It took one more camp and another day’s march to stagger down the final slope to the hut. “Never had I seen the Antarctic appear so serene and beautiful,” Hurley later claimed. With Bage so snowblind he had to ride the sledge, the trio limped the last few hundred yards, as their teammates at the hut rushed out to greet them. “We three had never thought the Hut quite such a fine place, nor have we ever since,” Bage concluded.
It was January 11, only four days before the rigid deadline Mawson had imposed on all the teams. Stillwell’s Near Eastern Party, with Close and Laseron, had arrived six days earlier from their relatively modest exploration of the coast immediately east of the hut. But three other teams—nine men, including Mawson himself—were still out there somewhere on the ice.
What, exactly, had the Southern Party accomplished in its journey of 600 miles? The data minutely recorded in logbooks each day would find light only years later, in the AAE scientific reports. But in The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson succinctly hailed the team’s achievement: “The information brought back proved that Adelie Land is continuous with South Victoria Land and part of the great Antarctic continent.”
That may not sound like much to justify two months of intense hardship and danger. Yet by trudging across the polar plateau to reach an altitude of 5,900 feet, Bage’s party had fulfilled the most ancient and cherished of exploratory goals—to go where no one else had ever been, to fill in a blank on the map. By the end of 1913, most of Antarctica would remain a blank, but no expedition ever discovered more land on the southern continent than the AAE.
The adventures of the other three man-hauling trios out of Cape Denison were not unlike those of the Southern Party. All the teams suffered greatly from wind and snow and cold, from storms that kept them tent-bound for days on end, from sastrugi overturning sledges, from the constant threat of hidden crevasses into which men plunged only to be saved by rope or harness. It will suffice here simply to summarize the deeds of the two more ambitious of those man-hauling units—Madigan’s Eastern Coastal Party and Bickerton’s Western Party.
Since there was only one feasible route onto the polar plateau from Winter Quarters—the snow ramp that backed Cape Denison to the south—all the sledging parties followed the same track for the first five, 10, or even 15 miles, before branching off on their separate itineraries. In August, at the 5-mile Depot site first explored by Mawson the previous February, the men spent two days digging a substantial snow cave. Aladdin’s Cave, as the grotto was named, would play a pivotal role in the doings of the following summer.
“A refuge from the hurricane,” as Mawson called it, Aladdin’s Cave comprised a vertical entry shaft whose opening could be closed with a specially designed canvas flap, giving onto a cubicle in which several men could rest or sleep in horizontal comfort. Mawson would wax poetic about this “truly magical world of glassy facets and scintillating crystals,” where “it was a great relief to be in a strong room, with solid walls of ice, in place of the cramped tent flapping violently in the wind. Inside the silence was profound, the blizzard was banished.”
Shelves for primus stove, spirit bottle, matches, kerosene and other oddments were chipped out at a moment’s notice. In one wall a small hole was cut to communicate with a narrow crevasse fissure which provided ventilation without allowing the entrance of drifting snow. Another fissure crossing the floor at one corner was a natural receptacle for rubbish [including human excretions]. Whatever daylight there was filtered through the roof and walls without hindrance. The purest ice for cooking could be immediately hacked out from the walls without the inconvenience of having to don one’s burberrys and go outside for it. Finally one neatly disposed of spare clothes by moistening the corner of each garment and pressing it against the wall for a few seconds, where it would freeze on and remain hanging until required.
In polar regions, as on high mountains, snow caves have often served as welcome and even lifesaving alternatives to pitched tents. That the AAE did not dig more of them was dictated simply by the time and labor it took to construct them.
On November 17, 25 miles out from Winter Quarters, Madigan’s Eastern Coastal Party, with Archibald McLean and Percy Correll (the youngest member of the AAE), bade farewell to Mawson, Ninnis, and Mertz as they bent their course north to follow the coast. During the subsequent weeks, instead of the featureless plain across which Bage’s Southern Party had trudged, Madigan’s trio wove an intricate path among crevasse fields, rocky outcrops, and chaotic jumbles of sea ice. Instead of the barren, lifeless plateau that had chilled the souls of Bage’s team, the Coastal Party found itself daily visited by all kinds of birds, and in close proximity to strutting penguins and lolling seals.
On November 21, the trio roped up to make the AAE’s only significant ascent, of a handsome 1,750-foot-tall tower of gneiss the team named Aurora Peak, after the ship that was their lifeline to Australia. The summit “was quite a knife-edge, with barely space for standing.”
The next day, the team survived its worst crevasse fall, when Madigan broke through a snow bridge and plunged 25 feet. “I cannot say,” he later wrote, “that ‘my life flashed before me.’ I just had time to think ‘Now for the jerk—will my harness hold?’ when there was a wrench, and I was hanging breathless over the blue depth.” With the hauling line, McLean and Correll pulled a chastened but uninjured Madigan back to the surface.
In late November, the trio crossed the snout of a major glacier, subsequently named after Xavier Mertz. Then, on December 2, the trio ran into the even more gigantic snout of the ice-flow the team would later name the Ninnis Glacier, which sprawled far north into the sea. Here they left a small depot of food and fuel, 152 miles out from Winter Quarters. It took the men four days to cross the dangerously crevassed surface of the glacier. Once on the far side, they had no choice but to abandon land and cross the broken, frozen sea—“a plain of floe-ice, thickly studded with bergs and intersected by black leads of open water.” The next six days, recalled Madigan with Edwardian understatement, “were full of incident.” At one point, the trio gauged that they were a good 45 miles north of the coast. The sledge ran smoothly enough, but the men had to be on constant guard against open holes in the ice, through which they might suddenly plunge into the sea itself.
Back on land on December 17, the Coastal Party explored the prominent cape that they had named after Sir Douglas Freshfield. Here, in the midst of a steep talus pile—a rare expanse of rock laid bare to the sky—they discovered a substantial seam of coal. In The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson hailed this find as “a notable discovery,” for he was still hopeful that Antarctica might eventually be mined for its mineral resources.
On December 21, the same day that the Southern Party had turned around, the Eastern Coastal Party started home, having traveled some 270 miles out from Winter Quarters. The return, though less perilous than the one Bage’s trio had faced, imposed its trying ordeals. The worst of them was recrossing the Mertz Glacier, where now the men hauled the sledge on “a narrow ridge of hard snow, surrounded by blue, gaping pits in a pallid eternity of white.” Time and again all three men fell up to their waists into small crevasses. Wrote Madigan, “I had never felt more nervous than I did in that ghostly light in the tense silence, surrounded by the hidden horror of fathomless depths.”
Like Bage’s party, Madigan’s almost ran out of food, though penguin meat supplemented their larder. Only the recovery of their first depot of food, which Madigan accomplished on a bold solo jaunt, finding the original eight-foot mound of snow reduced by drifts to a barely discernible two-foot lump, gave the men the sustenance they needed to cover the rest of the journey back.
On January 16, one day after the deadline, the weary trio stumbled back to the hut. There they learned that both Bickerton’s and Mawson’s teams were still out. But Winter Quarters was abuzz with animation. Three days earlier, the Aurora had arrived.
John King Davis considered the passage from Australia that he had just completed “norma
l”—“by this I mean that we had experienced our fair share of gales and heavy seas while crossing the Southern Ocean.” On January 13, he brought the Aurora to anchor in Commonwealth Bay, though out of sight of the hut. It was only ten hours later, when the ship’s motor launch puttered toward shore, that Walter Hannam, stepping outside after lunch, spotted this proof of the blessed arrival of the relief vessel.
As Davis recalled the rendezvous decades later:
We were laden with mail and fresh provisions and the delight of these lonely men, who had lived for so long completely severed from their families and from the world, may be better imagined than described. To us they had the appearance almost of strangers, a band of wild, hairy veterans whose looks bore little resemblance to the hopeful young men we had landed here a year ago.
The Aurora also brought the men the first news from the outside world that they had had for twelve months. Of the keenest interest to them was the announcement that Amundsen’s team had reached the South Pole successfully in December 1911, and that in January 1912 Scott had parted from his support teams 150 miles short of the pole, but that nothing of his subsequent fate was known. Laseron later summed up the impact of this flood of news: “Australia had lost the cricket Tests; the Titanic had been sunk with great loss of life; the Balkan War had been waged; Scott was spending another year in the Antarctic.”
Although only nine men were in the hut when Davis greeted them on January 13, the captain was not unduly worried about “the parties out at present.” Three days later, Madigan, McLean, and Correll came in. As early as January 15, Davis had written in his diary, “Dr Mawson is out 66 days today and is expected tonight. Bickerton ought to be in now, as he is out 43 days with only 40 days food.”
The Western Party had started later than the others, because of Bickerton’s endless tinkering with the air-tractor—the wingless fuselage of the Vickers monoplane that had crashed on its test flight near Adelaide. The canny engineer had converted the machine into a kind of motorized sledge. It was not until December 3, with Leslie Whetter and Alfred Hodgeman as his teammates, that Bickerton set out from Winter Quarters. Hauling a chain of three loaded sledges, the tractor chugged uphill the five miles to Aladdin’s Cave in the remarkable time of one hour. There the trio added more cargo and a fourth sledge and started on, headed for a second campsite known as Cathedral Grotto.
All at once, a cylinder that had misfired repeatedly in tests failed again. It was only the harbinger of a more general mechanical breakdown. In Mawson’s summary:
Very soon the engine developed an internal disorder which Bickerton was at a loss to diagnose or remedy. . . . Bickerton was on the point of deciding to take the engine to pieces, when his thoughts were brought to a sudden close by the engine, without any warning, pulling up with such a jerk that the propeller was smashed. A moment’s examination showed that even more irremediable damage had occurred inside the engine, so there was nothing left but to abandon the air-tractor and continue on their journey man-hauling the sledge.
Weeks later, after lugging the air-tractor back to Winter Quarters and taking it apart, Bickerton discovered that a number of pistons had seized and broken.
“We were very sorry to leave the machine,” Bickerton later wrote. “We had never dared expect a great deal from it, and it had not surprised us in an alarming matter. But the present situation was disappointing and it is not pleasant to have to admit this at the very outset of a journey.” So ended another chapter in the tragicomic history of early attempts to adapt motorized travel to the Antarctic: Shackleton’s motorcar in 1908, Scott’s heavy tractors in 1911, and now Bickerton’s air-tractor.
The men consolidated their baggage on a single sledge and donned their harnesses as they pushed on toward Cathedral Grotto. Now, however, Bickerton found himself the weakest member of the team: Whetter and Hodgeman had spent previous weeks learning to man-haul, while their leader had devoted all his time to the contraption housed in the “hangar.” The next day, Bickerton confessed, “by lunch time I felt I could do no more.”
It could hardly have been a more inauspicious beginning for the Western Party, but the very next day, December 5, the three men made one of the most electrifying discoveries of the whole AAE. Six miles out from Cathedral Grotto, the men paused for lunch, then sledged onward. Only 240 yards from their lunch spot, they sighted an anomalous black object lying in the snow. They picked it up. It was a black lump of stone, five inches by three by three and a half. Bickerton at once guessed that it was a meteorite.
The stone lay about two and a half inches below the surrounding surface of the snow. It “did not appear to have been there long,” Bickerton speculated, “probably only a month or so.” The leader’s first guess was right: subsequent analysis of the Adélie Land Meteorite (the first ever found in Antarctica) classed it as a chondrite, one of the most common forms of meteorite. But the second guess was dead wrong. Specialists have since concluded that the lump of rock from outer space had hit the earth some 70,000 years ago. Rather than plunking down in the snow where Bickerton’s team found it, it had probably been carried hundreds of miles over the millennia by the movement of the polar plateau.
Forty-nine years would elapse before a second meteorite was found in Antarctica, when Russian geologists prowling in the Humboldt Mountains in 1961, on almost the opposite side of the vast continent, discovered another one. Since then, Antarctica has become the most fertile ground on earth for meteorite sleuths. Since 1969, more than 30,000 specimens of stone from outer space that have survived their headlong plunge through the earth’s atmosphere have been recovered from the southern continent. One of them, retrieved in 2003, has been proven, thanks to a remarkable analysis by spectrograph, to have once been part of the planet Mars.
During the next week, the weather was consistently bad. The men struggled westward as their spirits drooped. “This is a dismal rotten country,” wrote Bickerton in his diary on December 11. “If I had not been through a winter in Adelie Land I would say ‘But the weather must change this can’t go on for ever.’ ” During their first week on the outward trail, the men had covered a wretched 31 miles. Bickerton calculated that at that rate, even if they postponed their return to Winter Quarters until as late as January 20, they would accomplish a trek of only 107 miles, as opposed to the minimum of 150 he had hoped for.
Then, on December 12, a mishap occurred that threatened to wreck the whole effort. The men had mounted a canvas sail to take advantage of the wind to propel the sledge. Around midnight, Bickerton slipped and fell on the ice, and the sledge slammed violently into a hard ridge of sastrugi. The bow of the sledge was shattered. Later that day, Bickerton, ever the tinkerer, managed to jury-rig a substitute bow out of pieces of a bamboo pole lashed in place with rawhide.
To compensate for their poor progress, Bickerton was willing to push his team beyond the turnaround date of December 21 that both the Southern Party and the Eastern Coastal Party had observed. On five successive days, they made excellent marches, covering 100 miles. But then, beginning on the 21st, a violent blizzard with winds up to 80 mph kept them tent-bound for four days. They celebrated Christmas by drawing a festive tree in the frost on the side of the tent, and by inventing imaginary presents for all the members of the AAE: these included a tin trumpet for Hannam, since he had never been able to get the radio working, and an “aeroplane” for Mawson.
The team’s last outward march gained 13 miles on December 26, through a dangerously crevassed ice field. At last Bickerton surrendered to the inevitable. In his diary that night, he wrote, “I have decided this shall be our farthest west camp. . . . I had been thinking while coming along what a waste of time this all is.”
The men started back on December 28. Having cut their rations for the last several days, all three now felt weak, with various kinds of ailments and possible illnesses. Feeling a metallic taste in their mouths, Whetter and Bickerton wondered if it signaled an attack of dysentery.
The three men had c
ut their margin of safety to an absolute minimum. Whetter later referred to their adventure as “a narrow squeal.” During the next three weeks, the fickle weather tormented the trio. A glorious, sunny day that allowed fine sledging would alternate with whiteout so total the men could see nothing in front of them except the toes of their boots. One storm marooned them in their tent for thirty-six hours. Bickerton had been having trouble taking celestial observations, so the men began to wonder whether they were lost. And he had forgotten to wind his chronometer, so for a while the men even lost track of the date.
During this increasingly anxious retreat, Bickerton’s veering moods reached new extremes. As his biographer, Stephen Haddelsey, writes, “His diary becomes a dialogue in which optimism and doubt vie for supremacy, one moment confidently asserting that their remaining week’s rations would see them through the 50 or so miles to the hut, the next recollecting that it had sometimes taken as much as twelve days to cover that distance.”
On January 15, the men came in sight of the ocean, but could not be sure if what they saw was part of Commonwealth Bay. The next morning, they trudged on in uncertainty. Suddenly Hodgeman stopped and pawed through the boxes on the sledge, retrieving the team’s binoculars. He had seen a faint black mark in the snow ahead. Now, peering through the glasses, he let out a cry, “Yes it is, it’s the aeroplane!” Attributing his colleague’s sighting to a wishful hallucination, Bickerton took the glasses himself. Through them he saw the unmistakable carcass of the air-tractor, left where the men had abandoned it in the snow six weeks earlier. As Bickerton wrote that night, “I could have jumped for joy, there was the poor mouldy old thing as plain as anything, about 15 miles off. Let joy be unconfined, tonight we blow out the whisky from the medical outfit.”
Despite this proof that they were on course, the men somehow managed to miss Cathedral Grotto altogether. On the 17th, just as navigational doubt was starting to fog their minds again, Bickerton spotted what looked to be a snow mound in the distance. Squinting through the binoculars, he recognized the marker that announced Aladdin’s Cave. He and Hodgeman “felt inclined to drop the sledge and run,” but restrained themselves. At 10 p.m. the men stood by a heap of stones reinforced with shovels and boxes to form a makeshift cairn. On top of this landmark, a pickax had been planted with a fresh orange impaled on one of its spikes—proof that the Aurora had arrived.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 18