Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration

by David Roberts

  After the war, back in Australia, Mawson was promoted to a professorship in geology and mineralogy at the University of Adelaide. He would remain in that position for thirty-one years, until his retirement in 1952. During those years, he inspired generations of protégés in geology and exploration. Mawson’s abiding passion, however, was to get the scientific results of the AAE published. Over decades, he met with one rebuff after another, ranging from team members who failed to produce the reports they had promised to university and government presses unwilling to finance the issuing of the costly volumes. Mawson firmly believed that the expedition itself had had little value unless those scientific reports could see the light of day.

  Some of the reports were written by scientists not on the expedition, using notes recorded in the field and specimens curated at the university, such as Réné Koehler’s esoterically titled Echinodermata Ophiuroidea, a 1922 treatise on starfish. As late as 1943, Mawson himself wrote up a report on the geography and geology of Macquarie Island, based on the thirty-year-old records of Leslie Blake, who, like Bob Bage, had been killed in World War I. Thanks to Mawson’s doggedness, by 1947 twenty-two volumes comprising ninety-six separate scientific reports from the AAE had been published.

  It would take some time for the value of those reports to be appreciated. As Riffenburgh notes, “The scientific goals of early Antarctic expeditions were not to make bold advances in theory, but to establish large databases and build up a corpus of information that would serve as a framework for future knowledge.” In 2003, the scholar Gordon E. Fogg, author of the definitive A History of Antarctic Science, told Riffenburgh that “the Australasian Expedition was easily the most productive scientific effort in the Antarctic before the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58.”

  The drama of the AAE may be forever overshadowed by the expeditions in search of the South Pole prosecuted by Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen between 1901 and 1912. But in 1928, another expert on Antarctic history, J. Gordon Hayes, categorically stated:

  Sir Douglas Mawson’s Expedition, judged by the magnitude both of its scale and of its achievements, was the greatest and most consummate expedition that ever sailed for Antarctica. The expeditions of Scott and Shackleton were great, and Amundsen’s venture was the finest Polar reconnaissance ever made; but each of these must yield the premier position, when fairly compared with Mawson’s magnificently conceived and executed scheme of exploration.

  In 1929 and 1930, Mawson led two more expeditions to the Antarctic. The British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, or BANZARE, would produce its own slew of scientific reports, and would make further discoveries on the southern continent, but a principal motivation for the journeys was to forestall an aggressive thrust by the Norwegians to claim territory that the Australians felt belonged to them, or at least to the British Empire. Captain John King Davis was once again the pilot for the expedition ship on the 1929 voyage, during which he and Mawson fell out so angrily that they stopped speaking to each other, trading notes instead. The quarrel wrote a doleful finis to what ought to have been a lifelong friendship cemented by the two men’s loyalty to each other on the AAE.

  Though BANZARE made significant contributions to the further exploration of Antarctica, by 1930 the heroic age was over. Airplanes had started to reduce the remoteness of the southern continent, and the radio communication Mawson tried so futilely to establish in 1912 and 1913 had become a standard feature of voyages to Antarctica. As a saga of adventure, BANZARE cannot compare to the extraordinary story of the AAE.

  For all the energy and drive that characterized Mawson’s whole career, the desperate trek back to Winter Quarters after Mertz’s death took a lasting toll. In 1976, Eric Webb, by then the last surviving member of the AAE, reminisced about his impressions of Mawson on first meeting with him in New Zealand after the expedition:

  He was still purposeful, but he was a noticeably chastened man—quieter, humble, and I think much closer to his God. . . . I saw he had aged, was worn, had lost much of his hair, and I fear he was never again the same iron man who started on that fateful journey. I am now convinced his terrible sufferings left scars on his physique and his constitution, and that he would have lived a lot longer than he did but for his awesome ordeal.

  For the rest of his life, Mawson was regarded in his home country as the greatest explorer in Australian history. For decades, his face, wearing a balaclava in a Frank Hurley photo, graced the nation’s one-hundred-dollar bill. Today, sadly, there are many young people in Australia who have never heard of Douglas Mawson.

  Some of the AAE members went on to craft distinguished careers, many in academe. Frank Wild and Frank Hurley gained further fame as members of Shackleton’s ill-starred Endurance expedition. Chosen to lead the refugee camp of twenty-one men on Elephant Island while Shackleton set off in an open boat for South Georgia Island, Wild kept the men alive and morale from crashing during their horrendous four-month vigil. On that journey, he became the first man in history to be the veteran of four major Antarctic expeditions. Hurley brought back photos and film footage from the Endurance expedition that were every bit as excellent as what he had shot on the AAE. The publication of scores of those photos in Caroline Alexander’s 1998 retelling of the story, The Endurance, turned the book into a bestseller, and the riveting film footage of the ship breaking up and sinking in the ice anchored the accompanying traveling exhibition organized by the American Museum of Natural History.

  Shackleton has come down to us as the exemplar of leadership and responsibility for his men. But Mawson deserves equal praise in this regard. The men of the AAE, with the exception of Cecil Madigan (and later, a disgruntled John King Davis), maintained a lifelong respect, bordering on awe, for Mawson’s leadership through those two grueling years in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Hurley closed his memoir Argonauts of the South with a tribute:

  No words of mine can do justice to Sir Douglas Mawson, to his judgement in choosing his men, his care for their welfare and the resourcefulness and courage with which he inspired them. Those who lived with him through the long tedious months in the blizzard-smitten South looked up to him not only as a leader but loved him as a comrade and a man.

  Although only seven years Mawson’s junior, Eric Webb wrote in 1976, “To me, when I was a young man in my early twenties, Mawson was already a hero.” Growing up in Lyttleton, New Zealand, Webb as a boy had stood on the dock and watched Scott’s expeditions depart for Antarctica in both 1902 and 1911. At the age of eighty-seven, he looked back and evaluated the three great Antarctic expedition leaders most admired by the English-speaking public:

  [Mawson] was not a Shackleton, nor a Scott—but he was no ordinary leader. Shackleton had a magnetic personality of the kind which is physical rather than intellectual, while Scott was, in the main, a naval martinet with scientific leanings. Mawson was, above everything, an intellectual leader with utter motivation and selfless dedication to his objective which he handed out to all of us in his party. . . . Mawson’s dedication to scientific objectives infused a like spirit into us with the determination to emulate and excel the results of our peers.

  In later years, the surviving Australian members of the AAE would gather annually in Sydney or Melbourne to renew their friendships and reminisce about the greatest adventure of their lives. On hearing that Mawson had suffered a heart attack in 1954, several of the AAE veterans sent him heartfelt testimonies to his role in shaping their lives. George Dovers, who had been the surveyor in Wild’s Western Base party, wrote: “I consider that I was a most privileged person to have had the opportunity as a young man of serving under your leadership. . . . I do not think there is any doubt that the experience and example we had as young men under your command had a most tremendous effect for good on our characters.”

  The biologist John Hunter wrote, “The 1911–14 days will ever take pride of place in my memories, and the example you set in leadership has always inspired me over
the years.” And Charles Laseron testified, “The years 1911–13 are still the chief milestones in my life. . . . I think you would like to know that while writing my three books [including South with Mawson, published in 1947], it is your approbation as our old leader, that I have wanted more than anything else.”

  In September 1958, at the age of seventy-six, Mawson suffered a minor stroke that temporarily affected his speech. As Paquita recalled, “Knowing that he was not remembering words properly, he made himself write them down, copying them from books, carefully writing line after line to aid his slowly recovering memory. His mind was clear and active, and before long he was practically normal in speech.”

  It is not surprising that Mawson spent the last weekend of his life “worrying about some scientific work which he had not been able to finish.” The end was sudden and relatively painless.

  Sunday was a perfect October day and we sat out on the lawn with friends. But on Monday morning Douglas suffered a further stroke which rendered him unconscious and took him from us next day. He died peacefully, surrounded by his family, at 9 p. m. on 14 October 1958, in the house he had planned when he was in the Antarctic.

  The prime minister of Australia arranged a state funeral for Mawson two days after his death. Hundreds of mourners stood outside the church, listening as the bell tolled seventy-six times, one for each year of the explorer’s life.

  Paquita spent six years writing the first biography of her husband. Mawson of the Antarctic was published in 1964. As a biography, it has since been superseded by the works of Philip Ayres and Beau Riffenburgh, but it remains the primary source for many anecdotes and insights into Mawson’s character that only the person who knew him best could divulge.

  In the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, a permanent exhibition celebrates the deeds of Mawson. For the visitor steeped in the story of the AAE, the relics preserved under glass have a powerful numen. Perhaps the artifact that most rivets one’s attention is the half-sledge that Mawson hauled 100 miles back to Winter Quarters after burying Mertz, and that saved his life more than once when it served as an anchor arresting his crevasse falls. A hemp cord, apparently used to lash his belongings atop the sledge, is still tied to the framework. The fenders and runners bear the leather reinforcing strips Mawson improvised on the ice. And the short trunk of the mast across which he spread the sail made of Mertz’s burberry jacket and a cloth bag stands in place. Nearby, the knife—labeled a “Bonsa tool kit”—with which he somehow cut the sledge in half rests on display.

  Another case contains the homemade crampons Mawson jury-rigged out of the wooden pieces of the theodolite case, with the nails and screws he thrust through them still in place. As footgear, these crampons look woefully flimsy, but it is surprising to see how big they are—bigger than any man’s boots, almost the size of mini-snowshoes. Inside the case, also, are the theodolite poles that held up the tent cover Mawson and Mertz slept under in lieu of the tent that had vanished with Ninnis.

  The smallest items bespeak Mawson’s desperate ingenuity: a wooden spoon he carved out of something or other, shaped like a miniature spatula; a single ski pole that Ninnis used; a spade-like shovel made of a flat metal blade bound to a wooden handle with heavy twine.

  The exhibition also recreates, in cutaway cross-section, part of the hut in which the men spent two long years. Mawson’s bunk and office are immaculate, while a pair of other bunks—could they have been part of Hyde Park Corner?—are covered with a reindeer-skin sleeping bag, a pair of finnesko, a pair of fur mittens, a set of beige-colored burberry outerwear, and a crude-looking balaclava with a flap to close the front orifice to the size of a narrow tunnel.

  There are stuffed penguins and petrels, penguin eggs, shelves bearing portraits of the men’s sweethearts, smoking pipes mounted on the wall, old books in leather bindings, the sewing machine with which the men stitched their sledge harnesses, and even the “puffometer” Percy Correll rigged from a metal ball hanging on a chain affixed to a wooden packing case, the device the team used to measure the velocity of the peak gusts of wind. Perhaps the most beguiling of the objects in the exhibition is the doll that Anna Pavlova gave to Ninnis when she came on board the Aurora in London.

  The whole exhibition has the eerie authority of a vanished age—the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Compared to modern gear, all the objects look fragile, even inadequate. How could that sleeping bag, coated with ice from a night’s exhalations, keep a man warm? How could burberry and finnesko have staved off frostbite? How could those books and pictures and pipes have kept the men occupied through an endless winter? How could the hut itself have withstood the blizzards?

  Mark Pharaoh is the Senior Collection Manager of the Mawson Centre, housed in a separate building just behind the South Australian Museum itself. No one living, perhaps, has a deeper grasp of Mawson’s character and career. In a thoughtful rumination in July 2011, Pharaoh summed up his judgment of Mawson as a man and as the leader of the AAE.

  “Mawson had his faults, to be sure,” said Pharaoh. “He was something of a control freak. He paid attention to every single detail, and was not always a very good at delegating chores and responsibilities. He hated waste. He worked too hard himself, and so overemphasized the importance of work for his men. He was not very flexible in this respect.

  “Some have said that Mawson lacked a sense of humor, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. It’s true that he didn’t handle being laughed at very well. On the AAE, he made some mistakes, just as Scott did on his own last expedition. Because he didn’t know how to ski himself, he dismissed the value of skis altogether, so on the expedition only Mertz used them. Amundsen had proved how valuable skis are for travel in Antarctica.

  “As a scientist, he believed that collecting was of prime importance. Theoretically, he wasn’t very open-minded. All his life, he resisted Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, even after his mentor, Edgeworth David, took up the idea. Mawson tended to get locked into a priori paradigms.

  “But look at what he accomplished. In only three years, he essentially went from being a passenger on board the Nimrod to playing a critical role on Shackleton’s BAE, then to becoming the leader of the most ambitious Antarctic expedition of all. His very attention to detail was a virtue in its own right. He was really good at gleaning information by drawing on all the clues that he had at hand.

  “His emphasis on work kept the team together during the terrible winters. By urging the men to go out of the hut in the strongest winds, he tried to keep them from succumbing to apathy and depression.

  “I think he was personally quite modest. Paquita said that he was completely indifferent to fame. Whatever his faults, he cared deeply about the safety and well-being of his men, and he won the lifelong respect and loyalty of virtually all his teammates.

  “And finally, you have to consider the feat of his survival after Ninnis and Mertz’s deaths. There’s nothing else like it in polar history.”

  In 2007, Australian Tim Jarvis decided to try to recreate Mawson’s 300-mile trek from the crevasse in which Ninnis died on December 14, 1912, back to the hut at Winter Quarters, which Mawson finally reached on February 8, 1913. Jarvis was already one of the most accomplished Antarctic explorers of his generation, having set a record in 1999 by sledging solo to the South Pole in forty-seven days, two days faster than any other lone adventurer had performed such a trek unsupported. Jarvis was determined to undertake his 2007 march wearing the same clothing that Mawson and Mertz had worn, using the same equipment, and eating very much the same food.

  The “recreation,” however, was hedged about with loopholes that would make the 2007 journey crucially different from Mawson and Mertz’s race against death. To play the role of Mertz, Jarvis recruited Evgeny Stoukalo, a very fit Russian who was an expert climber, competitive cross-country ski racer, and ex-military officer. Having grown up in Siberia, Stoukalo was accustomed to cold. He would not, of course, be asked to die as Mertz so agonizi
ngly had. Instead, Stoukalo would share the man-hauling with Jarvis for 200 miles or twenty-five days, whichever came first. From that point, he would be “extracted” (Jarvis’s word) by a helicopter that would whisk him off to a modern scientific research station on the coast. After that, Jarvis would go it alone.

  Because, according to Jarvis, “the logistics of travelling over the same ground proved impossible to arrange,” the two men chose to sledge across a part of Antarctica that was 1,600 miles west of Cape Denison as the crow flies. Instead of Adélie Land, Jarvis and Stoukalo would cross Princess Elizabeth Land. Standing in for the hut at Winter Quarters was Davis Station, the principal Australian research facility operating on the continent, manned in summer by a substantial corps of scientists. (The station, which first opened in 1957, had been named after John King Davis, the captain of the Aurora.)

  Jarvis also decided that “To make the project viable, it had to be filmed.” The insertion of a film crew changed the game profoundly. It meant that as Jarvis and Stoukalo sledged across the plateau, a caravan of motorized all-terrain vehicles would chug along on a parallel path, dropping by at regular intervals so that the cameramen could film and interview the recreators. Jarvis and Stoukalo were in radio contact with this armada, which was never far away. The filmmakers in turn received precision weather forecasts from Australia that they shared almost daily with the sledgers. And if any disaster befell the men impersonating Mawson and Mertz, the film crew would serve as an instant rescue service, with the capacity to summon a helicopter within hours.