From his diary and from The Home of the Blizzard alone, only a vague sense of Mawson’s religious beliefs can be divined. If in that moment, dangling from the harness rope, anticipating death, he looked forward to the discovery of an afterlife, that sentence is the only hint of such a faith in “the great Beyond.” After Ninnis’s death on December 14, Mawson had written in his diary, “May God Help us.” Elsewhere, however, it is not God that Mawson invokes, but Providence. Whether by the word he meant God’s plan for each human being, or only an impersonal fate, it was “remembering how Providence had miraculously brought me so far” that now kept him from giving up.
That, and a verse from his favorite poet, Robert Service, that suddenly came into his head:
Just have one more try—it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.
So Mawson girded himself for one more “supreme attempt”:
Fired by the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife, new power seemed to come as I applied myself to one last tremendous effort. The struggle occupied some time, but I slowly worked upward to the surface. This time emerging feet first, still clinging to the rope, I pushed myself out at full length on the lid and then shuffled safely on to the solid ground at the side.
At once Mawson passed out. Waking after an hour or even two—he could not tell how long he had been unconscious—he was surprised to find his body covered with a dusting of new snow.
“Numb with cold,” Mawson managed to pitch the tent and crawl inside, though it took him three hours to complete the job. Lying at last in his sleeping bag, “I ate a little food and thought matters over.” And in that moment, it was not Robert Service’s poetry that came into his head, but a verse from the atheistic Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?
“Never have I come so near to an end,” Mawson later wrote about his ordeal in the crevasse; “never has anyone more miraculously escaped.” His diary entry on the evening of January 17, however, is less dramatic. “I thought of Providence again giving me a chance,” he wrote of the effort to summon up a second hand-over-hand climb of the rope. And upon emerging, “Then I felt grateful to Providence.”
The phrase from the account of his near-death in The Home of the Blizzard, “having lost hope of reaching the Hut,” indicates that by the 17th Mawson was convinced he could not survive a return journey. Certainly at some point during his desperate solo march, he gave up hope of survival. The only incentive for continuing to push on was the wish that he might be able to cache his and Mertz’s diaries somewhere where they might be found by searchers, so that the world might learn the story of the heroic tragedy of the Far Eastern Party. Robert Scott, dying in a very different part of Antarctica ten months before, had expressed a kindred determination to save the story of his polar party’s demise for posterity, as he wrote in a last “Message to the Public”: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”
Yet Mawson’s diary entry on the 17th, after escaping from the crevasse, implies that he still had hopes of pulling through: “It is impossible to say what is ahead, for the light gives no chance, and I sincerely hope that something will happen to change the state of the weather—else how am I to keep up my average. I trust in Providence, however, who has so many times already helped me.”
After his hellish experience, Mawson got no sleep on the night of January 17–18. Instead, he did a lot of thinking. Part of it was philosophical: “I was confronted with this problem: whether it was better to enjoy life for a few days, sleeping and eating my fill until the provisions gave out, or to ‘plug on’ again in hunger with the prospect of plunging at any moment into eternity without the supreme satisfaction and pleasure of the food.” But in the midst of such ruminations, a very pragmatic idea came into Mawson’s head. “It was to construct a ladder from a length of alpine rope that remained,” he wrote; “one end was to be secured to the bow of the sledge and the other carried over my left shoulder and loosely attached to the sledge harness. Thus if I fell into a crevasse again, provided the sledge was not also engulfed, it would be easy for me, even though weakened by starvation, to scramble out by the ladder.”
Mawson was off shortly after 10 a.m. on the 18th. He had not gone far when “I sank to knees in one crevasse and got out and . . . noted open ones all around, so decided to camp and consider matters.” After his brush with death, the panic and dread that Mawson must have felt that day, threading his way through open and hidden crevasses, ladder or no ladder, can only be imagined. Inside the tent, he noted further ravages to his body: “Now ration is being reduced blood is going back and several festerings broken out again. If only I had [good] light I could make the Hut. . . . If only I could get out of this hole.”
The menace of the crevasses continued unabated on January 19, as Mawson got underway at 8:30 a.m. Yet “zigzagging about I found that at intervals they were choked with snow. At any rate I chanced them.” Zigzagging, however, meant that he traveled much farther than he gained in distance from the still far-off hut. “I stopped awhile and considered the question. Everything seemed hopeless—the serac seemed to be endless, the glacier cracked and boomed below.”
Mawson had underestimated the crevasses. Twice that day he broke through snow bridges and plunged over his head into the void, “but the sledge held up and the ladder proved ‘trumps.’ ” He was able to scramble out “without much exertion, though half-smothered with snow.” (Curiously, Mawson neglected to mention these close escapes in his diary, recalling them only in The Home of the Blizzard.)
In four and a half hours of all-out effort (“felt very tired”), Mawson gained a pitiful three and a half miles. “I decided to turn in early,” he wrote in his diary, “and go in early morning hoping for a good day.” During the last five days, constantly surrounded by crevasses, coming as close to death as he could and still survive, Mawson had nonetheless performed the considerable feat of sledging across the head of the Mertz Glacier, on a path some 20 miles south of the track he had laid down with Mertz and Ninnis in November. “I had never expected to get so far,” he later wrote, “and now that it was an accomplished fact I was intoxicated with joy.”
Recognizing that he had left behind the worst of the crevasses, Mawson hoped for better mileage in the coming days on the smooth plateau that stretched ahead. On the 20th, however, “a wretched overcast day,” he gained only two and a half miles, and the next day, under sun and wind, a mere three miles. Desperate to improve his marches, that evening Mawson threw away more gear: his crampons (the loss of which would have grave consequences), the alpine rope from which he had made his rescue ladder, and the stick with which he probed for crevasses. But on a “gloriously sunny” January 22, he covered six miles—his best march since January 11. Mawson’s spirits were buoyed, as he came in sight of an “old friend”—Aurora Peak, which Mawson, Mertz, and Ninnis had discovered on November 18 and named after the expedition ship. At the end of that day’s effort, “I felt very weak and weary. My feet were now much improved and the old skin-casts [i. e., the soles] after shrivelling up a good deal had been thrown away. However, prolonged starvation aided by the unwholesomeness of the dog meat was taking its toll in other ways. My nails still continued to fester and numerous boils on my face and body required daily attention.”
Mawson realized full well that he was getting weaker by the day. And on the 23rd, bad weather returned, with low clouds and a rising wind:
Everything became blotted out in a swirl of drifting snow . . . I wandered through it for several hours, the sledge capsizing at times owing to the strength of the wind. It was not possible to keep an accurate course, for even the wind changed direction as the day wore on. Underfoot there was soft snow which I found comfortable for m
y sore feet, but which made the sledge drag heavily at times.
That day, Mawson’s progress added up to a discouraging three and a half miles.
On the 24th, to his incredulous delight, he was able to ride the sledge for half a mile, as a favorable wind filled his makeshift sail. He gained another five miles before camping, fortifying himself that evening with “an extra stick of chocolate.” But in the tent, he found more evidence of his physical deterioration: “Both my hands have shed the skin in large sheets, very tender and it is a great nuisance.”
The fickle weather seemed to tease Mawson with promises of clear skies and good sledging, only to slam the door in his face. He woke on January 25 to a “violent blizzard” that prohibited any travel. Mawson spent the day in his sleeping bag, his mind tormented with some of his darkest thoughts yet.
I cannot sleep, and keep thinking of all manner of things—how to improve the cooker, etc.—to while away the time. The end is always food, how to save [cooking] oil, and as experiment I am going to make dog pem & put the cocoa in it. Freezing feet as too little food, new skin and no action: have to wear burberries in bag. The tent is closing in by weight of snow and is about coffin size now.
Yet even in these doldrums, he still had faith in a dwindling chance of survival: “I am full of hope and reliance in the great Providence, which has pulled me through so far.”
Despite a continuing blizzard, with wind up to 60 mph, Mawson packed up and moved out on the 26th. It was, he noted wryly, “a great experiment,” for he was not sure that he would be able to pitch the tent at the end of the day. If he could not, he knew he would die before the morning. Somehow, Mawson managed to sledge nine miles in terrible conditions—under the circumstances, a heroic feat. He got the tent pitched after a prolonged struggle. Not until after midnight was he able to cook his dinner.
On the morning of January 27, Mawson calculated, he was 48 miles from the hut. The previous day’s effort had taken too much out of him, so despite the blizzard’s starting to moderate, he spent the whole day in the tent. “My clothes and bag and all gear wet with yesterday’s business,” he recorded. “For the last 2 days my hair has been falling out in handfuls and rivals the reindeer hair from the moulting bag for nuisance in all food preparations. My beard on one side has come out in patches.”
On the 28th, although snow still fell under a leaden overcast sky, the wind had dropped considerably. But so much snow had drifted around the tent that Mawson had a hard time crawling out of it. When he emerged, he saw that all but the top several inches of the tent’s peak had been drifted under. (Other explorers have suffocated when they slept through snowstorms that completely buried their tents.) The sledge was nowhere in sight. It took Mawson hours to dig out the tent and to “prospect” for the sledge before digging it free as well.
By late afternoon, as the sky cleared magnificently, Mawson had sledged onward for eight miles. “My spirits rose to a high pitch,” he later wrote, “for I felt for the first time that there was a really good chance of making the Hut.” Yet his body was in a deplorable state, with skin coming off everywhere, hair falling out, boils on his face and body, and raw, tender skin underfoot instead of the “shriveled” soles he had tossed out. He was down to about two pounds of food—one day’s fare for a man on the outward journey—after weeks of slowly starving himself by eking out the rations. All that was left were “about twenty small chips of cooked dog meat in addition to half a pound of raisins and a few ounces of chocolate.”
Mawson had been navigating by compass, by the occasional sun sight, by the direction of the sastrugi, and above all by dead reckoning, aided by glimpses of familiar landmarks—first Aurora Peak, then Madigan Nunatak. By the evening of the 28th, he estimated the distance to the hut as 35 to 36 miles. But he was so weak, so tired, and so hungry that he had no assurance that he could drag himself through that last stretch of barren terrain. And even if he did reach Winter Quarters, what would he find there?
Once again, Mawson crawled out of the tent and packed the sledge on the morning of January 29. Snow was falling, and the wind rose to 45 mph. He set a compass course of north 45° west, and doggedly followed it for five miles. At that point, a minor miracle occurred.
About 300 yards to the north of his course, Mawson caught sight of “something dark loom[ing] through the haze.” He veered north, dragging his sledge toward the apparition. When he came close, he could see that it was a cairn of snow blocks covered by a black cloth. Removing the cloth, he seized upon a bag of food. Inside a tin in the bag, he found a note. The message revealed that the cairn and food cache had been laid by Archibald McLean, Alfred Hodgeman, and Frank Hurley, out searching for the overdue trio, “on the chance that it might be picked up by us.”
As he sat in the lee of the cairn, Mawson tore open the food bag and scattered the contents in the snow. Though he neglected to specify exactly what food and how much of it the three men had left, Mawson at once gobbled down chunks of frozen pemmican, stuffed more in his pockets, and carefully lashed the bag with the rest of its contents onto the sledge. He marveled at his good fortune in finding the depot: “a few hundred yards to either side and it would have been lost to sight in the drift.”
Now he renewed his march. “As I left the depot,” he wrote, “there appeared to be nothing on earth that could prevent me reaching the Hut within a couple of days.” The note had indicated that Aladdin’s Cave, the underground grotto carved out of the snow the previous autumn, lay only 23 miles away, on a compass bearing of north 45° west. From Aladdin’s Cave, it was only five and a half miles to the hut. The note also contained the stunning news that the Aurora had arrived, that Amundsen had reached the South Pole the year before, and that Scott was wintering over again in Antarctica.
Yet for all the joy and hope the cairn, the food, and the note brought Mawson, it contained a tantalizing “what if.” McLean, Hodgeman, and Hurley had recorded the time and date when they had left the cache. The trio had camped there overnight before departing at 8 a.m. that very morning of January 29. Mawson had found the cairn at 2 p.m. He had missed running into the search party by a mere six hours. And he realized that “during the night of the 28th our camps had been only some five miles apart.”
Fired with new energy, Mawson plunged onward, though he knew better than to hope that he might catch up to the three fit and healthy searchers. He covered another eight miles on the 29th before stopping to camp. The day’s run all told had been thirteen miles, Mawson’s best in weeks. “It is a great joy to have plenty of food,” he wrote in his diary, “but must see that [I] don’t overload or disaster may result.”
Yet Mawson’s wild hope that he might reach the hut within a couple of days was destined to be cruelly dashed, by yet another all-but-unforeseeable vicissitude. And once again, his life would hang by the thinnest of threads.
At the end of his long march on the 29th, Mawson had found himself on a surface unlike any that he had trudged across during the previous weeks. “Am now on ice and half ice and falling every few yards on account of heavy side wind,” he wrote in his diary. If only he had kept his crampons, he could have trodden blithely across the slippery plateau, but the soft soles of his finnesko were useless for purchase on ice, especially with the sledge behind him catching every gust of wind and pulling him off the track he hoped to pursue. “Before giving up [on January 29],” he later recalled, “I even tried crawling on my hands and knees.”
The next morning, before emerging from the tent, Mawson tried to manufacture substitute crampons. As ingenious a tinkerer as ever, he cut up the theodolite case, producing a pair of thin, flat pieces of wood. Then he scavenged all the screws and nails he could find, taking apart both the sledgemeter and the theodolite. These he thrust through the pieces of wood until they protruded like crampon spikes. Before starting out on January 30, he lashed these devices to the soles of his finnesko. It took only a few miles of marching to break them to pieces.
The destruction of the “cra
mpons” forced Mawson to camp after a little more than five miles, “on first bit of half snow I could find.” To add to the miseries of the 30th, Mawson’s trek took him back into a region crisscrossed with crevasses—terrain he thought he had left behind for good. “Sledge breaking through dangerously in several places,” he dryly recorded. Having thrown away the alpine rope, Mawson no longer had his rescue ladder to extricate himself should he fall into yet another fissure in the ice.
At the end of the day’s march, however, he had seen a distant object that looked very much like the “beacon” that had been erected months earlier to mark the location of Aladdin’s Cave. It seemed, however, too near to fit the distances indicated in the note left by McLean, Hodgeman, and Hurley.
On January 31, as the wind blasted the plateau, Mawson spent all day inside the tent trying to craft a second set of crampons, scavenging yet more materials from various pieces of his sledge and gear, including parts of the box that held the Primus stove. “This work took an interminable time,” he later recalled, “for the tools and appliances available were almost all contained in a small pocket knife that had belonged to Mertz. Besides a blade it was furnished with a spike, a gimlet and a screw-driver.”
It was not until past noon on February 1 that Mawson was satisfied with his new crampons. The weather had turned favorable. As Mawson pulled the sledge, his balance unsteady on the ice, the black dot that he had seen two days earlier grew closer and clearer. And then, after a march of only two and a half miles, he came to Aladdin’s Cave. “Great joy and thanksgiving,” he noted in his diary. In The Home of the Blizzard, he elaborated on the momentous arrival:
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 24