On November 26, a full day of brutal work gained the party only 1,050 yards. All four fell up to their waists in crevasses, Harrisson 15 feet into one. “I received rather a nasty squeeze,” Wild recorded that day, “through falling into a hole while going downhill, the sledge running on to me before I could get clear. So far as we can see, the same kind of country continues and one cannot help thinking about having to return through this infernal mess.”
On November 27, Wild made the inevitable decision. “We turn back tomorrow,” he wrote in his diary, “for the simple reason we cannot go any farther.” He added, “We could push on further east from here, but it would be by lowering the gear piecemeal into chasms 50 to 100 feet deep, and hauling it up on the other side; each crevasse taking at least two hours to negotiate. For such slow progress, I don’t feel justified in risking the lives of the party.”
It was a bitter decision—Wild, after all, had hoped to sledge outward well into December—but a wise one. On the return to the Grottoes, the four-man Eastern Coastal Party would face all the tribulations it could handle.
Meanwhile, back at the Grottoes, Morton Moyes had settled in for a solitary vigil the likes of which no other AAE member would undergo. Even the other men’s leave-takings at the end of October had had a certain ominous tone about them. “Wild gave me his Diaries in case of accident, & letter for Dr. Mawson,” Moyes wrote in his diary on October 28. And a few days later, “George [Dovers] gave me a packet of letters to give to his father if he had an accident but I hope to return them to him in 3 months.”
From in front of the hut, Moyes watched the men depart. “Seems strange to lose all these men for 3 months,” he wrote, “& also to see them dying out as a faint speck on the white endless glacier.” During the following weeks, he tried to fill his time cooking, recording meteorological data, and reading (appropriately, perhaps) Dante’s Inferno. On November 11, he recorded, “Had a few ski runs on the slope after lunch, but no fun by one’s self.” Harrisson’s imminent return would, he felt, make all the difference.
Moyes had been a member of the team that had laid Hippo Depot in early September. That trip had taken twelve days out (three of them tent-bound in a storm). Knowing the way, in warmer November with more hours of daylight, the Eastern Coastal Party ought to improve on that time, Moyes thought. Harrisson’s job was only to drop his load of gear and food and return with the dogs to the Grottoes. When three weeks had passed, Moyes began to worry. “Harrisson out 26 days & no sign,” he wrote on November 24. And the next day, “Harrisson must be short of grub. I’ll have to move out after him if he is not back in 3 days.” But five days later, Moyes was still in the hut. The anxiety was mounting. “Like to know where Harrisson is,” he complained on November 30.
By the beginning of December, it was impossible to banish the fear that something terrible had happened to Harrisson, or even to the whole party. On the 3rd, the “sensible fellow” that Harrisson deemed his friend to be came to the fore as Moyes wrote out a memo to himself trying to solve the puzzle, almost in the terms of a Euclidean proof. The document was headed “Where is Harrisson?”
I. May have gone with E party
II. Came back homewards
I. a. With dog team would have been useful 1 month, then dogs had to be killed.
b. Extra man not needed after 4 weeks.
c. Reduce time from 14 to 11½ weeks.
d. More weight with tents & gear.
[Therefore] I. not probable.
II. 2a. Still out sketching [Harrisson was a gifted artist]
2b. Found a crevasse
2c. Snowed up
2a. (1) only grub for 4 weeks for self & dogs
(2) Not much to sketch
2b. (1) While on track of 1st journey, few crevasses & all visible, although may be hidden ones.
(2) Very careful & not likely to strike one.
2c. (1) No heavy snows for 2–3 weeks altho’ bad light.
(2) Careful man in putting up tent.
(3) Could cut out as always has knife with him.
Answer by Echo???
Whatever Moyes meant by the cryptic last line of his memo, only he knew. But in his hyperlogical way, he had rejected as “not probable” the very explanation for Harrisson’s absence that happened to be the true one.
Therefore, Moyes decided, Harrisson must be in serious trouble. On December 7, he set out pulling a spare sledge to look for his friend. He intended to search first in a badly crevassed area the August–September party had crossed. There, he speculated, “Harrisson with his dogs could be trapped in that honeycomb of death, waiting desperately for assistance.” But three days later, when he arrived at the site, Moyes saw only a set of sledge tracks heading east.
Zigzagging to try to pick up a possible track laid by Harrisson on an alternative route home, Moyes felt himself starting to go snowblind. Tripping and stumbling in the snow, he realized that he had to head back at once himself, or else he might become the kind of victim he sought. He fell into one crevasse, but his sledge harness caught him.
Back at The Grottoes on December 17, Moyes felt his sanity starting to erode. “The silence is so painful now that I have a continual singing in my left ear,” he wrote on December 20, “much like a barrel organ, only its the same tune all the time.” The approach of Christmas brought only gloom: “Christmas Eve! . . . Dont think I’ll hang up my stocking, looks like asking for presents.”
As John King Davis would point out many years later, by not being able to cross the Denman Glacier, Wild’s team missed a remarkable discovery that would not take place for another thirty-five years. Far to the east in the distance, Wild and his men had glimpsed patches of bare rock. These were but a hint of an anomalous ice-free cape, 300 square miles in extent, that lies on the 100th meridian east of Greenwich. The Bunger Hills, as they would subsequently be named, abound not only in bare bedrock but in meltwater lakes. They were first spotted from the air in 1947. A gutsy US Navy pilot, David Bunger, managed to land his plane on one of the lakes.
Bunger’s effort was part of Operation Highjump, led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who called the place “one of the most remarkable regions on earth.” Among the Bunger Hills, Byrd proclaimed, “An island suitable for life had been found in a universe of death.”
To compensate for the disappointment of having to turn back early, Wild’s team took its time returning to the Grottoes, making detours to explore isolated peaks and offshore islands. By now the three dogs had become mere companions, not sledge-haulers. On December 6, as Wild coldly recorded, “Switzerland had to be killed, as I cannot afford any more biscuit. Amundsen ate his flesh without hesitation, but Zip refused it.” In disgust, Harrisson added that Amundsen “started whining and crying for the meat, almost before the poor wretch was dead, and when thrown the still hot liver, bolted it almost without a bite.”
The return march was not without its perils. New snow had covered the men’s outward tracks, so they had to probe the treacherous surface for crevasses all over again. One day Watson fell into a huge crevasse, stopped only by “a heavy jerk” on the alpine rope connecting him to Wild. It took the three men on the surface using two ropes twenty minutes to haul the frightened man out, “no worse,” Wild laconically noted, “except for a bruised shin and the loss of a glove.”
The men celebrated Christmas with “a little bottle—just a wee one—of whiskey which we made toddy,” toasting friends far and near. Then Wild “formally took possession of the land in the name of the Expedition, for the Empire.”
Back in the Grottoes, a dispirited Morton Moyes glumly rang in the New Year: “Another year gone, & no much [sic] but personal benefit to show for it.” Five days later, during a Sunday snowstorm, Moyes read Macaulay and the Bible and tried not to worry about how “If this proportion of blizzards keeps up, the sledges will be overdue.” He added, “These days inside seem very long, in fact it is strange what a difference a few hours on the floe makes.”
Many years lat
er, Moyes explained to his nephew the psychological toll his ten weeks alone in the hut had taken on him:
A man can be lonely in a crowd but not alone.
It was not loneliness, but a sense of acute aloneness that I felt most keenly . . .
Here in this type of desolation, surviving like the last leaf on a branch, a person becomes aware of his manhood but it is not enough.
He turns in upon himself. If he has never heard of God before, he is looking for him then, and instinctively searching for a spirit to whom he can reach out and draw near to for peace of mind, or so I found, otherwise I could have become mentally unbalanced.
On January 6, the day after the Sunday blizzard, Moyes sat reading in the hut when, at 12:30 p.m., he thought he heard a familiar ship’s tune being sung. He told himself, “You are going dippy at last.” But, as he wrote that day in his diary, “I rushed outside, & nearly crazy with delight saw a sledge party approaching with all flags set.” Wild recorded Moyes’s reaction: “When he saw there were four of us, he stood on his head for joy and was so overcome with emotion; it was some time before he could talk with us.”
That evening, Moyes wrote, “Feel like a 2-year old tonight after my 10 weeks loneliness. Gave them a jolly fine feed all day.”
Fifteen days later, the Western Coastal Party came in. Now there was little for the eight men to do but wait. They packed up most of their gear, their unused rations, and the scientific specimens and sledged them to the edge of the ice shelf, from which they might be loaded onto the Aurora. Harrisson went on happily biologizing, catching fish and crustaceans with cage traps and sounding the bay off the ice shelf for depth readings.
January 30, the date by which Wild had been told to be ready to depart, came and went. The next day, Moyes wrote, “The Aurora should have been in to-day, and great yarns about the mail being overdue.” Ever the pragmatist, Wild decided to hunt seals to supplement the men’s food, in the dire event that they had to spend a second winter on the ice. “The food supply would have been quite sufficient for a second year with the exception of meat,” he later wrote. “There was a little more than two tons of coal out of the twelve landed, and by laying in a supply of blubber before the seals disappeared we should have done fairly well for fuel.”
No Antarctic explorer ever faced tough situations with greater equanimity than Wild. But the unspoken corollary to the men’s fate should the Aurora, for whatever reason, fail to arrive, was that whether or not the men survived a second winter, there was scant hope they would ever be found and rescued.
Adding to the men’s anxiety was the fact that, despite the warming of two summer months, three miles of thin sea ice still lay beyond the edge of the towering Shackleton Shelf and open water. To aid potential searchers, Wild “had erected direction boards close to the cliff edge, one at two miles and the other five miles north of the hut, and also fitted a lamp and reflector at mast head which was lighted every night and would be visible at least eight miles.”
The first two weeks of February passed, in almost continuously bad weather, with no sign of the ship. The men allowed themselves to speculate as to what might be causing the delay. “We surmise that one of the first base parties have been late returning—hence ship delayed at Adelie Land,” Harrisson wrote in his diary on February 16; “there’s time yet, and we hope for the best. But it makes me anxious when the thought of another year without seeing, without even a word from wife or children—and such thoughts will haunt me.”
On February 20, Wild and Dovers carried a big signboard three and a half miles north to the edge of the sea cliff and erected it. They tied it to a bamboo pole, with a flag on top. In large letters, the sign read “3 MILES,” with an arrow pointing toward the hut.
By now, however, hope was ebbing as despair crept in. “Started the [acetylene] gas again tonight,” Moyes wrote on February 16, “but we hope it is not for another year.” And six days later: “No ship yet. All our gear at floe edge ready for it.” Exactly one year and one week had passed since the eight men had disembarked on the ice shelf to begin their Antarctic adventure.
6
DEAD EASY TO DIE
Back at Cape Denison, Captain John King Davis finally felt that he needed to take action. Nine days had passed since he had brought the Aurora into Commonwealth Bay, with no sign of Mawson’s party—now a full week overdue after the deadline Mawson himself had imposed on all the teams before setting out the previous November.
Among the papers in the hut, Davis had found a more detailed note of instructions in Mawson’s hand, addressed to him:
Should I or my party not have arrived before the 1st Feb. you are to steam E scanning the coast—as far as lat 66° 45' South [by] 145° 50' [East]. If by that time no flag or other sign of the party appears you are to land 3 volunteers (Bage Madigan & Webb are the most capable leaders) capable of active sledging and navigation, and necessary equipment to winter at the hut—keep scientific records and in the summer of 1914 make a journey in our tracks to discover if possible our whereabouts. We shall have steered for the land seen by the Terra Nova in the summer of 1910–11.
It was a tall order, but not an impossible one. In fact, just the previous year, the members of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition had faced a similar challenge and carried it out bravely. When the polar party of five had failed to return to base camp at Cape Evans by mid-February 1912, two parties set out one month apart to search for them. Finding no sign of Scott and his four partners, the men concluded that they were almost certainly dead. But those men wintered over for the second time, then launched a more ambitious search in October. On November 12, they found the tent with the bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson (the last three to die) inside, only 11 miles south of a depot that would have saved their lives. By recovering Scott’s diary, his teammates—and ultimately the world—learned the tragic story of the second party to reach the South Pole in day-by-day detail.
Had there been no Western Base party to pick up, Davis could have lingered in Commonwealth Bay well into February, departing only when new sea ice threatened to trap the ship. But if he tarried too long waiting for Mawson, Ninnis, and Mertz, Davis would risk dooming the eight men under Frank Wild, languishing 1,500 miles to the west.
On January 22, 1913, Davis—now officially in command of the AAE—announced the makeup of the party fated to winter over a second year. He appointed not three men to that thankless task, but six. They were Cecil Madigan, who was to be in charge, along with Bob Bage, Frank Bickerton, Archibald McLean, and Alfred Hodgeman. The sixth man, who had come down with the Aurora, was Sidney Jeffryes, an experienced radio operator who would relieve Walter Hannam. With the others’ help, Jeffryes would try to get the masts up and the radio working, and thus finally establish contact via Macquarie Island with Australia.
A first draft of Davis’s orders to the men survives. In it, Percy Correll was initially slated to be one of the six. At some point, Davis drew a line through Correll’s name and wrote Hodgeman’s directly above it. One wonders whether the youngest member of the expedition ever learned how close he came to spending another winter in the windiest place on earth.
Among the five men selected to winter over again, none was more distraught than Madigan. He had already postponed his Rhodes scholarship to Oxford for a year by agreeing to go on the AAE, and he had no idea whether the Rhodes committee would tolerate another year’s deferment. On January 28, in an agonized letter to his fiancée, Madigan wrote, “My darling, this expedition, which has gone so happily so far, is, I fear, going to end in tragedy.” He still held out hope for Mawson’s party, but the three men were now thirteen days overdue.
Everything is being done to avoid a scare—they may have missed a depot and have gone down to the coast, and there be subsisting on seal and penguin—or they may have gone too far with the dogs, bitten off more than they can chew, so to speak, and cannot get back in time by man-hauling when the dogs are gone. . . .
I put this as it was put to me [by
Davis]—I am the most efficient sledger . . . and Bage’s eyes have gone, and he is the only man in that party who can navigate, I know the coast line for 300 m. East, where the Doctor went. . . .
I think I lose more by staying than anyone here. But there seemed nothing else for it—Captain Davis felt obliged to ask me to stay—and I could not go without a point blank refusal—I should have felt a coward and a deserter for the rest of my life, a miserable selfish being, if I had done so.
Frank Bickerton expressed his own dismay in more matter-of-fact language in a letter to his sister. After explaining the situation at Cape Denison, he concluded, “So the only thing to do is to leave a party in this breezy hole for another year. It is a rotten game & a rotten place but nevertheless has to be done by someone.”
Percy Gray, second in command on the Aurora, who by now was thoroughly disenchanted with Davis’s leadership, had a curious reaction to the wait for Mawson. As early as January 17, even before Bickerton’s Western Party had come in, he anticipated the possibility of leaving men to winter over.
We clear out, as far as I can gather, on the 20th. whether the parties have turned up or not, so probably one or two will have to be left behind. I don’t expect many of the shore crowd will be particularly keen. I should very much like to stay the winter down here myself, but I am afraid it is useless to suggest it to Gloomy as he would never sanction anything he thinks anybody would like to do. I should much prefer it to doing another dreadful year in this ship under his command.
Gray also felt that Davis’s deadline for departing from Commonwealth Bay was premature: “As a matter of fact, I think we could hang on here quite well until the 27th., that would then leave us 24 days to get round to Wild and clear out north. . . . I wonder whether Gloomy thinks about these things. I think he is in too much of a panic to think about anything.”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 20