Among all the scientific specimens and personal belongings the men of the Western Base brought back with them, Wild was proudest (and fondest) of the two huskies that had survived the year in Antarctica. By late February, Zip and Amundsen were “woefully thin and weak, all their ribs showing and backbones sticking up like sharp wedges.” But on board ship, the dogs ate so heartily that they arrived in Hobart “as fat as butter.”
Later, in Sydney, Wild gave Zip to a lady friend “who kept him for several years.” But upon first landing at Hobart, where a late-summer heat wave reigned, Amundsen suffered from a distress utterly different from anything he had undergone in Antarctica. Despite efforts to pack his kennel in ice, within days Amundsen had died of heat stroke.
On March 4, in the hut at Cape Denison, Archibald McLean wrote in his diary, “Hope for the Aurora’s return is at a very low ebb.” The only compensation for the seven men facing imprisonment in Antarctica for another year came from the fact that they had gotten the wireless apparatus working. Via the relay station on Macquarie Island, for the first time in fourteen months the remaining members of the AAE were in contact with Australia, and thus with the rest of the world. On March 9, McLean chortled, “Last night quite a budget of messages came through—seven in all.—It was quite like a morning paper to hear the contents at breakfast time.”
Basking in his triumph in the race for the South Pole, Roald Amundsen sent Mawson a short message, “hop[ing] he would have ‘a pleasant winter.’ ” On March 16, the radio sent news that the Aurora had arrived safely in Hobart. The men at Winter Quarters accepted the news stoically.
An unexpected corollary to the second overwintering was the necessity for the men on Macquarie Island to winter over again as well, simply to keep the radio link up and running. Life at 55° south was not nearly as onerous as existence in the “home of the blizzard,” at 67° south, but Macquarie was bleak enough—a raw, storm-swept, treeless landscape of rugged hills covered with tussock grass, though the prevalence of seals and penguins year-round relieved the monotony. Upon learning via radio from Mawson about the need to keep the relay station going for another year, George Ainsworth, the leader of the five-man party, offered his teammates the chance to return to Australia in May aboard a relief vessel, returning only in November. But such was the loyalty of the men to Mawson and the AAE that all four volunteered to stick it out through the whole winter.
At Cape Denison, Mawson imposed a strict discipline on his men, limiting their personal use of the radio to a bare minimum. The precious wireless connection, he felt, should be saved for official scientific and business purposes. He did manage, however, to embed a brief telegraphic missive to Paquita in a longer message to the AAE secretary in Australia. It read,
DEEPLY REGRET DELAY ONLY JUST MANAGED
TO REACH HUT EFFECTS NOW GONE BUT LOST
MY HAIR YOU ARE FREE TO CONSIDER YOUR
CONTRACT BUT TRUST YOU WILL NOT ABANDON
YOUR SECOND HAND DOUGLAS
Paquita promptly replied:
DEEPLY THANKFUL YOU ARE SAFE WARMEST
WELCOME AWAITING YOUR HUNTERS RETURN
REGARDING CONTRACT SAME AS EVER ONLY
MORE SO THOUGHTS ALWAYS WITH YOU ALL WELL
HERE MONTHS SOON PASS TAKE THINGS EASIER
THIS WINTER SPEAK AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE
During February and March, Mawson was too depleted to contribute much to the chores and duties of the hut. His diary entries are more clipped and lethargic than during any previous period of the AAE. Many are one-liners: “Covering Hut and fitting store,” “Drifting and strong wind,” “Macquarie Id heard but could not catch.”
Yet as leader, Mawson thought it critical to the men’s morale to keep them busy. This was not a machiavellian ploy: Mawson sincerely believed that “there still remained useful work to be undertaken.” Accordingly, he directed operations “to make the Hut, if anything, safer and snugger.” The principal remodeling effort consisted of covering the roof with an old sail left behind by the Aurora, which, Mawson was convinced, made the building more windproof.
Bob Bage was put in charge of magnetic and astronomical observations, and he also served as storeman, arranging such delicacies as penguin eggs and seal steaks in accessible cases on the windward side of the overhanging veranda. Cecil Madigan kept up the meteorological records, and Mawson put him in charge of twenty-one huskies that had served on Amundsen’s South Pole expedition. A gift from the Norwegian, the dogs had been carried south aboard the Aurora on its relief expedition in 1913. Frank Bickerton was the mechanical handyman, charged also with keeping the vital radio mast and wires from breaking down. Archibald McLean, ever the biologist, took on the odd jobs of gathering ice for drinking water and carrying coal for the stove. He also launched bottles filled with messages into the sea, “on the chance of their being picked up, thereby giving some indication of the direction of the currents.” Alfred Hodgeman, the architect, assisted Madigan with the meteorological notes, and made maps and plans to help document the expedition. And Jeffryes, the newcomer, reputed to be a more skillful operator than Walter Hannam, took charge of sending and receiving the all-important radio messages.
Yet it was impossible for the men not to feel that most of these chores were little better than make-work to fill the empty days of the second winter. Mawson tacitly acknowledged as much, setting the wake-up call later than the year before. Breakfast occupied the hour from 9 to 10 a.m., so that the chores themselves began as late as 11. As Bickerton later wrote:
The hut was not so cold the second winter and we were not so crowded. . . . But the wind was unvarying as ever, the food we knew too well in every possible combination, and we felt badly the need of occasional entertainment with people not subject to our routine or monotonous climate. We came to accept our life as the normal and an effort of the imagination was needed to see oneself in a world supplied with grass and friendly weather and modern plumbing.
Mawson was determined to keep up some semblance of scientific research beyond making daily weather observations. A stray comment in McLean’s diary records a bizarre experiment not mentioned in The Home of the Blizzard: “DM and AM [i. e., McLean himself] paint penguins black—like tagging—to see if they return to the same rookeries.” The men knew the penguins would soon desert the continent for their breeding grounds farther north. McLean vigilantly observed their piecemeal departure. “Last penguins have gone north,” he wrote on March 29, only to glimpse a few stragglers several days later. But by April 21, “No luck looking for last solitary penguins.”
On February 22, via the radio, the men learned for the first time about the fate of Robert Scott and his four companions returning from the South Pole the year before. Wrote Mawson in his diary, “ ‘Scott reached the Pole—died and 4 others.’ I know what this means as I have been so near it myself recently.” The wireless communication with Macquarie Island was spotty at best. Mawson’s diary entries, still brief and telegraphic, record the team’s frustration: “Wireless hears Macquarie talking but only for a short while”; “Jeffryes hears very little of Macquarie.” Part of the problem was caused by atmospheric disturbances such as the aurora and St. Elmo’s fire. “Jeffryes would sometimes spend the whole evening,” Mawson wrote, “trying to transmit a single message, or conversely, trying to receive one.”
On March 23, for the first time since reaching the hut, Mawson confessed his fragile psychological state to his diary:
I find my nerves in a very serious state, and from the feeling I have in the base of my head I [have] suspicion that I may go off my rocker very soon. My nerves have evidently had a very great shock. Too much writing today brought this on. I shall take more exercise and less study, hoping for a beneficial turn.
Boredom was the ever-present enemy. “Reading is a great solace,” McLean wrote on April 6, “and we fortunately have plenty of books.” Mawson elaborated: “There was a fine supply of illustrated journals and periodicals which had arrived by the Aurora and w
ith these we tried to make up the arrears of a year in exile. The ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ was a great boon, being always the last word in the settlement of a debated point.”
To leaven the monotony of the men’s rations, each of the seven concocted some culinary specialty. Bage cooked steamed puddings, Madigan puff pastry, Jeffryes milk scones, and so on. In retrospect, Mawson could see humor in these efforts: “Bickerton once started out with the object of cooking a ginger pudding, and in an unguarded moment used mixed-spice instead of ginger. The result, though highly spiced, was rather appetizing, so ‘mixed-spice pudding’ was added to our list of discoveries.”
What to do with the huskies Amundsen had donated to the expedition presented a curious dilemma. There was no longer any need for sledging journeys, so the dogs became in effect pets. But they had to be fed (mostly on rotting seal carcasses), quartered in the veranda, and kept from tearing into the food supplies. They also had an unpleasant penchant for fighting viciously with one another. As Mawson noted:
On May 23 Lassie, one of the dogs, had his abdomen ripped open in a fight and had to be shot. Quarrels amongst the dogs had to be quelled immediately, otherwise they would probably mean the death of some unfortunate animal which happened to be thrown down amongst the pack. Whenever a dog was down, it was the way of these brutes to attack him irrespective of whether they were friends or foes.
Yet despite the best efforts of the seven men to keep up morale, tensions began to invade the hut. The most disaffected member was Cecil Madigan. He had, of course, been sorely disappointed at being chosen to spend a second winter in Antarctica, for it meant delaying his Rhodes scholarship yet another year—a hiatus he was not at all sure the committee would tolerate. The antagonism toward Mawson that had been latent through the first winter now flared into an intense resentment, even disgust.
Since Madigan’s diary is not available to scholars, the only source for the man’s feelings and judgments during the second winter is the secondhand paraphrase in Vixere Fortes, the family memoir written by his son David Madigan and privately published in 2000. As Riffenburgh argues about this chronicle, “the assessments of Mawson break down at points into little more than a litany of complaints or a vitriolic rant.” Since the sentiments expressed in this book are so at odds with the diaries and later writings of the other team members, Vixere Fortes must be regarded as somewhat unreliable.
According to David Madigan, in March “Cecil’s gloom deepened as he surveyed the narrow space of his confinement. He was in a strange and wonderful country, but one week of it was enough. . . . Such was Adelie Land, which had become loathsome to him.” In that gloom, Madigan turned his contempt on the man he had jeeringly nicknamed Dux Ipse.
Not the least of his tribulations was Mawson, of whom his opinion changed greatly, becoming steadily worse, as did that of his colleagues, particularly Bickerton. By April everybody except Mawson was sick to death with everything, and chiefly with Mawson himself. They had made a great sacrifice in staying behind for Mertz and Ninnis, and lastly for Mawson, but they received no thanks, nor did Mawson give any sign that he felt the least gratitude, quite the reverse: it was Mawson first and the rest nowhere, and he even dropped hints that they might not be paid their salaries. He did nothing himself but eat and he seemed to think that everybody else was equally idle, since he was constantly suggesting things for them to do, yet the more one did for him the more he grumbled.
The imputation that Bickerton shared Madigan’s extremely negative feelings toward Mawson is not borne out by Bickeron’s biographer, Stephen Haddelsey, who categorically states that “there are no criticisms of Mawson, either real or implied, in Bickerton’s writings.” Another contraindication to Vixere Fortes lies in the fact that Mawson’s diary contains very little criticism of Madigan during the second winter, or evidence of conflict between the men.
By April, however, the seven men marooned in the hut began to face a far graver crisis than any antagonism on the part of Madigan. It had to do with Sidney Jeffryes. The first hint of it emerges in a cryptic single line Mawson wrote in his diary sometime between April 1 and 6: “Jeffryes sat in the batter pudding.”
By the beginning of April, the radio was working splendidly. “Wireless good—but too good, so that jammed out by Australian stations,” wrote Mawson on the 21st. But on May 8, “Wireless last few days nil but very free from static.” The problems continued during the following days. Mawson wondered whether atmospheric disturbances were interfering with transmitting or receiving.
The men had been dreading the onset of May, for along with increased darkness and cold, the winds had averaged their highest velocity of any month during the previous May. At first the winds in May 1913 did not match the blizzards of 1912, but just as much snow fell. Then on May 17 and 18, a shrieking gale set in: over the first twenty-four-hour period, the wind averaged 83 mph, and almost 94 mph on the 18th, with a peak gust of 103 mph.
The hut withstood these blasts, but all seven men were worried that the radio mast would collapse. But it was not the equipment that was the problem. Something was happening to Jeffryes. Mawson’s first acknowledgment of trouble came in a long diary entry on May 26—by far the longest he had written since returning to the hut on February 8:
On evening of 26th I dozed till near midnight, then on coming out, found Jeffryes asleep—had been practically all evening. . . . It was a great pity about the wireless as it was a good night. After waking up he got in only a little before Sawyer went to bed. [On Macquarie Island, Arthur Sawyer was one of the two radio operators, and the agreement was to exchange messages between 8 p.m. and midnight.] Jeffryes stops up all day—goes for tiring walks, etc, and then is not fit to keep an alert watch during the 8 to 12 hours. This is bad management.
Exacerbating the problem was the fact that only Jeffryes knew how to operate the wireless. Bickerton, in charge of keeping the mast up and the guy wires tight, had at best a very rudimentary understanding of how the radio worked.
On June 6, Mawson voiced another complaint: “Tonight Jeffryes goes to bed before midnight when the aurora had died out & calm, said there was some noise, inferring a kind of static in the telephone. I can’t get him or Bickerton to take the subject up scientifically.” Jeffryes’s sleepiness might at first have seemed only a case of depression, a state that all seven men in the hut had to struggle to avoid. But radio contact with the outside world was the most important antidote to the doldrums of another winter, with too much time on the men’s hands and too little real work to do.
On June 8, what all the men feared came to pass. A whirly—one of the sudden, violent, cyclonic gusts that seemed so often to assail Cape Denison—blew away the top section of the radio mast, shattered the middle section, and brought the whole thing crashing to the ground. “Another Black Sunday,” Mawson wrote, alluding to the kindred catastrophe of October 13, 1912, when a similar gust had flattened the north radio mast. “Hope something can be done.” Only thirteen days before Midwinter’s Day, the men had to reconcile themselves to the kind of isolation from the outside world that they had borne through the whole of the previous winter. Almost two months would pass before the mast could be repaired and erected, allowing radio contact to resume.
In the meantime, Jeffryes’s mental state passed beyond the realm of simple depression. The first flare-up, recorded by Mawson on July 7, was deeply alarming:
Last night Jeffryes at the table suddenly asked Madigan to go into the next room (to fight) as he believed that something had been said against him—nothing whatever had. Madigan had mentioned the name of a novel he had read that day The Hound of the Baskervilles and Jeffryes appears to have taken it to be a reference to him. A ridiculous thing, for everybody has felt on the best of terms with him. I stopped the row and he talked it over with Madigan after, but was not very satisfactory. . . .
This morning after breakfast Madigan was filling his lamp with kerosene in the gangway and Jeffryes went out, pushing him. Asked him to fight a
gain, danced round in a towering rage, struck Madigan, rough and tumble. Madigan got a clinch on him, then I had to speak to him and others.
Despite this evidence of extreme paranoia, McLean, the expedition doctor, and Mawson were inclined to minimize the significance of the outburst. “McLean thinks [Jeffryes] is a bit off his head,” Mawson added. “I think that his touchy temperament is being very hard tested with bad weather and indoor life. A case of polar depression. I trust it will go now.”
Instead of going away, Jeffryes’s dementia worsened during the following days. On July 9, Mawson tersely noted, “Jeffryes confides in Bage, makes Bage think he is not all there. Blizzard continues.” The next day:
Jeffryes has been on night watch. He comes to me after breakfast and confides in me that he “went the pace” when he was younger and it left him with a venereal trouble. This trouble has caused him to make seminal emissions of late, he says. Asks me to get McLean to give him poison. This makes me think he surely must be going off his base.
And the day after that, July 11:
Last night Jeffryes spoke to McLean and it seems that most of what he told me re venereal disease was a hallucination. McLean gave him a sleeping draught but could not get him to go to bed. . . .
McLean gave him another sleeping draught this morning and he slept most of the day. Just before dinner he came into my room and said that he “wished we would state clearly all the accusations imputed against him.” This showed him to be still at sea in his mind. I tried to get from him what he supposed we had against him, assuring him that there was nothing but good feeling toward him. At last he ventured that “he could not understand what we meant in referring to the Aurora’s Log.” Later on he “could not see what Capt Davis had to do with the wireless.”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 26