From the start of the return journey on December 14, the dogs had been at least as famished as the men. At each camp, they had to be tethered fast, for, as Mawson wrote, “they were seized with a morbid desire to gnaw everything within reach, including the straps and even the wood of the sledges. . . . The most repugnant refuse was greedily devoured and dog ate dog so completely that the wonder was how the sledge-load and the team came to diminish in bulk.”
On December 21, Midsummer Day, the two men accomplished a march of 11 miles. “ ‘Haldane’ collapsed after 5 miles,” Mertz recorded. “We put her on the sledge, and shot her in the evening. . . . The dogs pull no more. We just make sure that they don’t collapse, to have food during the whole return trip.” (As this passage indicates, the gender of the dogs is uncertain. Mertz referred to Haldane as “she,” Mawson as “he.”) By now, the huskies still alive had been reduced to two, Pavlova and Ginger.
It was evident to both Mawson and Mertz that they were growing weaker by the day. Every ounce of baggage on the sledge added to the day’s grim toil. On the 21st they reduced the load slightly by throwing away several pairs of socks, some rope, and their precious rifle. Two days later, when it came time to kill Pavlova, Mawson had to accomplish the execution not with a gun but with a knife—“a revolting and depressing operation.”
On the 23rd, the men discarded more of their gear, including their hypsometer (with which they had measured altitudes throughout the trek), the sledge runners they had used as tent poles (to be replaced by the legs of the theodolite), and Mawson’s camera, together with most of his film packs. This last was a particularly painful sacrifice, for he had gone to great efforts to document the journey in images of land no one had ever seen before. That day Mertz calculated that the two men had covered 115 miles from the crevasse that had swallowed Ninnis—leaving almost 200 still to traverse to reach Winter Quarters.
Despite their efforts to banish thoughts of food from their minds, hunger invaded the men’s waking and sleeping hours. “Very hungry tonight—can’t sleep for it,” Mawson wrote on December 23. The next day, “Dog stew this afternoon best yet.” And the next, which happened to be Christmas, “Dreamt of a huge fancy cake last evening amidst weird surroundings.”
The men tried to make some kind of festive occasion out of Christmas. “I found two bits of biscuit in my bag, so we had piece each,” noted Mawson. Mertz went into richer detail:
At 1 am, Mawson woke me up and wished me a merry Christmas. I slept well after having eaten the cooked [dog] legs, yesterday evening. Thinking of our current hunger, we arranged to have an excellent meal with the best courses, every future Christmas day. . . . In order to still have a Christmas party on snow and ice, we demolished some dog meat with a little butter. I hope to live to share many merry Christmases with my friend Mawson, but if possible, as a real festivity in the civilized world.
On Christmas Day, the men covered 11 miles, aided by wind at their backs. Taking new sun sights for latitude and longitude, Mawson made his own calculation of how far they still had to go to reach Winter Quarters. He judged the distance to be 160 miles as the crow flies. It was an encouraging revelation, for it meant that, despite their hunger and debilitation, the men had covered almost half of their journey back to salvation.
The next day, however, they were slowed by bitter cold and a wind that reached 40 mph. They tried to improvise a sail with their tent cover, but, as Mawson wrote, “the excessive amount of lashing and unlashing connected with this arrangement when starting and camping, all of which had to be done with bare fingers in a biting wind, was a great drawback. . . . Whenever a halt was called for a few minutes’ spell the conversation invariably turned on the subject of food and we laid plans for a celebration on board the Aurora.” In the high wind, it took the men a full four hours to pitch the tent, cook dinner, and get inside their sleeping bags.
Yet another tribulation was caused by the necessity of cooking inside the cramped tent. The heat of the Primus stove melted any snow that had drifted onto the outside walls, sending a steady drip through the cloth. Even worse, the stove thawed the snow surface upon which the sleeping bags had to be laid, with no ground cloth (that too having gone down the crevasse with Ninnis). Day by day the bags grew soggier and heavier. But as soon as the men turned the stove off, the tent cooled so rapidly that the moisture on the walls froze to solid ice.
The cold affected Mertz more seriously than it did Mawson, in large part because of the loss of his burberry trousers. On December 27, he complained to his diary, “The drift is uncomfortable, because everything gradually gets wet. Without wearing mountain pants, the snow can penetrate into my underpants. At night, when I lie in my wet sleeping-bag, I realise how slowly one piece of clothing after another thaws on my body. One can’t say that such conditions are comfortable.”
Mawson was starting to worry about his partner’s condition. “I promised to do all I could for Xavier for him to see Australia and New Zealand,” he wrote in his diary.
During these days, dog meat was the staple of the men’s diet, “to which was added one or two ounces of chocolate or raisins, three or four ounces of a mixture of pemmican and biscuit, and, as a beverage, very dilute cocoa.” Mawson estimated the total weight of a day’s rations as 14 ounces per man—this, compared with more than two pounds per man per day on the outward run. It was no surprise that Mawson and Mertz were steadily weakening. And of course the dog meat would eventually give out.
Only Ginger was still alive. With a fortitude matching the men’s, she continued to help pull the sledge through December 26 and 27, but after a march of three miles on December 28, she collapsed. The men pushed on another two miles, then camped. “Ginger slain, meat cooked,” Mawson wrote bluntly in his diary. Later, he would recall the macabre transformation that turned a faithful husky into desperately needed food:
As we worked on a system which aimed at using up the bony parts of the carcase first, it happened that Ginger’s skull figured as the dish for the next meal. As there was no instrument capable of dividing it, the skull was boiled whole and a line drawn round it marking it into right and left halves. . . . Passing the skull from one to the other, we took turns in eating our respective shares. The brain was certainly the most appreciated and nutritious section, Mertz, I remember well, remarking specially upon it.
On the 29th, the men broke the sledging into two shifts. From 2:30 till 8:30 a.m., they managed to cover seven and a half miles. They pitched the tent, ate “a great breakfast off Ginger’s skull—thyroid and brains,” then tried to sleep before setting off again at 11:15 p.m. Mertz’s annoyance with the camping routine spilled into his diary: “The tent is too small. Only one of us can move, meanwhile the other one has to remain sitting in a corner. . . . One wonders how it is possible.”
Yet during the second shift of sledging, lasting almost ten hours, the men broke clear of the relentless uphill grade and emerged onto a flat terrace of snow. “We strode along at a good pace,” Mawson later wrote, “and by 9 a.m. had accomplished a splendid march of fifteen miles. . . .
“Our spirits rose and the prospects for the future had more promise than for many days past,” he added. “Fortune was beginning to smile upon us at last, but, alas! trouble of a new order was brewing.”
Mertz’s diary entry for December 30 was his shortest in weeks—three curt sentences. In them he noted a march of 15 miles, “light wind,” “increasing wind,” then: “As I am tired, I write no more.” Mawson’s own diary entry recorded his first hint of alarm: “Xavier off colour. . . . He turned in—all his things very wet, chiefly on account of no burberry pants.” Later Mawson would reflect that his first intimation that something was wrong with Mertz came “when I realized that my companion was not as cheerful as usual. As he had always been so bright and energetic it was clear that there was some good reason for this change, but he gave no hint upon the subject and I was loath to speak to him directly about it as it would likely pass off.”
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p; Late that evening, snow started to fall. The next day, the men did not get off until 10 a.m. After two days of splendid progress, on December 31 they hauled “under wretched conditions, for the light was atrocious and the surface slippery and ridged. The wind, tending to blow the sledge along sideways, only added to our troubles.” After gaining a paltry two and a half miles, they stopped to camp. Mertz started his diary entry with a hearty proclamation of “New Year’s Eve!,” but his words were leaden: “Now it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and we sit again in our sleeping-bags. Outside there are snowfalls and a diffuse light, therefore one can see little or nothing.”
During the previous evening, the men had had a long discussion about food. Mertz confessed that “he had found the dog meat very disagreeable and felt that he was getting little nutriment from it. He suggested that we should abstain from eating any further of this meat and draw solely upon the ordinary food of which we still had some days’ supply carefully husbanded.” Mawson agreed.
When the sun briefly reappeared at 9:30 p.m., the men packed up camp and started on again. But clouds moved in, and soon a dense fog enveloped them. “Can’t be sure exactly where going so camped after 5 miles,” Mawson glumly recorded.
“1 January New Year!” Mertz crowed in his diary. But the short entry was even gloomier than Mawson’s: “It’s not good weather to travel. Incredibly bad light, cloudy sky, therefore we didn’t go far. We wait for better weather. The dog meat looks indigestible for me, because yesterday I felt a little weak.”
It was the first time that Mertz had admitted to his diary that he was having trouble eating the dog meat. And it was the last entry he would write. After January 1, 1913, the Swiss ski champion and all-around athlete, who had faithfully kept his diary for a year and a half, from his departure from England aboard the Aurora in July 1911 through its arrival in Australia and then at Cape Denison, through the long winter in the hut, and through the first seven and a half weeks of the grueling Far Eastern journey, no longer had the energy to lift his pen and document the day’s doings.
The abstention from dog meat did nothing to improve Mertz’s condition. On January 2, the men stayed in their tent the whole day. On the 3rd, they managed five miles before calling it quits. And on the 4th, they “rested” inert for another whole day. Mawson’s diary records his partner’s decline. On January 3, the only day in three that the men sledged at all, he wrote, “Mertz boiled a small cocoa and had biscuit, and I had a bit of [dog] liver. . . . Did 5 miles but cold wind frost-bit Mertz’s fingers, and he is generally in a very bad condition. Skin coming off legs, etc.” Mertz himself could not believe that he had frostbitten fingers, for he had never before experienced frozen digits. “To convince himself,” Mawson later wrote, “he bit a considerable piece of the fleshy part off the end of one of [his fingers].”
On January 4, Mawson recorded, “Intended getting up 10 am and going on as day very good but Mertz in bad condition, so I doctored him part of day and rested.” On the 5th, Mertz’s state was even worse: “I tried to get Xavier to start but he practically refused, saying it was suicide and that it much best for him to have the day in bag and dry it and get better, then do more on sun-shining day. I strongly advocated doing 2 to 5 miles only for exercise even if we could not see properly. Eventually we decided to rest today.”
What was wrong with Mertz? Mawson later elaborated on his analysis of the predicament during those first days of January:
I found that, like myself, he had from time to time a dull painful gnawing sensation in the abdomen; it may well have been that his was more acute than in my case. I had discovered that the pain was greatly relieved by frequently changing position as one rested. My theory, at the time, was that the gastric secretions, especially under the influence of food dreams, were so active in search of food as actually to attack the wall of the stomach itself. By turning over at intervals the damage would be distributed and less severe.
Yet Mertz’s torpor was deeply disturbing, and so unlike the hardy comrade Mawson had come to respect and revere. It was as if the man no longer realized that the survival of both depended on making some march, no matter how short, every day. “All will depend on providence now—,” wrote Mawson on January 5, “it is an even race to the hut.”
By now, Mertz could not even eat the pieces of biscuit Mawson offered him. He could stomach only Glaxo, the powdered milk manufactured as baby food, so Mawson turned over the whole supply to his companion while he continued to eat biscuit and dog meat.
On the 5th, after Mertz had refused to move, Mawson spent the day inside the tent “cooking more meat and making appetizing broths which, however, my companion did not appreciate as I had hoped, furnishing additional evidence of the weakness of his digestive arrangements.” All day the snow fell, lashing against the tent in a gale-force wind. The two men spent “wretched hours lying in the wet sleeping-bags—how we longed to get them properly dry!”
The next day, with a wan sun shining through thin clouds, the men packed up and tried to sledge onward, starting at 10:30 a.m. “The grade was slightly downhill and the wind well behind,” Mawson wrote, “but these advantages were offset by an extremely slippery surface and awkward sastrugi ridges. Falls were frequent and they soon told severely upon my companion in his weak condition.” Mawson himself felt “quite dizzy from long stay in bags,” and “weak from want of food.”
The men had not gone far before Mawson realized that Mertz was incapable of hauling. Mawson suggested that his partner ride the sledge. Mertz demurred several times, then finally gave in. In their debilitated state, even a week earlier it had been all the men could do to pull the sledge, sometimes aided by their tent-cover sail, more than five miles in a continuous march. The effort now required of Mawson, to haul all by himself with Mertz’s added weight atop the sledge, is unimaginable. With his characteristic stoicism, in neither his diary nor The Home of the Blizzard does Mawson make any fuss about this superhuman feat. Instead, “With a wind blowing from behind, it required no great exertion to bring the load along, though it would often pull up suddenly against sastrugi.”
Even so, immobile atop the sledge, Mertz grew too cold to continue. After a pitiful gain of two and a half miles, the men stopped to camp.
Mertz was depressed and, after a little refreshment, sank back into his bag without saying much. He was troubled from time to time with recurrences of dysentery and had no power to hold in his stomach the broth which he was prevailed upon to swallow at intervals. Occasionally, during the day, I would ask him how he felt, or we would return to the old subject of food. Even then the conversation often led to the discussion of what we would do on arrival aboard the Aurora, though I doubt if either of us at that time really expected to get through. I recollect that it was agreed that once on board the ship Mertz was to spend the day making penguin-egg omelettes, for the excellence of those he had made just prior to leaving the Hut had not been forgotten.
In the privacy of his diary, Mawson faced the true enormity of the men’s situation: “Things are in a most serious state for both of us—if he cannot go on 8 or 10 m[iles] a day, in a day or two we are doomed. I could pull through myself with the provisions at hand but I cannot leave him. His heart seems to have gone.”
By the morning of January 7, the two men had only nine days left to meet the January 15 deadline Mawson had imposed on all the teams for their return to Winter Quarters. But the hut was still 100 miles away. Over the last six days, the men had advanced only seven and a half miles—an average of just a little more than a mile a day. At that rate, it would take them three months to reach Cape Denison. And there seemed little hope that Mertz, in his desperate condition, could even match the effort of the previous week.
With hindsight, Mawson later analyzed the men’s physical plight:
Starvation combined with superficial frost-bite, alternating with the damp conditions in the sleeping-bags, had by this time resulted in a wholesale peeling of the skin all over our bodies; in its pl
ace only a very poor unnourished substitute appeared which readily rubbed raw in many places. As a result of this, the chafing of the march had already developed large raw patches in just those places where they were most troublesome. As we never took off our clothes, the peelings of hair and skin from our bodies worked down into our under-trousers and socks, and regular clearances were made from the latter.
The men resolved to sledge on January 7 “at all cost.” But that morning’s departure fizzled into an utter fiasco. Somehow Mawson summed up the energy to recount it in detail in his diary:
Just as I got out [of the tent] at 8 am I found Xavier in a terrible state having fouled his pants. He must be very weak now for I do up and undo most of his things now and put him into & take him out of the bag. I have a long job cleaning him up, then put him into the bag to warm up. I have to turn in again to kill time & keep warm—for I feel the cold very much now. At 10 am I get up to dress Xavier & prepare breakfast but I find him in a kind of a fit & wrap him up in the bag & leave him—obviously we can’t go on today, and it is a good day though bad light, the sun just gleaming through the clouds. This is terrible. I don’t mind for myself, but it is for Paquita and for all the others connected with the expedition that I feel so deeply and sinfully. I pray to God to help us.
Mawson cooked cocoa and beef broth for Mertz, but had to lift him bodily to sit up enough to drink. After noon, he seemed to improve a bit. But then in the afternoon, “he has several fits & is delirious, fills his trousers again and I clean out for him.” Unable to speak coherently, Mertz now refused to eat or drink. The end came quickly, but not without agony. “At 8 pm he raves & breaks a tent pole,” wrote Mawson in his diary. “Continues to rave & call ‘Oh Yen, Oh Yen’ for hours. I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful & I put him quietly in the bag. He dies peacefully at about 2 am on morning of 8th.”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 22