Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration

by David Roberts

  The ten AAE members not chosen to stay another winter kept their feelings of relief to themselves. Yet as Laseron wrote decades later, “We went about our tasks with heavy hearts at this time, and those of us who were to depart had almost a guilty feeling at thus leaving our comrades behind.”

  There was much to do to prepare the six men for a second winter. The Aurora had come laden with provisions for just such a possibility, so that once all its cargo was offloaded, the men had enough food and fuel. Penguins and seals were killed to supplement the larder. And the radio masts were re-erected.

  Now Davis revised his departure date. On January 22, the same day that he deputized the six to winter over, he resolved to send a search party out along the track of Mawson’s Far Eastern Party, leaving on the 25th and returning no later than the 30th. Only if that search proved fruitless would Davis steam out of Commonwealth Bay toward the far-off Western Base.

  The search party heading out on the 25th was made up of Hodgeman, McLean, and Frank Hurley. In four days of atrocious weather—warm, wet, and windy, causing the surface to turn to slush—the men sledged 25 miles east. “Our sleeping-bags and clothes became so wet,” Hurley recalled, “that in spite of fatigue, we preferred action in the open to the discomfort of resting and shivering in the shelter of the tent.”

  On the fourth day, with the team’s turnaround imminent, the weather started to clear. The men built a big cairn of snow blocks on top of which they left a ration bag and directions back to Aladdin’s Cave, from which refuge the hut lay only five and a half miles north. Wrote Hurley:

  Through the glasses I then swept the horizon—limited to a range of three miles owing to the mist—for signs of the missing men, but could see nothing of them. What could have happened? Had they passed us in the blizzard or had some terrible disaster befallen them? With these thoughts disturbing our minds we turned back.

  On January 22, Davis had gone on shore to “stretch my legs” with a short hike inland. Two miles from the hut, he turned and gazed north. That view and the feelings it provoked stayed with him the rest of his life.

  Most of the ice around the winter quarters had melted and . . . the immediate surroundings of the hut looked like a handful of rubble that had been carelessly flung there by a giant. . . . With what nostalgic longing did I look upon that glorious expanse of open sea! Turning inland, the apparently level ice-cap met the sky line—a white, silent, frozen wilderness, dreary, but also lovely beyond all description. Somewhere beyond that sloping, dome-like horizon, somewhere beyond my limited vision, within that vast, unfeeling, sterile solitude, were Mawson and his companions, dead or alive.

  On January 29, the day before the three-man search party returned, Davis steered the Aurora out of Commonwealth Bay to make a three-day scout along the eastern coast. If this search too proved fruitless, upon his return he would board the ten men not expected to winter over and head west to gather up Wild’s Western Base. The men on the ship constantly swept the shore with binoculars, looking for a flag or a signal of any kind. Along the edge of the Mertz Glacier tongue they fired off rockets and flew a big kite, hoping that Mawson’s party might spot these signals of rescue close at hand. An hour before midnight on January 30, Davis turned the ship around. “It is a terrible situation,” he wrote in his diary. “We dare not delay much longer if we are to reach Wild this year.”

  But now, once again, the fiendish weather at Cape Denison thwarted the expedition’s plans. The Aurora arrived back in Commonwealth Bay late on January 31, but the wind and waves were too strong to launch a motorboat toward the shore. Davis could not even communicate with the men anxiously awaiting his return and their escape. During the next seven days, the gales never moderated sufficiently for Davis to pick up the refugees. Instead, it was all he could do to steam in circles inside the bay, keeping the ship from ramming reefs or the surrounding cliffs. He was burning nine tons of coal a day. Davis’s mood grew frantic. On February 6, the sixth straight day of hurricane winds, he wrote, “If we do not get these people off soon, I do not know what will happen. We shall have to leave them here I suppose.”

  Meanwhile, the men at Winter Quarters could see the ship, tantalizingly close, but could only wait for the weather to change. They began to fear that the Aurora itself might not survive the storm—an outcome that would doom them all. During that endless week’s vigil, there was still no sign of Mawson’s party.

  Finally, on the morning of February 8, the gale died out. Davis brought the ship close to shore. Remembered Hurley, “From masthead to waterline she was sheathed with ice. . . . On the furrowed faces of Captain Davis and the crew was written an epic of struggle. Davis did not speak of the ordeal, but I afterwards learned that he had not left the bridge throughout the seven racking days and nights.”

  The parting between the men staying on for another winter and those freed to head back to Australia was hurried and deeply emotional. As soon as the latter were on board, Davis ordered “Full steam ahead.” “As we drew away from the land,” Hurley recalled, “six tiny specks were seen waving from a rocky summit—soon to be swallowed up in the vastness of the solitude.”

  For one of those specks—Archibald McLean, the AAE’s doctor—the uncertainty had become intolerable. “We were all heartily glad,” he wrote in his diary, “when [the Aurora] was out of sight.”

  Almost two months earlier, on December 14, 1912, Mawson, Mertz, and Ninnis had set out from their overnight camp on the polar plateau. In five weeks of sledging, they had reached a point more than 300 miles southeast of Winter Quarters. Thanks to the added pull provided by the huskies, the Far Eastern Party had covered more ground than any of the other three main exploratory missions that had left Cape Denison, and more than either of the Western Base’s two coastal parties. They had not quite linked up the terra incognita of Adélie Land with the distant hills of Victoria Land seen from shipboard by Scott’s men in 1911, but Mawson had every reason to hope that within the coming week, his trio could push on, attain a goal 350 miles out from the hut, and complete that cherished linkage.

  Although Mawson could not know the other teams’ turnaround dates, both Bage’s Southern Party and Madigan’s Eastern Coastal Party would head home only on December 21, while Bickerton’s Western Party would not begin its voyage back to Winter Quarters until December 28. Another week of progress for Mawson’s team seemed entirely reasonable, and by making faster times with lighter sledges on the return journey, the Far Eastern Party ought to be able to meet Mawson’s own deadline of January 15 for its arrival at Cape Denison.

  But then, utterly without warning, Ninnis had plunged with his sledge and the team’s six best dogs into the gigantic crevasse that, as Mertz and Mawson had crossed it only minutes before, had seemed a harmless obstacle akin to scores of crevasses the team had sledged across without a serious incident during the previous five weeks. Having shouted for hours into the gaping abyss, unable to rig any kind of rope to descend into its dark depths, glimpsing only the broken body of a groaning dog, the dead body of another, and a few shattered pieces of gear that had fetched up on an ice shelf 150 feet below the surface, Mawson and Mertz had finally accepted the inevitable and started back on their homeward trek.

  Among all the crevasse plunges suffered by all the three-man teams during the whole duration of the AAE, why, one wonders, had Ninnis’s accident so far exceeded the others in its catastrophic result? Time and again, other men in other parts of Adélie Land had broken through snow bridges, only to be caught by ropes tied to teammates or by harnesses attached to their sledges, after falls that never left them dangling more than 25 feet below the surface and that never caused any of them a serious injury. Frank Wild’s Eastern Coastal Party had been stopped cold by a chaotic labyrinth of crevasses that looked far more dangerous than the smooth, apparently innocuous plain of snow Mawson’s trio traversed on December 14.

  Nor can one find fault with Mawson’s logistical plan. It seemed, in fact, a scheme ideally devised to maximize
the team’s safety—Mertz on skis scouting ahead, Mawson coming second with the least vital gear and food on his sledge, Ninnis taking up the rear and having to face hazards only after his teammates had successfully avoided them. No expedition exploring Antarctica, even today, has been able to figure out a way to reduce the danger to zero. Crevasses are a way of life on the southern continent, and for every one that lies open to the sky, announcing its treacheries, there are one or two whose wind-sculpted snow bridges hide them from sight, even to the keenest eyes of the most seasoned adventurers.

  In the end, Ninnis’s death, and the terrible survival ordeal into which it plunged his partners, must be attributed to sheer bad luck.

  The two men now had food for themselves for only a week and a half, and no dog food whatsoever. Besides their tent, the team’s shovel, its only ice ax, and such sundry items as their mugs and spoons had vanished into the crevasse with Ninnis. A more grievous loss than spoons was Mertz’s burberry outer trousers. As a substitute to ward off the cold, he donned a pair of woolen under-trousers that had providentially been stored on Mawson’s sledge. The first meal after the accident consisted, according to Mawson, of “a thin soup made by boiling up all the empty food bags preparatory to throwing them away.” To feed the ravenous dogs, Mawson and Mertz “tossed them some worn out fur mitts, finnesko, and several spare raw hide straps.”

  Then, driven by the adrenaline of their despair, Mertz and Mawson sledged through the night of December 14–15, covering 24 miles in five and a half hours. That jaunt was a wild downhill dash, with Mertz calling upon all his alpine training to glide across the surface on skis, the dogs in mad pursuit behind him. It was all Mawson could do to hang onto the sledge, from which he was twice flung free. He guessed that the team crossed several crevasses without breaking through snow bridges only thanks to the pell-mell speed generated by the huskies.

  At the end of that dash, the men regained the campsite they had occupied on December 12. There they found the remnants of the third sledge that they had scavenged for parts and abandoned three days before. With only a spare tent cover from which to improvise a shelter, Mertz contrived a frame made of his skis and two half-length sledge runners, the poles tied together at the apex, over which the men draped the japara cotton cover. This “unwieldy” edifice stood only four feet tall. “Inside there was just room for two one-man sleeping-bags on the floor,” Mawson later wrote; “but, unfortunately, only one could move about at a time and neither of us could ever rise above a sitting posture.”

  Mawson’s diary during these days is a telegraphic blueprint of exhaustion and grim pragmatism. “Up 10 am,” he wrote on December 15. “Go on with packing, tent fixing, killing George, etc. Dogs very hungry. . . . We divide up stores and fry dog for breakfast at 5 pm. Cutting load down.” The men had known at once that with the loss of the best dogs, all of the dog food, and most of their own food, the six remaining huskies would have to be killed and eaten on the return journey.

  In his own diary, Mertz recorded, “On December 15th, we didn’t sleep much. The events of December 14th were too fresh in our minds.” Both men were still trying to puzzle out what had happened. “Now when I think about Ninnis,” Mertz mused, “I am firmly persuaded that, walking beside his sledge, he was the first to crash through the crevasse. The dogs and the sledge must have fallen directly onto him.” As for the larger, existential meaning of the tragedy, “Our only comfort was the thought that the death was a straight path from a happy life. The ways of God are often difficult to explain.”

  Later, in The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson would eloquently expand on the two survivors’ dark thoughts as they began the homeward dash:

  Our companion, comrade, chum, in a woeful instant, buried in the bowels of the awful glacier. We tried to drive the nightmare from our thoughts; we strove to forget it in the necessity of work, but we knew that the truth would assuredly enter our souls even more poignantly in the dismal days to come. It was to be a fight with Death and the great Providence would decide the issue.

  The two men now considered the expedient of heading straight north toward the coast, rather than retracing their outward track. If they could reach the edge of the sea, they might be able to kill seals for food. But the likelihood that that unknown stretch of plateau plunging toward the coast would be crisscrossed with even worse crevasses decided them against the detour.

  For a while, the men settled into a routine of sleeping during the day and sledging through the night. On December 16, Mawson suffered from searing pain in his eyes. He thought it was conjunctivitis, but treated it as he would snow blindness, asking Mertz to place tablets of zinc and cocaine under his eyelids to dissolve and assuage the torment. He got almost no sleep.

  That night’s march was a dispirited one. The dogs were playing out. “Johnson gave in at 5 m & had to be carried,” Mawson laconically recorded; “Mary gave in at 9 ½ m, so we had to camp. Pavlova also very much done.” The next day: “The dogs now do nothing (except Ginger). I pulled most of the load all the time—we had to put Mary in sledge at 9 ½ miles. Mertz skinned her at camp. A wretched game. . . . Find the dog meat very stringy but nevertheless very welcome.”

  To make matters worse, it had started snowing, reducing visibility to close to nil. “As we could see nothing, going in the same direction was incredibly difficult,” wrote Mertz in his diary. “Everything was in grey.” Food longings preoccupied the men. “How lunch would have tasted good,” Mertz complained, “with butter, hot chocolate and tea, like 4 days ago.”

  Mawson began to worry that he and Mertz had deviated from their outward track. “The course can be only approximate,” he confessed on December 18. “We hope it is almost west.” And the next day, “Surely we are south of our outcoming course.”

  Mawson’s terse diary entries recording the deterioration of the dogs belie the real affection the men had developed for their huskies. Johnson was a particular favorite. In The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson remembered the dog’s last day, as he had to be strapped atop the sledge: “Beyond the dismal whining of Johnson, into whose body the frost was swiftly penetrating, there was scarcely a sound; only the rustle of the thick, soft snow as we pushed on, weary but full of hope.”

  At the end of the day’s march, Johnson was too weak to stand or even eat his “ration” of the meat of other dogs, so Mawson had to shoot him.

  Johnson had always been a very faithful hard-working and willing beast, with rather droll ways of his own, and we were very sorry that his end should come so soon. He could never be accused of being a handsome dog, in fact he was generally disreputable and dirty, curiously enough these latter qualities seemed to be reflected even in the qualities of his meat, for it was permeated with a unique and unusually disagreeable flavour. This we subsequently referred to as “Johnsonian.”

  On December 18, another dog, Mary, who had completely collapsed, also had to be shot and eaten. The men were down to three dogs, and only one of them, the plucky Ginger, was capable of hauling. “To go forward,” Mertz noted, “Mawson and I had to put on the harness and haul the sledge. The most uncomfortable thing was the bad light. Over the sastrugi, I often had the impression of walking like a drunkard, and more than once, each of us fell onto his face.”

  On December 19, the men tried traveling during the day and sleeping at night. It was a dubious tradeoff: sun sights might help them to calculate their latitude and longitude, but in the daytime warmth the snow turned soggy and made the sledging more onerous. That day, the character of the surface modulated from hard sastrugi to bare ice seamed with crevasses. Mawson deduced that they had reached the head of the Ninnis Glacier. “It was very satisfactory to know this,” he wrote, “to have some tangible proof that we really were where we thought we were.” Even so, they had wandered 20 miles south of their outward track. The only consolation was that the Ninnis Glacier might prove easier to traverse at its head than in mid-flow, where it had taken the three men a full week to negotiate the crevasses at the end
of November.

  That same day, Mawson and Mertz almost lost Haldane in a crevasse. The dogs had grown so skinny that their harnesses no longer fit tight. Just as the men hauled the husky back to the surface, he slipped loose. “Fortunately I was just able to grab a fold of his skin at the same instant,” Mawson later wrote, “otherwise many days’ rations would have been lost. Haldane took to the harness once more, but soon became uncertain in his footsteps, staggered along and then tottered and fell.”

  “Splendid weather,” Mertz crowed on December 20. But:

  After 8 miles “Haldane” collapsed. We crossed an infinite number of hard sastrugis. We stop only for 2 hours, so that the dogs could recover their strength. “Pavlova” also nearly fell down. The effort is too big for the animals, they haul no more. Mawson and I have to pull the sledge. We realise that it is a laborious work. We drank a light tea made with leaves, previously used. Because of the foggy days, we don’t know if we are too far north, or too far south. Tomorrow at midday, we hope to determine our latitude.

  Sledging in whiteout and falling snow amounted to slow, relentless torture. As Mawson later recaptured the ordeal:

  In the snow-blind light of an overcast day, the strain on the eyes to delineate the trend of the sastrugi would have been trying enough, but with all the surface markings blanketed in a shroud of soft, newly fallen snow, the task was rendered still more difficult. . . . Under these conditions our progress degenerated into a sort of shuffling march; pushing one’s finnesko-covered feet through the soft snow, sliding them along the old hard surface, ever alert to correct direction of march by hints from the irregularities underfoot. This was very exhausting work.

  Hunger had become a constant aggravation. During these days, Mawson and Mertz ate only six ounces each of their prepackaged sledging food, supplemented with a little dog meat, chopped up into small pieces, mixed with a smidgen of pemmican, and boiled in water. The rest of the canine carcass was fed to the surviving dogs. “They crunched the bones and ate the skin until nothing remained,” Mawson wrote. Even with such severely reduced rations, the men knew they would soon have even less to eat.