineffectual. On July 20, “Close has put in much time at [mending] his clothes, but gets tired before the day is out and has a nap at intervals. After 4 pm he is prone to read a book and does the same when he is not asleep till after midnight.”
The incompetence and anxiety that must have made the overwintering a terrible psychological ordeal for Close are revealed most clearly in the comments of other teammates. On April 7, John Hunter records his disgust that it takes Close half an hour to hike the 150 yards to the anemometer and another half hour to take a reading. “He cannot yet read the barometer,” writes Hunter, “although nearly everyone has showed him the way. Poor old John Close.” On May 3, Hunter remarks that Close avoided his chores, instead performing “his deep breathing exercises”—a suggestion of constant anxiety. “The Doctor was very annoyed with him,” Hunter adds. “Close is certainly the jest of our party.”
The hurricane winds that shook the hut seem to have frightened Close more than they did his comrades. Hunter again: “Poor old John Close is terribly afraid that the wind will lift the whole hut & dump it in the sea.” The lighting and electrical system of the hut was based on acetylene, a colorless gas that can be highly explosive if mixed with oxygen. This too caused Close severe anxiety. Instead of reassuring him, however, his teammates taunted Close by setting off “little acetylene bombs near him.”
Predictably, Close’s cruelest tormentor was the practical joker Frank Hurley. Decades later, without naming the teammate, Laseron recalled the elaborate prank the photographer played on the addled man:
There was one member of the party who was very nervous of fire, as indeed we all were, for a fire would have been disastrous. But he voiced his anxiety too often. Moreover, he had a deep-rooted distrust of the acetylene generator, which he was sure was always on the point of blowing up. One night this member was the nightwatchman, so Frank took the long length of rubber tubing that always seemed to play a part in his schemes, and immersing one end in the water for the generator, carried the other to his bunk. Here at intervals through the night, and at the expense of his own rest, he blew hard, creating a most satisfactory bubbling. It was too much for the nightwatchman. After climbing up several times to investigate and finding nothing to reveal the cause, he at last woke the Doctor. D. I., annoyed at being disturbed, at once spotted the trouble, but did not give the show away. He merely remarked that it certainly was dangerous, but even if it did blow up, nothing could be done before morning, and calmly went back to his bunk again. The nightwatchman spent the rest of the night in anxious misery, and it was not until some days later that he came to understand the hilarity that greeted any discussion on the nature and habits of acetylene generators.
As with Whetter, no diary from the hand of John Close has come down to us, to give us his side of the story of that fraught overwintering. Close “rather vanished from sight after the AAE,” writes Beau Riffenburgh. “Little is known of him before his death in Sydney in 1949.”
Despite the growing resentment of at least one member, Cecil Madigan; despite the communal scapegoating of the two most hapless teammates, Whetter and Close; despite, above all, an ordeal by wind and cold the likes of which no party in the Arctic or Antarctic had previously endured, the AAE got through the winter of 1912 at Cape Denison with its morale intact. The ultimate credit for that feat of perseverance must go to Mawson himself. Yes, the D. I. could be stern and demanding. His fanaticism for hard work must have seemed at times tyrannical. He may well have been a leader unwilling to own up to his mistakes, while delivering “I told you so”s to his men. But he was not, as some of his critics have claimed, humorless. Most importantly, he led by example, not by command. No matter how tough or dangerous a job he asked his men to perform, there was no task that he himself ever shirked.
The proof that Mawson was, in the end, not only a great explorer but an inspired leader would emerge in the loyalty of every single member during the marathon sledging journeys of 1912–13, and in the trials that ensued beyond that summer of unprecedented discovery.
As he planned to send out his parties of three men each in every direction from Cape Denison, Mawson knew that he would have to assign three men to stay and guard the hut. This would be the most thankless and discouraging job of all; after ten months in Antarctica simply surviving its tempests, three men would have to accept the fiat that they would house-sit, playing no real part in the discoveries that were the raison d’être of the expedition.
One would think that Mawson would have chosen that hut-bound trio from the men who had most disappointed him through the winter: Whetter and Close, of course, and perhaps Madigan, if Mawson had become aware of his former student’s mounting antagonism. But it was not to be so. Although Mawson would never publicly explain how he chose his trios, in the spring of 1912, Whetter would set out with the Western Party, hoping to use the air-tractor as a slingshot boost to their progress, and Close would be assigned to the Near Eastern Party, mapping the coastline east of Commonwealth Bay. As for Madigan, he would not only join the Eastern Coastal Party, charged with exploring the coastline even farther east than the Near Eastern trio might venture, he would be chosen as leader of that vital mission.
Whether Mawson made those appointments to test the men he doubted most with an ultimate challenge, or whether by October he had come round to finding in them the virtues for which he had originally signed them up, we cannot know. What we do know is that all five of the subsidiary teams, including Madigan, Whetter, and Close, pulled off their journeys with splendid fortitude and pluck. And when the most ambitious trio of all, Mawson’s Far Eastern Party with Ninnis and Mertz, ran headlong into disaster, it was the fidelity of the other fifteen members of the Main Base party that turned tragedy into triumph.
5
THE PAINFUL SILENCE
Of all the expeditions launched during the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, the AAE was the most ambitious. The three autonomous bases—Macquarie Island, Main Base, and Western Base—formed a geographic triangle whose sides stretched 1,100, 1,500, and 2,100 miles in length. To use a rough North American analogy, if Mawson’s Main Base were situated in Miami, Wild’s Western Base would be in Boston, and Macquarie Island would lie somewhere in the Virgin Islands.
On the Antarctic continent itself, during the summer of 1912–13, seven separate teams of three men each would sledge across unknown terrain to distances as far as 650 miles round trip from their winter huts. In addition, four supporting parties, also of three men each, would lay depots to assist their comrades, on shorter sledging treks along the same or similar routes. And the whole time, almost every man would be charged with making scientific observations or gathering various kinds of specimens.
On the Shackleton Ice Shelf, as soon as the Aurora had steamed away on February 21, Frank Wild and the seven teammates who made up the Western Base party set about building their own hut, only 600 yards from the cliff that threatened daily to calve into the sea. The prefabricated building was similar in design to the one erected at Cape Denison, although smaller in size (20 feet square), with the pyramidal roof overhanging the walls to create verandas for storage on the sides. Bunks laid out inside for the men were in single tiers, unlike the Main Base’s double-deckers. Wild, like Mawson, had his own private cubicle in one corner of the hut.
Among the eight men, the thirty-eight-year-old Wild was the only one with previous polar experience, and he was the only Englishman. His teammates, all Aussies, ranged in age from twenty-one to twenty-five, with the exception of the forty-three-year-old biologist and artist Charles Harrisson. The men were in awe of their leader, who had journeyed south with Scott and Shackleton—so much so that throughout the expedition they addressed him only as “Mr. W
ild.” Yet Wild was a far more relaxed and democratic commander than Mawson. Riffenburgh pinpoints the differences in the two men’s leadership styles:
Mawson not only was driven to work all the time but enjoyed it; so it was natural for him to push his men as he did himself. . . .
Conversely, Wild, despite his position, was effectively a hired hand. He did not have a great investment in the science; his manner of dealing with it was to ask those around him what they wanted to accomplish, and then to give them assistance. . . . Rather than issuing orders, he tended towards management by discussion, and he regularly sat with the men around the table debating plans, with Wild having the final say, but everyone giving input.
Wild had grown up middle-class in Yorkshire, one of thirteen children of a religiously devout schoolteacher and his wife. His father wanted the young man to follow in his footsteps as a teacher, but as Wild would write in 1934, in the first sentence of his memoirs (not published until 2011), “As far back as I can remember, at the age of four, I wished to be a sailor and when eight years old read a book on Arctic adventure, and ever since have had a keen desire for Polar travel.”
At the age of sixteen, Wild landed the first of several postings as a merchant navy man. These led eventually to his selection by Scott for the Discovery expedition of 1901–04 and by Shackleton for the Nimrod expedition in 1907–09. Upon joining the AAE at age thirty-eight, Wild was still single (he would not marry until 1921, after turning forty-eight)—a man with an unquenchable thirst for adventure and a seemingly limitless tolerance for hardship. He stood only five feet four and a half inches tall, with a muscular physique and, according to his biographer, “piercing china-blue eyes.” Like many another navy man, he bore a number of tattoos on his arms (snake, eagle, ship, and anchor). In a well-known midlife portrait, Wild stares serenely into the camera, head propped on his right fist, a pipe clenched in the left corner of his mouth. His handsome face looks all the more rugged for the horizontal wrinkles on his brow, a receding hairline, and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard.
In South with Mawson, Charles Laseron left a memorable testament to the impact of Wild’s leadership on his men:
It was more than affection, it was almost worship. . . . Not a conspicuous figure at any time, yet there was something in his presence that inspired confidence. Like Kipling’s sailor, he was a “man of infinite resource and sagacity,” to which might be added the word “experience”. . . . Moreover, his quiet cheerfulness, forethought and kindly consideration for those with him never slackened for a moment.
During the winter of 1912, the Western Base team suffered through ordeals and close calls nearly the equal of those borne by the eighteen men at Cape Denison, although the winds on the Shackleton Shelf were not quite as strong or as constant as those that raked Commonwealth Bay. The story of Wild’s party from 1911 to 1913 deserves a book-length narrative of its own; but given that it served within the AAE as an adjunct to the even more ambitious program launched from the Main Base, it must be succinctly summarized here.
The nine dogs that Wild brought with him from Cape Denison had been so depleted by their months of shipboard misery on the Aurora that they were incapable at first of helping pull the sledges at all, even on short hauls from the landing cove to the base site. By May 1, only four of the huskies were still alive. Two had died, one had disappeared, and, as Wild wrote, two “bitches” had “refused to do any work so had to be shot, as food for the dogs was scarce.” To try to rehabilitate the ailing huskies, the men had hunted seals for dog food from the moment they had come ashore. But on March 13, just as a prolonged blizzard petered out, a huge section of the ice cliff broke loose and crashed into the sea with a tremendous roar. The unfortunate result was that the comparatively gentle snow ramp that led down to the ocean’s edge, by which the men had hauled their loads to the hut site, had disappeared, leaving a vertical face of fresh blue ice a hundred feet tall. For weeks, until the snows formed a new ramp, the men found it impossible to gain the sea edge to hunt for seals and penguins.
As the men settled into their new home, a certain snugness gave them comfort. It did not take long for the winds to pile snowdrifts so high on the hut walls that the men had to dig a tunnel forty feet long to reach the door. “This bad weather had its compensations,” wrote the ever-sanguine Wild, “the temperature always rose during a blow and instead of being well below zero remained somewhere about 30° Fahrenheit.” The drifts provided such effective insulation that inside the hut, “even with gusts of over one hundred mph there was not much more than a slight tremor to be felt.”
The one serious oversight among the supplies carried 1,500 miles from Cape Denison to the Shackleton Shelf had to do with the vital business of sewing clothing and gear. The party had brought a sewing machine, but had inadvertently left behind shuttles, spools, and needles. So all the sewing had to be done by hand—an art that Wild painstakingly taught his protégés. The leader was particularly vigilant in supervising the sewing of each man’s sledging harness. “If we were to fall down a crevasse,” recalled twenty-five-year-old Morton Moyes, “our lives could depend on a strong harness. . . . Frank came over one day and said, ‘Now then, no homeward bound stitching’. . . . So we had little stitches, and not long ones.”
Instead of Mawson’s day-long program of chores and observations, the laid-back Wild decreed that work would normally end with lunch, at 1 p.m. The afternoon would be reserved for “sport and recreation.” Although the scholarly Harrisson carved a cunning set of chessmen, the most popular game was bridge. The men played every day, and kept a running score. “Two medals were struck,” reported Wild, “a neat little thing for the highest scorer, and a huge affair as large as a plate . . . with Jonah inscribed on it, to be worn by the player at the foot of the list.”
For exercise, the men practiced “slope running”—skiing on gentle slopes, sliding on one’s rear end on steeper ones: “though diverting,” one of the men wrote of the latter activity, “this is rough on clothes.” The men also attempted to play hockey (apparently the gear carried to Antarctica included real hockey sticks), but with four men on a side, the sport was too exhausting. Instead, Wild devised golf balls made of string and rawhide and laid out a twelve-hole course on the ice. For “gokey,” as the men called their invention, the balls were chipped with the hockey sticks. The same participant wryly commented, “This game is probably a good deal more exciting than ordinary golf as several of our greens are on crevasses and it is not rare to see some one break through a lid.”
Crevasses were indeed an omnipresent hazard, even within a few yards of the hut. According to twenty-two-year-old Alexander Kennedy, the men developed the skill of deciphering when they were crossing a bridged crevasse by the sound of their boots in the snow alone: a sequence of “crunch crunch crunch crunch tang tang tang tang crunch crunch” signaled the successful traverse of a four-step snow bridge (the results verified by probing with an ice ax).
Eager to make the best use of the dwindling days of early autumn, Wild chose five teammates to man-haul sledges with him in a concerted effort to lay a depot of supplies inland for the next summer’s journeys. With each man pulling a load of 200 pounds, the party set out on March 13. Until now, during their first three weeks on the ice, the men had yet to feel solid land beneath their feet. Gazing south, they had discerned the edge of the continent to be seventeen miles away from their hut.
This twenty-five-day mini-expedition turned into as grueling and dangerous a mission as even Wild himself in his most pessimistic mood might have envisaged. The crevasses were everywhere, “and we all had falls, [Archibald] Hoadley dropping with his head below the surface into one five feet wide.” Some of the crevasses were so broad that the men had to lengthen their harnesses to avoid stranding two men on the same snow bridge at the same time. “We crossed one at least 60 feet wide,” Wild remembered decades later, “with a badly broken bridge and a black bottomless pit showing through all the holes. This one looked so da
ngerous that we went over one by one on an alpine rope and hauled the sledges over after crossing ourselves.”
The weather was so fiendish that the men were able to travel on only twelve of their twenty-five days away from base. Forced to lie in their sleeping bags while the storm raged outside, they had to deal with snow driven through the tent ventilators that was thawed by the men’s body heat and that soaked their reindeer-skin bags. “When it is understood that for no purpose whatever is it possible to leave the tent during a blizzard and that a section of the floor snow must be used for drinking and cooking,” Wild wrote in disgust, “it may be partially realised how irksome these storms are.”
On the move again, Archibald Hoadley made a small error that nearly had major consequences. Feeling his fingers starting to freeze as he took meteorological observations, he tucked the record book under a strap on his sledge rather than replacing it inside the instrument box. Two hours later, he realized the book was missing. Judging the “track very easy to follow,” with “no sign of wind,” Wild sent Hoadley back alone to find the book. Three hours passed, with no sign of him. Just as Wild was preparing a rescue effort, Hoadley reappeared. “He had found the book two miles back,” Wild recalled. “That had not worried him, but the utter loneliness of that three hours had quite unnerved him.”
On March 21, a seven-day storm began. For a full week, the men could not move. More than a year later, Wild’s team would learn that during that same seven-day storm, some 1,700 miles away in another part of Antarctica, Robert Scott, Edward Wilson, and Birdie Bowers had perished one by one in their tent, as their hopes of returning alive from the South Pole slowly flickered out.
In the end, Wild’s team succeeded in caching a depot containing food and paraffin for the stove for three men for six weeks on a forlorn snow ridge some sixty miles south of the hut. The return trip, if anything, was more trying than the journey out. In hideous soft snow, on what the usually understated Wild called “one of the hardest days I have ever experienced,” the six men dragged their sledges only a mile and a quarter.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 16