At last Mawson had to acknowledge that Jeffryes’s mental instability went far beyond “polar depression.” On the 12th, the paranoia reached a new depth:
Jeffryes came to me in the anteroom and talked at length. He believes that every word we utter is an imputation against him, and keeps referring to a “judge and jury business”. . . .
He said once that the whole trouble arose through McLean analysing his urine and deducing from that things against his past. McLean never of course had anything to do with his urine.
On the same day, Madigan discovered that Jeffryes had been collecting his own urine in jars that he placed on the shelf above his bunk.
Jeffryes was not the first Antarctic explorer to be stricken with insanity during an overwintering. As mentioned in chapter four, on the Belgica expedition of 1897–99, the two team leaders, Adrien de Gerlache and Georges Lecointe, gave up on life and took more or less permanently to their beds. But theirs was a passive craziness, threatening the rest of the team only because they abdicated their leadership. Jeffryes’s madness was more ominous, for in his paranoia he promised to become an active menace to the six men marooned in the hut with him.
On July 17, Mawson wrote, “Jeffryes continues to be a trouble. . . . Says we will all be put in gaol on arrival in Australia for contemplating murdering him. Looks bad at times and might become violent, so always have somebody watching him.” The strain of enduring the darkest, coldest part of the winter without radio contact with Australia, exacerbated by Jeffryes’s madness, took its toll on Mawson, still weak both physically and psychologically. That same day, he confessed, “Last night I felt almost at my limit, my brain felt to be on the point of bursting.”
The men’s enforced leisure, however, found a stimulating outlet in a new project. Chiefly the brainchild of Mawson and McLean, The Adelie Blizzard was to become an in-house newspaper (though effectively a magazine), written by the various members and typed up by McLean, who would serve as editor. The precedents were obvious: Scott’s first expedition from 1901–04 had produced the South Polar Times, and Shackleton’s BAE from 1907–09 had manufactured a veritable book, called Aurora Australis. Mawson had contributed a bizarre science fiction fantasy, “Bathybia,” to the latter work. In fact, expeditions producing periodicals during polar overwinterings can be traced back to the New Georgia Gazette, a weekly printed on shipboard in the winter of 1819–20 as a team led by William Edward Parry, attempting the Northwest Passage, lay ice-bound in the Arctic north of Canada.
The Adelie Blizzard had two purposes. First and foremost, it was to occupy the time of the men waiting out the winter, and to entertain them with all kinds of inside jokes and parodic whimsies about their hut-bound life. But Mawson also hoped to publish the collected issues upon the men’s return to Australia, just as Scott had arranged the publication of the South Polar Times in London. Between April and October five issues of The Adelie Blizzard appeared, filling a total of 217 pages.
The deadline for articles for the first issue was April 23. With handwritten copies on his tabletop, McLean laboriously typed up the pieces on the expedition’s battered Smith Premier typewriter. He had a small supply of ribbons, some in different colors. The paper had been supplied by a pair of stationers, one in England, one in Australia. Alfred Hodgeman, the architect, designed the intricate title headings.
Since the articles were published without attribution, it is difficult to determine today who wrote what. Not all the men were equally keen to contribute. According to the editors of a modern facsimile edition published in 2010, “Madigan showed little enthusiasm, and Bickerton apparently had to be nagged to contribute.”
The mock-formal tone of the newspaper (as Mawson insisted on calling it) was struck at once, in a line directly beneath the title: “Registered at the General Plateau Office for transmission by wind.” The first issue contained seventeen pieces, ranging from relatively straight history (“Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition”) to fanciful poems and essays (“Ode to Tobacco,” “The Evolution of Women”). For all the frivolity of the production, the April issue opened with an “In Memoriam” poem dedicated to Mertz and Ninnis. It closed:
“Could we but greet thee, comrades of our heart,
What warmth of human kindness were our speech!”
Were we happier, then? Better were Faith—
Fragrant the knightly flower of beauteous youth—
Then had we said:—“Nobler to have won the fight,
Wresting the prize of thrice-hard duty, wrought
Amid the chilling wastes of pathless snow!”
With the first lines of the editorial on the facing page, however, the Blizzard strikes a humorous note. Under the heading “Marooned,” the writer compares the seven men’s situation to that of Robinson Crusoe: “This somewhat lugubrious title describes the present state of ‘society,’ so far as we are concerned.” He goes on to minimize the tribulations of winter in the hut, declaring, “We are surrounded with most of the advantages of civilization, and even if there is none of the gay tinsel of the Comic Opera, we may discover, living in this misguided climate, the vein of humour which has always taught Britishers to laugh at misfortune.”
Except for the opening “In Memoriam,” the poetry in the Blizzard is unabashed doggerel. Thus a stanza from “Ode to Tobacco,” about the condition of team members addicted to the weed:
How they go down at heels,
Too tired to take their meals,
Meager as Weddell seals,
Silly as rabbits.
How their glances grow oblique,
Matches they all learn to sneak,
Hyde Park Corner!—What a reek!
Horrible habits.
Or the opening of “Sledging Song”:
An explorer’s life is the life for me,
O’er the ice to roam—a life so free.
O’er snow-field wide and barrier wall
With comrade true the sledge we haul.
Some of the articles in the Blizzard were serious, and patently intended for the public audience Mawson and McLean hoped eventually to attract. Mawson’s own four-part “The Commercial Resources of Antarctica” expounds at length, and with no irony, on the huge potential for whale-hunting, mining, oil exploration, and the like that formed a major part of the motivation for the AAE in the first place. “Mining in the vicinity of an accessible landing should not offer great difficulties,” he wrote, gazing into his crystal ball. And despite the terrible ordeal he had recently survived, he added, as if writing advertising copy for the continent, “The climate is healthy. Food stuffs keep indefinitely anywhere in the great natural refrigerator.”
Yet other entries were so arcane and in-joke-ish as to remain opaque to any reader not on the expedition. A notice in the June issue, under the rubric “Gleanings,” purports to define “championship”—the cry that echoed through the hut whenever someone committed a foolish mistake or act of unintentional comedy:
A championship is a grave misdemeanour usually accompanied by an audible crash, though, in a subtler sense, it may be unwittingly and silently performed on the stillest of still nights. The defaulter may be a nervous person, or the most blatant and adamant of citizens. The definition is necessarily elastic enough to include anything from the dislodgement of a roof-garden to the destruction of an anemometer.
One of the most delightful pieces in the Blizzard is “An Adelian Alphabet,” which begins:
A is Antarctic where I’m writing this rot,
B is our Bay; a more definite spot.
C is the Cold which tries to frost-bite you,
D is the Drift which we find here “in situ.”
Yet even in this poem, it would have required an insider’s knowledge to detect the dig at Mawson’s strict budgeting of personal radio use in this couplet:
M are the Messages others must spurn,
For N is the Nothing they send in return.
Mawson and McLean had no illusions about the literary qu
ality of The Adelie Blizzard. Yet read at the distance of a century from its composition, the newspaper opens an intimate window on daily life in the hut during the winter of 1913—at least, on the lighter side of that life. (But for the opening “In Memoriam,” there is no allusion in the Blizzard to Ninnis and Mertz’s deaths, and no comment whatsoever on Mawson’s incredible survival story.) Likewise at the distance of a century, the five issues bespeak the high level of competence in writing that was taken for granted among university-educated men in Edwardian times, and that today’s expeditions would be hard put to match. It takes considerable wit and skill, after all, to produce rhyming, metrical doggerel of any sort.
In the introduction to the 2010 facsimile edition of The Adelie Blizzard, Elizabeth Leane and Mark Pharaoh cogently analyze the functions the newspaper served for the men stuck in the hut through a second winter. “The most obvious was the alleviation of boredom,” they write.
But a newspaper was not only a good antidote for individual depression. It was also a way of dealing with group dynamics. Its production was a team activity, and the sharing of its contents encouraged group cohesion. . . . It could also act as a form of debriefing, in which trying aspects of expedition life could be dealt with comically, and feelings that might otherwise have been interpreted as complaints or whining could be expressed and shared. . . . In addition, by allowing the men gentle digs at each other, the newspaper provided a release-valve for simmering tensions.
As winter modulated into spring, McLean found it more and more stressful to put out issues, and they slipped from monthly to bimonthly. As if trying to hurry the seasons through wishful thinking, he headlined the August issue “Spring,” the October issue “Summer.” In his own diary on October 25, 1913, having put to bed the last of the five issues, he reported that he was “glad there’s no more to be done!”
After the expedition, to both men’s disappointment, Mawson and McLean failed to find a publisher for The Adelie Blizzard. Today, the sole original copy is one of the most prized possessions of the Mawson Centre in the South Australian Museum in Adelaide.
Desperate for exercise and for temporary escape from the hut, the men devised various activities. A favorite pastime was racing down the snow slope west of the hut, with the men sitting on packing-case lids. “We had some really exciting slides down an almost sheer drop of thirty feet,” wrote McLean, “ending in great drifts of snow out of which we could pick ourselves, only to climb up some steps cut with an ice-axe and start again. . . . It is quite the best sport I have had for a long time.”
The men also played football (soccer) in the snow, and tried once more to master the art of skiing, this time without the tutelage of the expert, Xavier Mertz. When the weather allowed, the men took walks around the shores of Commonwealth Bay. Discovering a novel sight, Bickerton declared, was “like a new kind of drink when you are thirsty!”
The weather, however, did not often permit such larks. The “home of the blizzard” lived up to the ominous reputation it had earned the previous year. During the entire month of July, the wind averaged 63.6 mph, a new record, surpassing the 61 mph of May 1912. No amount of activities or distractions sufficed to cure the general anomie that pervaded the hut. Despite his tireless efforts to produce The Adelie Blizzard, McLean suffered deep funks. On June 4, he wrote in his diary, “I must say I felt very lonely today.” And the next day, “It is very difficult to keep the diary going at times. It seems to one like the same old repetition.”
Hovering over everything was Jeffryes’s madness. It was exacerbated by his personal slovenliness, so that his body odor started to disturb the others. “I spoke to him sharply last evening,” Mawson wrote on July 18, “telling him to keep himself and his bunk clean. Had the darkroom prepared for a private washing chamber for him. It seems to have sunk in, for today he has washed out some of his clothes.” Two weeks later, however, “He seems to have no interest in life. Eats ravenously, lies in his bunk all day dirtying books. Never offers to help anyone. . . . Several times I have told him to have a bath. He washed more clothes but did not have a bath.”
Jeffryes’s hygiene issue came to a head in August, in a way that seemed almost grotesque. On the 12th, Mawson noted in his diary, “At ten to 1 pm Jeffryes appeared. It appears that when we all went out Jeffryes had a hurried bath—how much of his body nobody knows, but everybody is decided that the canvas bath will now want disinfecting.”
On July 13, in his distress, Jeffryes had written Mawson a letter:
Sir,
You have been previously forewarned that you were almost on the eve of a dastardly murder. I have found it impossible to make you believe that I am in a perfectly normal state of mind.
What Jeffryes, in his delusional state, meant about “murder” is fleshed out in an even more bizarre letter that Jeffryes wrote the same day to his sister in Australia (though how he hoped to send it remains a mystery):
I am to be done to death by a jury of six murderers who are trying to prove me insane originating from the jealousy of six of them. . . . They . . . have insinuated the most outrageous and dastardly things against me all on Dr. McLeans evidence & surmise. . . . My services to this expedition have found their reward in death. . . . Farewell to all. I am unable to prevent their folly and so must die a martyr to their bloody mindedness.
The day after being reprimanded about keeping himself and his bunk clean, Jeffryes wrote another letter to Mawson:
I did not come down here to foment trouble. I have done my duty by the expedition . . . in the face of all obstacles led to the absurd jealousy of Madigan & others. . . .
My constitution is absolutely unimpaired & McLean’s charge of insanity is ridiculous. My vision is clearer than theirs inasmuch as it is not warped by jealousy.
Mawson did not know what to make of this screed. “It is curiously logical and well-written,” he remarked in his diary. “The only thing is that he starts off on the assumption that we are leagued against him.” The “curiously logical” tone of Jeffryes’s utterances led the other men to hope that he was cured. On July 20, McLean was “overjoyed to find that Jeffryes had almost recovered.”
July 20 was also Jeffryes’s twenty-eighth birthday. Normally, a man’s birthday became the occasion for a special dinner with toasts and joke presents, an interlude all the more welcome in 1913 with only seven men in the hut. But with Jeffryes in such a terrible mental state, Mawson was at a loss to craft a celebration. The result, as recorded in Mawson’s diary, sounds lugubrious:
I had intended to cook as I had taken over his work entirely. However, he got to work and McLean suggested leaving him at it, so we did. The pudding he made was a revelation in rotten egg and grease. He made a speech in which he spoke clearly and well, but the matter foolish cant like his letters.
During the last few weeks, the men had been struggling during the brief lulls in the nearly constant winds to get the mast reerected and the radio operating again. “Jeffryes helpless in this,” Mawson noted. “Bickerton takes charge of the work.”
On July 27, Jeffryes offered Mawson a written declaration: “I am now reluctantly obliged to tender my resignation as a member of this expedition as I am unable to carry on owing to the bellicose attitude shown to me by the other members. I have already stated that my health is perfect & my character irreproachable.” This letter prompted Mawson to address the whole team about the radio operator’s state. In the awkward meeting after dinner on the 28th, Mawson “pointed out the impossibility of resigning, as there was no accommodation, food, or Antarctic clothing that was not the property of the expedition.” Speaking of Jeffryes in the third person, even though the man sat at the table with the others, Mawson added, “What I desire is that he shall recognise that he was ill for a time and to continue a full member of the expedition, then the matter will be forgotten.”
The words seemed to strike home. Jeffryes “instantly got up and spoke for a long time, apologising for his actions and stating that he was ill and wi
shed everything forgotten. I then stated that we accepted his explanation and things were to go on as they had 2 months previously.”
Yet any hope that the group meeting might have ameliorated Jeffryes’s condition was quickly dashed. The very next day, Mawson recorded, “Jeffryes makes no attempt to do anything.” And the day after that, “Jeffryes writes me another letter. He interjected again at breakfast and is evidently ‘bug’ again. I have great difficulty getting him to go out in the sunshine for a few minutes. No attempt to help anybody.” In that letter, Jeffryes wrote, “I deeply regret having made such calumnious remarks & statements,” but in the next breath threatened to bring lawsuits against all his teammates once he returned to Australia.
The six men stranded in the hut with Jeffryes—even McLean, who had studied medicine at the University of Sydney and who served as the team’s doctor—had virtually no comprehension of mental illness. They knew well the stories of insanity breaking out on the Belgica and other Antarctic expeditions, but attributed those breakdowns only to the vague condition they called “polar depression.” Very little is known of Jeffryes’s life before the AAE, and it is impossible to diagnose the poor man at the distance of a century. Yet the delusions, the extreme paranoia, the alternation of surrender and aggression, the terror of annihilation interspersed with grandiose pronouncements, even the periods of relative lucidity, all hint at some kind of psychosis. It is possible that a latent vulnerability came to the fore under the intense stress of wintering over in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. In view of Jeffryes’s young age, however, and the subsequent course of his life after he returned to Australia, it may be that the psychotic break at Cape Denison heralded the onset of incurable schizophrenia.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 27