At 7 p.m. that haven within the ice was attained. It took but a few moments to dig away the snow and throw back the canvas flap sealing the entrance. A moment later I slid down inside, arriving amidst familiar surroundings. Something unusual in one corner caught the eye—three oranges and a pineapple—circumstantial evidence of the arrival of the Aurora.
Of course Mawson had already learned of the ship’s arrival from the note in the snow cairn that he had discovered on January 29. Perhaps it took something as tangible as a pineapple to convince him that the note told the truth.
That evening, sleeping in the blissful refuge of the grotto, Mawson was only five and a half miles from the hut. Surely his ordeal was finally over. He could not know that at that very moment the Aurora lay at anchor in Commonwealth Bay, waiting to pick up the ten men who had not been delegated to stay a second winter and search for traces of the Far Eastern Party. But he might have guessed as much, since only three days had passed since McLean, Hodgeman, and Hurley had started back from the snow cairn on top of which they had deposited the food bag with the note.
But Mawson also knew that the five-and-a-half-mile slope leading from Aladdin’s Cave to Winter Quarters had most likely turned into a treacherous toboggan run of hard ice. Even if he abandoned his sledge and made a dash for it, without proper footgear he would surely slip and tumble, perhaps to his death. In his diary that first evening, he wrote, “My new crampons want improving as one is quite unsatisfactory and has strained my right leg, so I must camp for the night.” On arriving at Aladdin’s Cave, as ecstatic as he was to discover bags full of food, his great disappointment was not finding an extra set of crampons.
In the night, a fierce gale blew in. The storm continued without respite for a week. It was the same storm that kept the Aurora steaming in circles in Commonwealth Bay, unable to launch the motorboat to pick up the ten men who were going home, as Captain John King Davis kept up his sleepless vigil. On the morning of February 2, Mawson slithered out of the cave, ready to head for the hut, only to be lashed by 50 mph winds. The temptation to make the dash was strong, but he dismissed it “as a last resort.” How terrible it would be, he thought, to have survived a desperate trek of almost 300 miles from Ninnis’s crevasse, only to kill himself trying to force the last homeward leg.
Instead, Mawson crawled back into the “comfortable cave” and spent the day trying to improve his fragile crampons. He ransacked the grotto for anything—benzine cases, food bags, loose nails, parts of a dead dog’s sledge harness—that might aid his improvisation. On February 3, he emerged again, hoping to head out, but in the blowing snow, he realized he would have to haul his sledge in case he got lost and missed the hut. And that was an impossibility without adequate crampons.
“This is most exasperating,” he wrote in his diary. And, “I turned in at midnight, very tired. It almost appears as if scurvy or something of the kind were upon me—joints very sore. Blood keeps coming from the right nostril in thin watery description, also from outbursts on the fingers.”
February 4 was no better: “Blowing quite as hard as ever, and thick drift. I wait in the bag and listen for cessation for greater part of day. . . . Oh for a clear spell! Will the ship wait?”
On the 5th, Mawson almost set out. But when he tried out his new crampons on the icy surface, he was “disappointed to find that they had not sufficient grip to face the wind, so had to abandon the idea of attempting the descent.” In his diary he agonized over the uncertain gamble: “With good crampons it would be a pleasure to walk down to the Hut, but with what I have, and the taking of sledge down, it would be a toss-up.” Instead, he tried to console himself with the new luxury of food: “I bring in the tin of S & A biscuits, find it a great change—now eating chunks of pem out of tins and S & A biscuits. Have got to like very much boiled Glaxo with biscuit in it.”
On the 6th and the 7th, the wind blew furiously, interrupted only by brief lulls. Mawson’s diary entries were growing shorter and shorter. “Perfected second pair of crampons by screws got out of sledgemeter,” he boasted on the 6th. But the next day, he wrote only six words: “Wind continues too strong for crampons.”
It was only on February 8 that the weeklong gale finally blew itself out. The wind fell quickly after 8 a.m., but Mawson waited until 1 p.m. to make sure it was not a false lull. At last, he started downhill on the final trek to the hut. Wearing one pair of rickety, unreliable crampons and carrying a backup pair, Mawson had also outfitted the sledge with safety modifications—what he called “a patent anti-crevasse bar,” as well as ropes wrapped under the runners to slow the sledge’s glide on the icy slope.
During that risky jaunt, Mawson tormented himself with primal questions:
(1) Had the ship gone?
(2) If so, had they left a party at the Hut?
(3) Or had they abandoned us altogether?
While Mawson had been preparing the final march of his 300-mile return from disaster, Davis had finally brought the Aurora close to shore. Taking advantage of the windless hours on the morning of February 8, he sent the motorboat to pick up the ten men. In a desperate hurry to steam westward to relieve Wild’s Western Party, Davis and his crew performed the task with commendable efficiency. Just before noon—an hour before Mawson set off from Aladdin’s Cave—the ship headed out of Commonwealth Bay, as the men onboard waved their goodbyes to the six left behind.
One mile down the slope, Mawson finally came in clear sight of the bay. There was no ship in view, though Mawson tried to temper his disappointment with the supposition that the Aurora might be drifting eastward along the coast, still searching for the missing party. Three miles farther on, Mawson caught sight of “a speck on the north-west horizon. . . . It looked like a distant ship—Was it the Aurora?” And if it was the Aurora, was she steaming away for good, or still circling and searching?
Only moments later, Mawson’s heart surged with relief, as “the boat harbour burst into view and I saw 3 men working at something on one side of it.” Mawson stopped in his tracks and waved for thirty seconds. At last one of the men looked up, saw the apparition far above, and waved in response. Suddenly five men were running as fast as they could up the icy slope, while Mawson resumed his cautious downhill plod, still pulling his sledge.
The first to reach him was Frank Bickerton. From 50 yards away, Mawson recognized his teammate, the man who had nursed the air-tractor through its year of feckless service for the AAE. But from the startled look on Bickerton’s face, as he beheld the ravaged countenance of the man limping down the slope above him, Mawson knew exactly what Bickerton was thinking: Which one are you?
7
WINTER MADNESS
Bickerton and the five other men who had rushed up the slope—all but the new radio operator, Sidney Jeffryes—took charge of Mawson’s sledge and helped their leader hobble down the last stretch to the hut. “I briefly recited the disaster and cause of my late arrival from the sledge journey,” Mawson wrote in his diary that night. “There were tears in several eyes as the story proceeded.”
Had Mawson come into view only five or six hours earlier, the whole of the Main Base party could have boarded the Aurora and steamed west to pick up Wild’s men. As it was, however, there was still the chance of such a salvation. During the idle days as the men had waited at Winter Quarters for the return of the Far Eastern Party, they had gotten the radio mast erected and the transmitter working. Before parting, Captain Davis had arranged for Jeffryes to send messages to the ship while she was still in radio range. Because the Aurora could receive but not send, Jeffryes had promised to broadcast at 8, 9, and 10 p.m., with Walter Hannam on the ship manning the wireless set.
That evening, Hannam transcribed the terse but stunning message: “Arrived safely at Hut. Mertz and Ninnis dead. Return and pick up all hands. Mawson.” Davis immediately turned the ship around, and by 9 p.m. she was steaming back toward Commonwealth Bay. “Thank God Mawson is alive at any rate,” Davis wrote in his diary.
&
nbsp; By the morning of February 9, the ship lay offshore opposite the hut. As Davis recalled decades later:
As we neared those too well-remembered ice-slopes we were greeted by the first shrill notes of the coastal blizzard piping in the rigging. By the time we had reached the anchorage it was blowing a full gale. A boat’s crew of volunteers . . . stood eagerly by the surf boat, but the wind was too violent to send them away.
At the time, however, Davis’s feelings were less charitable. “Why did they recall us,” he wrote in his diary. “It simply means that we are going to loose [sic] Wild for the sake of taking off a party who are in perfect safety. I wish we have never received the message. . . . I am just worn out and a heap of nerves.”
A heap of nerves could also have characterized the state of the seven refugees standing on the shore, staring at the gale-lashed ship, so close and yet so inaccessible. “We tried to be patient,” wrote Bickerton. “We looked at the sea, the wind instruments and the barometer and the ship. Every lull brought hope and every gust might be the last. If only the wind would drop ever so little a boat could fetch us.”
Mawson directed Jeffryes to send another wireless message to Hannam: “Anxious to get off, hope Capt Davis could wait a few days longer.” Yet despite the tantalizing prospect of a quick motor launch ride to the Aurora, Mawson could put Davis’s quandary in perspective. As he wrote in his diary on the 9th:
Of course I did not like commanding him to remain as he was responsible for picking up Wild’s party, which he had left in a difficult situation, and the probabilities were that as the season was now so far advanced he would either not get in to Wild’s base or, having got in, would not get out.
At 6:30 p.m. on February 9, Davis met with the whole ship’s crew to ask their advice. His own judgment was already firm in his mind: “This party are in perfect safety and have everything they want. Wild on the other hand, has not, and I feel that I am no longer justified in remaining here and risking losing the 2nd party.” The crew concurred. “I am sorry for the party left behind,” Davis added, “but have done what I believe to be right.”
Mawson woke on February 10 to a sharp disappointment. “Well, next morning strong wind and no ship in view,” he wrote. “The wind calmed off in afternoon, so that we could have got off if ship here.” The men left behind at Cape Denison still held out the faint hope that the Aurora might be able to return to gather them up after recovering Wild’s party.
Despite the calming of the wind in the afternoon, Davis had no second thoughts. “The strain of the last fortnight has been about as much as anyone could put up with I think, and still keep his senses,” he wrote in his diary. “I got a bit of sleep last night for the first time for nearly a week.” The men on the ship still had no clear idea of what had caused the deaths of Ninnis and Mertz. That evening, Hannam received a last, garbled wireless message. The only words he could make out were “crevasse, Ninnis and Mertz, broken” and “cable.” Davis concluded, “From this it would appear as if the two of them had been lost in a crevasse.”
The disheartened seven left behind at Cape Denison settled back into the hut to wait—whether for only a month or so, if the Aurora should manage to return, or for another year, until the ship could pick them up the following summer, they could only guess. The previous winter, Madigan, Bickerton, Mertz, and Ninnis had occupied the four double bunks that Ninnis had jocularly nicknamed Hyde Park Corner. Now Madigan wrote in his diary, “Of the four happy members of the Hyde Park Corner . . . only two remain. Bickerton and I sleep in the old corner—how desolate it seems—I have heard Bick sobbing under his blankets—and their terrible end, I cannot write of it.”
Mawson was so debilitated by his ordeal that, as he later wrote, “It was several weeks before normal sleep returned; during that time I did little else than potter about, eat and doze, with frequent interruptions from internal disorders.” On February 12, only three days after the ship had left, he wrote in his diary, “I am invaliding yet. I have shaken to pieces somewhat, and I anticipate it will take some time to pull me up to anything like I was physically before that awful journey home.” The rest of the men did their best to nurse their leader back to health. “For the first few weeks,” Paquita Mawson was later told by those teammates, “he would follow them round, not so much to talk to them as just to be with them.”
Mawson later told his friend and protégé Phillip Law “that he probably would have died had he gone on the ship.”
Fifteen hundred miles to the west, the eight men at the Western Base had begun to despair of the Aurora’s arrival. They had killed seals to shore up their supplies of food and blubber against the grim possibility of having to endure a second winter on the Shackleton Ice Shelf, and they had carried signboards out to the edge of the sea cliff in hopes of directing the ship’s crew toward their hut. But by February 20, they had lingered for almost three weeks beyond the January 30 date by which Frank Wild had been told to be ready for the pickup.
The men talked constantly about the Aurora, with George Dovers, the twenty-two-year-old surveyor, the most anxious of them all. According to Charles Harrisson, the biologist who was twice Dovers’s age, “George . . . announces in his positive way each morning that the ship will be in that day. Each night that we ‘will sleep on the ship tomorrow night!’ How continually that stretch of open water is swept for the sight of her!” Two days later, Harrisson added, “Trust nothing has happened to [the ship]. Her name constantly heard this day & twice George gave false alarm this morning.”
The Aurora’s all-out charge westward after leaving Commonwealth Bay, Davis later wrote, “remains in my memory as one long continuous battle with the elements. When it wasn’t headwinds, fog, gales or pack-ice, it was blizzards or icebergs.” By now, darkness was starting to fall at 9 p.m. “From then on until morning we had to grope our way as best we could, the blizzard wind flinging the snow into our faces with stinging force, while weaving through vast fields of pack-ice or twisting and turning to avoid being blown down upon the innumerable bergs that lay, silent and menacing, athwart our track.”
Davis’s diary during this trying voyage is a litany of complaints and maledictions. (Reading them, one understands how the young captain acquired the nickname Gloomy.) “We are too late in the season, that is the trouble,” he wrote on February 11. The next day: “A very poor run to the Westward. . . . I hope that we shall get a change soon or things will look very bad.” On the 15th, “A terrible day, running before an Easterly gale in thick snow, unable to see anything, barometer falling steadily. . . . I do not know how long a man would last out at this sort of thing. I know that it would not take a great deal more to wear me out.”
On top of bad weather, icebergs, and fog, Davis had an unexpected obstacle to deal with. As the Aurora pushed on to the west, he noted that “The [pack] ice is nearly 60 miles further North than last year. Whether we shall ever get to the 2nd base seems doubtful, unless there is a decided change in the trend of this pack.” But on February 21, Davis found a change. “It was much better than it looked,” he noted in a rare expression of optimism, as the ship steamed southward through open leads under a bright moon.
Ensconced inside the Grottoes, their snow-smothered base camp hut, Wild’s men waited out an 80 mph blizzard on February 22. The next day, however, the wind dwindled to a light breeze. Peering through binoculars, Wild saw to his delight that the pack ice stretching beyond the edge of the Shackleton Ice Shelf had broken up dramatically. That day, he and Sydney Jones hiked out to retrieve a sledge that had been used to make ocean soundings. “We had gone less than half a mile,” wrote Wild, “when we saw what at first appeared to be a penguin standing on some heavy pack-ice in the distance, but which we soon made out to be the mast head of the ‘Aurora.’ ”
Knowing it would take hours for the ship to come alongside, Wild and Jones dashed back to The Grottoes to share the joyous news with their teammates. By the time Davis had brought the Aurora to the edge of the shelf, the men had
hauled two sledge loads of gear a mile and a half to the sea cliff “in record time.”
“As the ship came alongside, we gave three hearty cheers for Captain Davis and were surprised at the subdued nature of the return cheers from the ship and an atmosphere of gloom over the whole ship’s company,” wrote Wild. On first hearing of the ship’s arrival, Harrisson had cheered out loud with his teammates. “But instead of the elation I expected to feel,” he wrote in his diary, “was an intense anxiety. The suspense of the last year was to end in an hour. What was the news she brought . . . good or bad?”
Harrisson continued: “Wild hailed & asked if Dr Mawson & First Party all well. But only an ominous silence.”
Many years later Charles Laseron, on board the Aurora, recalled the ship’s approach to Western Base:
At the foot of the barrier was a narrow shelf of sea-ice some hundreds of yards wide. At its edge stood a number of figures, some of whom we could see waving their arms. We rubbed our eyes, and counted again. There should have been eight, but here were twenty or more. Then, as the distance lessened, the figures separated into two groups. Eight of them were men, the others emperor penguins.
All, then, were safe. Our relief was more than great. The tragedy at the main base was so recent that subconsciously we had almost dreaded this moment, lest we learn that further calamity had overtaken us.
Wild’s men were stunned by the news of Mertz’s and Ninnis’s deaths, especially because the men on board the Aurora could supply no details as to how those two well-loved teammates had met their end. But the Western Base party was so eager to escape the Shackleton Shelf that it took them only a matter of hours to load all their belongings onto the ship, lay in a supply of ice for drinking water, and start north.
For Davis, there was no possibility of returning to Cape Denison to pick up Mawson and his six companions. The supply of coal on board was barely adequate for the return to Australia, and to dodge further among the bergs and pack ice as February darkened into March would be to invite getting the ship frozen in—as had already happened to several Antarctic expedition vessels, and would happen again. As the ship steamed north, Davis summed up the recent trials in his diary: “It seems like a dream to think that the awful nightmare of the last fortnight is over, and that the party are safe on board. I wish we had the people from the other base, but they will have to remain there now until next year.”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 25