As if dealing with Jeffryes were not trial enough, Mawson’s own health was still fragile. Hardly a man to complain about his own ailments, he wrote, on July 30:
I appear to be suffering from a mild irritation of the bladder, felt only when feet are cold. My health is very poor. Have been suffering for some days from a large deep-seated inflammation over practically the whole of the right side of my face. The day before yesterday it began to burst as a boil. Now appears to be on the mend. Some teeth want attending to.
Cecil Madigan was going through his own agonies. Although he had gotten word in March from the Rhodes committee, before the wireless ceased to function, that his scholarship would be renewed for the following year, he spent a good part of the winter in a dark funk. In the paraphrase of his son, David Madigan, “He went through many stages of depression, abject and thorough, and was eaten up by inaction and impatience. He felt utterly miserable to see time slipping by and all his hopes miscarrying; he had displeased his mother, who had not wanted him to join the expedition, and brought care and anxiety to Wynnis [his fiancée].” As for Dux Ipse, as far as Madigan was concerned, “Though he could never respect Mawson, for many reasons which he could not put down since one often regretted what was written, he would bear his authority.”
It was Madigan against whom Jeffryes had turned his madness on July 7, demanding that the two go into a separate room to fight after Jeffryes had misinterpreted Madigan’s innocent remark about The Hound of the Baskervilles. According to David Madigan—the anecdote was never reported by Bickerton or Mawson—the day after the “fight” (cut short by Mawson’s intercession), “Jeffryes avoided Cecil but asked Bickerton to be his second in a shooting duel. Bickerton tried to pacify him but he continued talking about shooting so Cecil and Bickerton locked up the firearms and cartridges, which fortunately were in Cecil’s care, since Mawson foolishly saw no need for such action.”
Although there are no passages in Mawson’s diary recording Jeffryes’s threats to shoot his teammates, Cecil Madigan (if his son can be trusted) recalled an atmosphere of almost constant apprehension through the dark, windy days of July, with Jeffryes “walking up and down with a dreadful expression which every now and then he turned separately on each of them.”
He said that if he shot any of them the law would find him innocent, and he made such dreadful threats that they had always to be ready to spring on him. He asked McLean and Mawson for poison and told Cecil that he would sleep a last night in the hut, after which Cecil could shoot him in the morning. . . . He was convinced that they were going to kill him in the night and every now and then sat up to glare about, putting his head through the string of clothes he had hung up in front of his bunk so that no one could see what he did. Someone had always to be awake through the night in case the watchman should call for assistance. Bage and Hodgeman found it difficult to sleep, and Bickerton was horribly nervous.
According to another secondhand source—a friend of Bickerton’s, to whom he told the story after the expedition—one morning in July Jeffryes told his teammates that the night before he had seen Bickerton loading a gun in order to shoot him. Bickerton calmly denied the claim, only to provoke the following exchange:
“Would you swear on the Bible that you did not and will not try to kill me.” [Bickerton] of course said yes bring me a Bible. “Would you swear on your mother’s bible.” Yes if I had it. “Swear by all you ever held truest and dearest.” Certainly I would. “Well even if you did all that I wouldn’t believe you.”
On August 5, after a hiatus of almost two months, the men got the mast up and the radio working. “To Bickerton is due all the credit, he has worked very well of late,” wrote Mawson. That night messages were sent and received, the Macquarie relay forwarding the words to and from Australia. The men were overjoyed at the prospect of continuing contact with the outside world. The only problem was that Sidney Jeffryes was the sole member of the team who knew how to use the radio.
For the first two days, Jeffryes did his job. The news from Australia included the beguiling information that Frank Hurley and Frank Wild were already on the lecture circuit entertaining audiences with the story of the AAE, even though its last chapter had not yet been written. The men in the hut also learned that the name Wild had proposed for the territory explored by the Western Base party, Queen Mary Land, had been accepted by King George V himself. Wild had returned to his native England shortly after arriving in Australia. At the Royal Geographical Society, he was told by three officers that he had committed a “very grave breach of etiquette” in slapping the queen’s name on the territory without first asking for royal permission to do so. This led to an audience with the king, during which a mortified Wild was reassured that both the king and his consort were very pleased with the naming, and that so-called etiquette had nothing to do with it.
Only weeks after returning from the AAE, with all the trials and uncertainties the Western Base party had undergone, Wild was asked by Sir Ernest Shackleton to join his upcoming expedition, which intended to make a complete traverse of Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Shackleton offered his teammate from two previous expeditions to the southern continent the post of second in command. Without hesitation, Wild accepted. On the Endurance expedition from 1914–17, he would play a pivotal role in the adventure that today resonates as perhaps the most legendary of all Antarctic voyages.
In August 1913 at Cape Denison, the newly reestablished radio communication was so precious that Mawson at first forbade the sending or receiving of any personal messages. But on the 8th, only three days after getting the apparatus working again, Jeffryes started to revert to his feckless, lethargic ways, going to bed long before the short evening window for broadcasting had closed. On August 10, when a vital cylinder tap blew out and was temporarily lost as Bickerton fired up the engine, “Jeffryes immediately undressed and went to bed.” The other six men pawed through the snow until Mawson found the tap. By now, Mawson had reached the limit of his patience. Of Jeffryes, he wrote:
He does nothing now a day but cook once in 6 days; of that he makes a bad job. What can be done with him I can’t imagine, for if I try to get him to keep up to scratch, his miserable temperament is liable to cause trouble in sending [messages]. He takes the crystal out of the setting each evening so that nobody else can use the instruments. I certainly feel like skinning him, but will wait another day and see how things go.
Without the crystal, the radio was inoperable. Removing it and hiding it from his teammates seem to indicate that Jeffryes had incorporated contact with the outside world in his paranoid delusions about persecution by the “others.”
During the next week, Jeffryes made a half-hearted show of trying to send and receive, but he spent nearly all his time in his bunk. In the radio log, he jotted down short and unreliable notations of his efforts. “No sane man could surely act as he does,” Mawson wrote on August 11. “I would certainly expel him from the expedition but for the fact that we could then no longer call upon him to operate the wireless. Nobody else is proficient in ‘sending.’ ”
The radio log, which has been preserved, forms a blunt testament to Mawson’s frustration. Even on a day when Jeffryes tried to work for four hours straight, his own annotations document nothing but futility:
8/am Called Mq I. No response
9:15/am Called Mq I. No response
9:20/am Jambing [sic] & Static at McQ I
9:40/am Called Mq I. No response
The notations continue for ten more lines, ending at 11:58 a.m. Every one reads either “Called Mq I. No response” or “No signals audible.”
There are at least four ways to interpret these annotations. The most charitable, but the least likely, is that something was indeed interfering with transmission, and that Jeffryes accurately recorded signals sent without an answer from Macquarie. A second theory would suggest that in his madness, Jeffryes no longer knew how to send wireless messages. A third is that the communicatio
n was working fine, and Macquarie was sending back genuine responses, but that Jeffryes’s paranoia prevented him from sharing their content with his teammates. A fourth explanation is the saddest of all—that the messages sent back from Macquarie, though perfectly coherent, were unintelligible to a man who had lost his mind.
All the while, Bickerton was attempting to master the craft, so that he could take over Jeffryes’s job. But even for that master tinkerer, working the radio proved baffling.
Throughout the month of August, Mawson tried to nurse Jeffryes through the essential transmitting and receiving. He drew up a contract specifying duties and made the man sign it, only to have to tell him days later that he was failing to live up to it. No amount of haranguing seemed to jolt Jeffryes out of his passive uncooperativeness. Some evenings the radio could pick up stray messages from afar—ship’s signals, even radio stations from Australia and New Zealand. But even these Jeffryes sabotaged. On August 27, “At midnight press was coming through well with short intervals of a minute or so breaks. He altered the gadgets so that nobody could listen, and jumped into bed.”
On September 1, Jeffryes’s madness seemed to take a new twist:
Before dinner Jeffryes came to me when in work-room and said that he would have to send a message to Australia that the Hut was being made too hot for him. Complained in a dazed sort of way of banging on the wall. Rambled on. Quite bug again. During evening seemed quite at sea with the wireless. . . . What is it? Is Jeffryes fooling us?
And the next day:
Jeffryes is quite off. Tells me that he and I are the only two not mad—though has some doubts about Hodgeman. He starts to put spikes in his boots, says that he is going sledging. Says he and I must start sledging. Says the others are making it too hot for us. Says he is sorry he could not get the message through last night apprising the world that we are all mad. Says he will try tonight.
September 1, nonetheless, was a red-letter day for the men. “A new month and 100 days to the coming of the Aurora!” McLean gloated in his diary. A pickup date of December 9 or 10 was of course only arbitrary; depending on the condition of the ice in Commonwealth Bay, it might prove too early in the summer to bring the ship close to shore. But the men needed a date to fix their hopes upon. Even Mawson could not resist marking the new month with a joyous prediction: “100 days to ship’s arrival!”
Now more than ever, communication with Australia seemed vital to keep up the men’s morale. But Jeffryes thwarted every attempt. On September 3, Mawson watched the radio man’s behavior with a mixture of puzzlement and rage:
This evening Jeffryes sending a lot of stuff at a high rate, not looking at message part of time. McLean detected several words not on the message he had before him. He was going hard for almost half an hour. I felt certain he was sending something of his own which he did not wish us to know of. He sent very fast so that we could not read it.
Unable to bear Jeffryes’s impertinence, Mawson ordered him into his private room, where he bluffed him with the accusation that McLean, looking over his shoulder, had read everything he had sent. A “very contrite” Jeffryes admitted that he had been trying to get out a kind of SOS, warning the outside world that five of the men in the hut were insane. “Once more I exacted a verbal promise from him to send exactly what I gave him,” Mawson wrote, “but I fear it will be of little use.”
Sure enough, the next day Jeffryes came to Mawson and “wished all wireless to cease, as he said it only brought trouble.” When Mawson threatened to replace Jeffryes with Bickerton, the man relented and promised to continue with his job. “Has been walking about and glaring all morning,” Mawson noted.
Mawson vowed to relieve Jeffryes of his duties on September 8, but changed his mind, mainly out of exasperation, for Bickerton had learned only how to send the most basic of messages, and he could not be sure they got through to Macquarie Island. On the 9th, Jeffryes simply sat in front of the wireless, “eyes closed, head on hand. I rouse him twice to call up. He calls but does not try to receive. . . . It is madness to let a lunatic humbug us like this.”
The radio log for early September reads once more as a record of utter futility: “Sept. 3: Nil,” “Sept. 4: Nil.” Some of the entries seem to be code words designed to verify contact with Macquarie: “Febrile. Ralph. Nine,” “Festa. Rondo. Nine.” On the 8th, Mawson suspected Jeffryes of sneaking in a personal message, and the log, in Jeffryes’s handwriting, bears out the suspicion: “To Norma Jeffryes. . . . Wire at once how mother much love to all. Sid.”
As the days grew longer, Mawson insisted on carrying out further scientific work. The men made forays from the hut to gather specimens of rock to be analyzed back in Australia. (Ever the geologist, Mawson filled his diary with notes such as “Red granites, some much more porphyritic than others; some show no evidence of metamorphism and may be younger than the red and grey granite gneisses so abundant.”) The men scrupulously kept up their records of weather and magnetism. And when the ice in the bay began to break up, they went out on excursions to search for marine life.
On September 14, Mawson relieved Jeffryes of his radio duties. Bickerton tried to take over, but the result was a failure. Two days before, Mawson had typed out a formal letter to Jeffryes, castigating him for his “eccentric behavior” and warning him that “should any further breach of faith on your part be discovered you will be held responsible on arrival in Australia.” He also threatened to withhold Jeffryes’s expedition salary if any such “breach of faith” could be proved. And he raised the specter of having the man prosecuted in criminal court in Australia.
None of these threats penetrated Jeffryes’s madness. His hygiene had once more become an uncomfortable issue, to the extent that “Does not even empty rears”—i.e., he apparently soiled himself regularly. On September 21, Jeffryes wrote another letter to Mawson, complaining indignantly about his treatment at the hands of McLean, Madigan, Bickerton, and Bage, who, he insisted, “for 3 months [have] diligently been endeavouring to send me insane by endeavouring to [?] my feelings by very subtle means & disturbing my sleep at every opportunity.” In the letter, he accused Mawson of worse: “I have been continuing my duties for the past two weeks under the influence of a hypnotic spell under which you have found it incumbent upon you to place me to avert a calamity.” Jeffryes offered once more to resign. And he threatened to “take provisions and take up my quarters in a tent apart from these four persons.”
In his paranoia, Jeffryes planned a real physical escape from his tormentors. “He states that [he is] getting ready for sledging,” Mawson noted on September 20. “Asks Bage for pemmican, spends part of afternoon looking around outside and digging for pemmican. Asks Hodge[man] how many dog harnesses there are, etc.” There were moments, however, when Jeffryes seemed to rally. “He speaks moderately rationally at dinner,” Mawson wrote on September 22. But only moments later, “Plays gramophone after dinner. McLean says to him when playing (gramophone) a weird thing: ‘I never can understand that piece.’ Jeffryes immediately packs his things, turns the sennegrass [boot insulation] out of its bag in next room, puts his clothes in, tells Dad [McLean] that he is moving.” Calling his bluff, Mawson waited in his private chamber for Jeffryes “to come and say goodbye to me.” But Jeffryes could not go through with it. Two hours passed after his threatened departure. “After standing at the verandah door for some time he returned and later went on with the wireless.”
As spring gradually dawned on the southern continent, the men kept up a lookout for signs of animal life. On September 19, McLean made the startling discovery of a sea leopard lolling on an ice floe not far offshore. Mawson ordered all the men out of the hut to hunt the great prey, which Madigan dispatched with a rifle. The party loaded the sea leopard on a sledge and hauled it back to the hut. There they found Jeffryes, who had ignored the order to join the hunt, and whose duty it was to fix lunch, stuffing himself with food while making no effort to prepare a meal for his teammates.
The same da
y, Mawson “saw white worm-like creatures on the bottom of the bay”—a minor biological discovery, but one more sign of returning spring. The men started dredging the patches of open water for crustaceans and worms, and laid crab traps. McLean and Bickerton made a wager: “First one to bring a penguin to the hut gets 25 cigars back in Australia.”
On September 24, Mawson wrote hopefully, “Jeffryes seems better today.” But the very next day, matters again came to a head:
Jeffryes calls up several times but does not bother to listen, sits without receiver on his head. . . . I look out 10 minutes after to find Jeffryes standing in front of fire having abandoned the wireless altogether believing me asleep. . . . I call him a something mongrel and have it out with him. He has no defence, says it is all due to the way four of the men treat him.
At that moment, Jeffryes handed Mawson the letter he had written on the 21st, with its “written statement of resignation. . . . I tell him he is in charge of the wireless no longer and that he has nevertheless to stand by in case he is wanted.”
Through the next nine days, Jeffryes lent a hand on occasion when Bickerton, Bage, and Mawson could not make the radio work, but his efforts were as useless as before. It was not until October 4 that Mawson formally fired Jeffryes. In another typed letter, he warned Jeffryes against making any public accusations against his teammates when he returned to Australia. But he took a certain pity on the madman, promising to pay him “for time served.”
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 28