We were pulling in pairs, Hoadley and I leading, sinking thigh to waist deep, and at one time tried going on our hands and knees, but found our faces went under. After one of our 40 yard struggles, I thought I might be halting too frequently and asked Hoadley if he thought so. He replied, “My God sir, if you go another yard I’ll die!”
During those twenty-five days, the two teammates left to caretake the hut had their own desperate times. On a simple errand to go out and feed the dogs during a blizzard, Alexander Kennedy got lost a mere ten yards from the hut. As he wrote that evening:
Unable to stand, or see, with a face covered with ice, and buffeted from all sides by a wind of force about 12 or more [greater than 70 mph], I crawled around and about in search of some object, anything would be acceptable. . . . [I] found the SE corner of the hut. After being blown headfirst from there to the [coal] brick pile, I crawled into the hut dazed & numb. Never again unless absolutely necessary.
As the days darkened and grew colder in late April, the men settled in for the winter. During the coming months, like their counterparts at Cape Denison, the residents of Western Base saw tensions flare up among them. The most persistent source of conflict came from Harrisson’s dismay over the slovenly housekeeping his comrades practiced in the kitchen and at the dining table. As not only the oldest man in the party but the only one who was married, Harrisson recorded his vexation day after day in his diary.
The men survived one near-catastrophe. On August 11, trying to fill the acetylene generator in the middle of a blizzard, one of the men nearly set fire not only to himself, but to the hut. Two teammates managed, after strenuous efforts, to put the fire out with water, snow, and blankets. “Wondering when the buckets of kerosene inside & the gas would go up & take us with it,” speculated Morton Moyes about this close call. “It also meant the ruin of hut & probably a death by freezing to the rest.”
Yet thanks in large part to Wild’s inspired leadership, the men at Western Base got through the winter without a wholesale plunge in morale. As spring began to dawn on their remote outpost, like their teammates 1,500 miles away at Main Base, Wild’s crew looked forward to the summer’s journeys with keen, unalloyed enthusiasm.
The AAE presents a narrative conundrum. Unlike Scott’s and Shackleton’s and Amundsen’s quests for the South Pole—in which the combined effort of a large team culminated in the final polar party’s thrust toward 90 degrees south, thus providing a dramatic arc to the whole story—Mawson’s expedition fielded no fewer than eight three-man teams in the summer of 1912–13, operating for the most part autonomously, in a kind of well-coordinated frenzy of discovery pursued in every possible direction. Since the dramas within each team took shape simultaneously, there is no simple way to tell their stories.
Mawson himself, in The Home of the Blizzard, succumbs to the awkwardness of the AAE’s ungainly plot structure. He jumps, chapter after chapter, from one trio’s doings to the next. His innate modesty leads him to downplay the climactic tragedy of the whole expedition—the fate of his own Far Eastern Party with Ninnis and Mertz—while giving generous play to what a century later seem to be only ancillary matters. The book, for instance, devotes three long chapters, written by George Ainsworth, to the accomplishments of the five men confined to the relay station on Macquarie Island. Subsequent historians have adopted the same clumsy narrative formula. (Indeed, it is a structure that proves hard to avoid.)
At the Main Base, Mawson chose three men—Herbert Dyce Murphy, John Hunter, and Walter Hannam—to stay and tend the hut. What further complicates the story, however, is that Murphy and Hunter also took part in the supporting teams that helped launch the Southern Party and the Near Eastern Party through the month of November. The shifting duties of these teammates and their companions during the late spring campaign take on the whirlwind quality of a game of musical chairs.
Those three house-sitters played an invaluable role in the AAE, and each was an interesting man in his own right. (As noted in chapter four, two full biographies of the enigmatic Murphy have been written.) But here, their contributions must go unsung, as must the work of the two supporting parties, whose numbers included not only the three hut-minders but, briefly, John Close, Alfred Hodgeman, and Charles Laseron as well.
After all kinds of preparations and reconnaissances in August, September, and October, the five main exploratory trios set out from Cape Denison in early November. The Western Party, under the leadership of Frank Bickerton, was to push as far west as possible along the coast. The team hoped to use the crippled air-tractor to propel it on its way. The Near Eastern Party, led by Frank Stillwell, a twenty-three-year-old engineer from Melbourne, was supposed to map the convoluted coastline east of the hut for some 100 miles. Leapfrogging past them to explore the coast farther east was the Eastern Coastal Party, whose leader was Cecil Madigan, the Rhodes scholar who had spent the first winter nursing his annoyance at Mawson. A Southern Party, led by Bob Bage, hoped to reach the south magnetic pole from the exact opposite direction of that followed by Mawson, Edgeworth David, and Alistair Mackay in 1908–09. Finally, the Far Eastern Party, led by Mawson himself, the only trio to use dogs to haul their sledges, would make the most ambitious thrust of all, trying to link the unknown land southeast of Cape Denison with the fugitive hills of Victoria Land glimpsed from shipboard by members of Scott’s party two years before.
November 6 was fixed as the grand departure date. Inside the hut on the evening of the 5th, the men celebrated with a lavish farewell dinner. But the usual blizzard arrived the next day, delaying the departures. In the end, the various leave-takings were staggered over the following week.
Along with detailed instructions as to the kinds of research and mapping each team was supposed to accomplish, Mawson gave his parties a strict deadline: they were to be back at Winter Quarters by January 15 at the latest, so that the planned rendezvous with the Aurora might take place, ensuring that all eighteen men—as well as the eight operating under Wild out of the Western Base—would return to Australia before the end of the summer of 1913. Yet Mawson, in his thoroughness, imagined every possible outcome. In a scrawled note left in the hut, he penned an order to John King Davis, skipper of the Aurora, that sounds in hindsight a grim premonitory tone: “Should I or my party not have arrived back before the 1st Feb. you are to steam west and pick up Wild’s party.”
Of the four man-hauling trios, perhaps the strongest was the Southern Party. Bob Bage, its leader, was the quiet, confident twenty-three-year-old whom John Hunter, early on, had deemed “the most popular man of the party.” His two colleagues were the effervescent photographer Frank Hurley and the dour magnetician Eric Webb. Except for Mawson’s own Far Eastern Party, none of the teams streaming out from Winter Quarters would accomplish more that summer, and none, except Mawson’s, would undergo a more perilous adventure on the ice.
The Southern Party’s plan was simple: to haul sledges south, at first with the help of a supporting team, establish depots of food and fuel for the return journey twice along the way, and get as close to the south magnetic pole as possible before having to turn back. Once up on the polar plateau itself, however, the men were quickly intimidated by the barren hostility of endless snow and wind. Only 19 miles out from Winter Quarters, John Hunter, one of the supporting sledgers, wrote in his diary, “What a God forsaken country this plateau is.” His comrade Charles Laseron concurred: “God damn this country. . . . Blowing a hurricane with drift as thick as peasoup.”
Sixty-seven and a half miles out, the Southern Party said goodbye to their three supporters, who turned north to head back to the hut, after all six men had built a ten-foot-tall snow mound in which they cached food and fuel. Taking careful measurements of the place’s latitude and longitude, Bage’s team named the depot Southern Cross. Almost two months hence, finding it would be crucial to the men’s safe return.
The daily fare for the sledging parties had been carefully worked out long before the Aurora had left Austra
lia. Like nearly all the best-planned expeditions, the AAE relied on an inflexible menu, the same food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. Even before reaching Cape Denison, the sledging rations were packed into bags that held either seven or fourteen days’ meals for three men. The daily allotment of food, chosen for maximum calories and minimum weight, amounted to 34 ounces per man per day. To vary the regimen and entice the men with rewards, Mawson added 25 pounds of “perks” to the sledge load: special treats for celebratory occasions.
The staple main course for both breakfast and dinner was hoosh, a kind of porridge made up of pemmican (a fifty-fifty mélange of dried beef and animal fat), crumbled plasmon biscuit (whose crucial ingredient was powdered milk), and water, the whole cooked on the Primus stove. Each man had his own mug into which the hoosh was ladled. The second course was cocoa—one part cocoa powder to two parts sugar to four parts Glaxo (the brand name of an enriched powdered milk). The AAE’s cocoa, one member reported, “sent the blood tingling into the fingers and toes.” But that was all—hoosh and cocoa for breakfast and dinner.
Lunch was only a little more varied: plasmon biscuit, tea, chocolate, and butter. In polar sledging conditions, one’s craving for fat becomes so intense that it is a delight to eat butter (or even lard) straight, without smearing it on bread or biscuit. The same aficionado who sang the praises of cocoa wrote, “if the weather was good it was pleasant to nibble alternately at a piece of frozen butter, chocolate and biscuit, and sip between whiles from a hot mug of tea.” It was the brewing up of tea that necessitated pitching the tent for lunch when any substantial wind was blowing.
When the wind was strong, pitching the tent each afternoon or evening became a risky tribulation. Made of japara, a heavy cotton treated with wax to make it waterproof, the three-man tent combined with poles and ground cloth weighed an unwieldy 33 pounds. The tent was supported by a structure of five stout bamboo poles that were inserted into a hinged centerpiece at the apex. The shelter had been designed so that the cone of five poles was meant to be erected first, then the tent slung over it, but the men realized long before commencing their November jaunts that such a procedure invited disaster: in a strong wind, the tent itself was likely to be torn loose from the men’s grasp as they struggled to hoist it over the pole pyramid. The AAE members had modified the design by sewing the poles inside sleeves of canvas loops on the inside of the tent. The whole apparatus thus resembled a giant umbrella. Tent pegs would have been useless to keep such a cumbersome shelter in place, but the tent itself came equipped with skirt-like flaps that, laid flat on the snow and covered with heavy objects, served to anchor it.
The men had practiced pitching the tents in gale-force winds for weeks before their November departure from Winter Quarters, for to lose the tent in a storm on the Antarctic plateau might well have spelled death. Charles Laseron left a vivid description of the extraordinary sequence of tasks required to get the tent safely pitched in a wind:
First, enough large blocks of ice or hard snow were cut and placed handy; then the tent was laid down with the apex upwind and the entrance on top, so that it would be in the lee when the tent was raised; next, one man crawled inside and, with the other two hanging on, the tent was lifted and the man inside spread the three windward legs, one directly upwind, the others far enough apart to keep the material taut and at the same time give sufficient room for the leeward legs to fall into position. This required a considerable knack as the whole time the wind would be tearing at the structure, and it took the united strength of all hands to prevent it being blown away. . . . Once up it was found difficult to readjust the position of the legs, and if this was unsatisfactory the only thing was to do the whole job over again. The ballast was now placed on the outside flaps, and a canvas tent floor . . . was laid down, and all was ready for occupancy.
The door was a tunnel sleeve that could be tied shut from the inside. In a bad wind, it could take three men more than an hour to pitch the tent.
Day after day, Bage, Hurley, and Webb crossed a featureless plain of snow. But on December 1, they suddenly confronted “an amazing field of huge crevasses.” Hurley took the lead as, roped to his partners, he tested each snow bridge by stomping forcefully on it. He was halfway across the crevasse field when “suddenly I dropped through a deep fissure. There was a sickening sensation of falling followed by a violent jerk. As before, I shouted to my mates, ‘Right-O! Haul away!’ ” But as Bage and Webb slowly pulled their companion back to the surface, the rope holding him sawed its way deep into the snow of the near lip of the crevasse. Bage paused, then yelled to Hurley that he would have to carve away the overhanging snow with his ax. Hurley called back anxiously, “Don’t chip through the line.”
In that moment of terror, the photographer in Hurley came to the fore. “I could not help noticing the unearthly beauty of the abyss into which I had fallen,” he later recalled. The walls enclosing him were jade in color near the top, shading through sapphire to cobalt and, in the depths below, black. “The sheer faces were covered with exquisite crystals that scintillated as I moved.” Still, as Hurley clambered at last out of the crevasse, “I emerged with the thought that there were worse places even than the plateau surface.”
On December 12, at a spot the trio measured as 200 miles out, they left another cache of supplies—ten days’ worth of food and a gallon of kerosene. They called it the Lucky Depot. Just as Mawson’s team had discovered in early 1909, however, the closer Bage’s party got to the magnetic pole, the harder it was to get accurate readings on the dip compass. Finally, on December 21, the men knew they had to turn around. By their own reckoning, they were 301 miles from Winter Quarters. The dip reading showed 89° 43.5'. They stood, they guessed, within 50 miles of the magnetic pole.
“What a temptation to go on and raise the needle to the vertical!” Hurley later wrote. “What lay beyond?” Instead, Webb made his final observations, the men ate lunch, then raised the flag of the Commonwealth and gave three cheers for the king—“they sounded very strange in the vast solitude.” That night the temperature was minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest yet recorded on the journey. “It was . . . Midsummer Day,” Bage dryly noted, “so we concluded that the spot would be a very chilly one in winter.”
The return journey would test the three men to the limits of their endurance. On December 27, they regained the Lucky Depot, where they celebrated Christmas two days late. Hurley prepared a formal menu, mocking the spartan paucity of the cuisine, with an hors d’oeuvre of “Angels on gliders. Made by placing a raisin on the top of a bar of chocolate previously fried” and, for entrée, “Biscuit fried in sledging suet.”
On the way back, superbly fit, the three men pushed the pace, covering a total of 41½ miles in one continuous push of twenty-two hours. It was, Mawson later noted, “a record for man-hauling sledging between camp and camp.” But slowly the men’s optimism crumbled, as the weather grew steadily overcast, snow fell day after day, the wind was incessant, and the omnipresent sastrugi overturned the sledge again and again. Removing their goggles to try to get their bearings in the gray miasma of the plateau, all three men at different times suffered from snow blindness. And to make navigation all the more difficult, their sledgemeter broke down.
On January 4, the men reached what they thought should be the vicinity of the Southern Cross depot, but they could not find it. They searched for it for the next three days, crisscrossing the featureless plain as the snow fell thicker than ever, but found no trace of the vital cache. By now, they were almost out of food.
Something was clearly wrong. If they were looking in the wrong place for the depot, the men could not be sure they knew how to find their way back to the hut. With the diminution of their food, they felt their fitness ebbing away by the hour. By January 8, all the men had left to eat was half a hoosh, six lumps of sugar, and nine raisins. And snow blindness continued to wreak its ravages.
In his diary that day, Webb wrote, “Matter of life and death.�
�� And the next day: “Sitting in the tent tonight we have high hopes that we may get thro but it seems but a chance. We don’t know where we are and can only trust to pure luck.”
In a fit of morbid humor, Hurley started composing doggerel verses about the finest meals he could remember. A sample:
I’ve dined in many places, but never such as these—
It’s like the Gates of Heaven, when you’ve found you’ve lost the keys. . . .
I’ve feasted with Iguanas on a lonely desert isle;
Once in the shade of a wattle, and a maiden’s winsome smile. . . .
In short, I’ve dined from Horn to Cape and up Alaska way,
But the finest, funniest dinner of all was that on Christmas Day!
When he read the verses aloud to his tentmates, Hurley later recalled, Bage commented “Pretty rotten,” while Webb chimed in with the trio’s motto for all the trip’s vicissitudes, “Might be much worse.” But in the privacy of his diary, Hurley added, “To hell with it all, let us die cheerfully.”
“There was only one thing for it now,” Bage concluded, “and that was to make a break for the coast.” The men packed their tent, got back in their harnesses, and started hauling their sledge north. But January 8 was “the worst day’s march of our journey,” with 60 mph winds and drifting snow.
Two days later, guessing they were still 27 miles from the hut, the trio was on the verge of giving up. But Bage, in the lead, came over a slight rise and suddenly recognized the offshore islets in the distance, ones they had come to know well during the winter months at Cape Denison. January 10, Webb told his diary, was “The most memorable day of our lives so far!”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 17