Stockdale left Ricketson, Pitt and McIllree to form another depot on 8 November and pushed on with Carl. They became worn down and separated. Stockdale returned to the depot, hoping to find the missing man there. But despite Stockdale’s frantic efforts to find him, the blacksmith did not turn up for some days. Stockdale, who had been ‘half out of my mind’ with worry, was elated when the smith reappeared. But his relief was soon tempered when he discovered that the three men left at the depot had not been looking after the horses: ‘a serious blow to the success of the expedition—in fact almost jeopardising its safety’.
On 23 November, the party returned to their first depot and were reunited with their three comrades. These three had been troubled with lack of food but, unlike the men at the second depot, they had looked after their horses, so the animals were fresh and ready to work:
I immediately set to work, and within ½ an hour they were all hard at it on a good sized doughboy [a lump of boiled dough] each, the sweetest, they say they ever ate, and full of hopes, and talking about home and friends, and how long it would take to reach them once again. What a weight of anxiety is now off my mind, and how light hearted I feel to see us all together once again, and everyone safe and right. I feel like a new man altogether, for no pen can tell how anxious I have been about the 3 boys left with so little, and for so long a time.
This relief was short-lived. Bad feeling soon set in between some of the party, with rations mysteriously disappearing and mutterings about Stockdale’s leadership. They were facing a 500-mile (800 kilometre) trek, leading their remaining packhorses, and most of the men were now without shoes, their boots having worn away. They soon lost two more horses to the unrelenting heat. Stockdale was now bitterly regretting the tight deadline he had contracted for his expedition:
had I not been bound by time, I could have saved all my horses, and had much easier times now. I am up early and late, and harassed out of my life, but I am going to get the report through at all hazards if my health is spared me . . .
This low point eased and soon they were moving along moderately well and managing to live off the land. But by early December a new challenge arose: they were running out of nails for the horses’ shoes, due to an oversight in the original provisioning. They had to improvise nails from copper rivets. Stockdale complained that this, together with ill treatment of the horses by two of the party, had forced him to add 400 miles (650 kilometres) to his expedition, as they were unable to cross stony ranges with unshod mounts.
On 9 December, they encountered a small group of Aboriginal people who seemed panicked by the presence of the explorers and climbed a steep hill to get away. A few days later they were again forced to keep the horses shod with improvised nails. There was still tension in the group: Mulcahy was malingering and dosing himself with opium. But even in the midst of this, the artistic Stockdale had time to appreciate the beauty around him: ‘Our friends the chattering birds gave us quite a rondelay last night. The bush is full of birds of exquisite note, and as whistlers not to be surpassed.’
Within a few days Mulcahy was acting very oddly: in a delusional state, he disappeared from camp and had to be retrieved. Stockdale resolved to take his drugs away. At this, Mulcahy admitted having stolen scarce supplies and said he was not worthy to be among them. Stockdale wrote that, ‘We all forgave him the wrong he had done us freely and truly,’ but the next morning the opium eater and Ashton, who seems to have been suffering a chronic complaint of some kind, asked to be left at the camp with supplies until a rescue party could be sent back for them. Stockdale was stunned by this collapse of the two largest and strongest of their group, but knew he could not show it for fear of dispiriting the other men.
So the group split again on 22 December, leaving only Stockdale and Ricketson to push on towards the Ord River. By Christmas Day they were still short of their destination. Stockdale wrote:
Our Christmas dinner consisted of doughboys, Johnny cakes and gooseberry jam, and very well it went. We know there are some very anxious thoughts about us this Christmas tide, and [many] eaters of good dinners are wishing all sorts of good luck to us, and the knowledge we are so cared for is cheering in our solitude today.
A few days later they realised they must have unwittingly crossed the upper reaches of the Ord River and were running very low on food. Fortunately they were now in range of Panton and Osmond’s cattle station and shot a stray bull.
We soon had his tongue, heart, kidneys and about 30 lbs of rump and loin cut off, and hide to mend our boots, and, our horses let go, camped and spelled for the remainder of the day, feeling all the better for our grilled steak, which was as tender as chicken. This is our first piece of cattle duffing.
By now they were far into the Northern Territory with ‘no food, no pack horses, no maps, no direction, no certain knowledge, only that we must now travel NE and strike the telegraph, if Providence aids us in keeping up our strength’. They did not know how long it would take them to reach the relative safety of the Overland Telegraph Line and although they were free of scurvy they were weak from lack of food.
On 31 December, they came upon an Aboriginal camp, shared some of their bush tucker and were lucky enough to find a few stray horses in good condition. On New Year’s Day in 1885 they reached Victoria River Station around 500 kilometres south of Darwin: ‘How our hearts jumped! New Years day and New Years fare!’ Stockdale was greatly relieved, not only to be saved but also because ‘we may consider our troubles are more or less over, and fair sailing all the way; and if my health holds out my report will be in time, and I shall be able to send relief to those behind, and all my engagements will have been kept, and a rest fairly earned’.
They were unable to immediately organise a rescue party for the two men left behind but pushed on in high spirits through good country. Both men and horses grew fat and they travelled at a good speed. The expedition reached Spring Vale Station on 11 January and the next day the two exhausted explorers sent telegrams from the nearby Katherine telegraph station.
Stockdale’s journal ends abruptly at this point but the story continues. Searchers sent to rescue the three left at the first depot eventually reached the camp. But McIllree had died before they arrived and Pitt was demented. Carl, a good bushman, seems to have been in reasonable shape. The other two men left much further out at the second depot were never found.
Despite some controversy in the press about the deaths of nearly half of the expedition, Stockdale was generally hailed as another intrepid explorer. He returned to the area the following year and went on to a career as a bushman and sometime artist, as well as collector and dealer in Aboriginal artefacts, including skulls, of the Ngarrindjeri people from South Australia. These ended up in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where they controversially remain today. He was also a showman, exhibiting the items collected on his many travels in his Australian Curios display in 1901. Four years later Stockdale was reported to be broke and ill, with a large family to support. He died in 1919.
ACROSS THE ICE
‘Deeply regret delay only just managed to reach hut.’ With these words Douglas Mawson telegraphed his survival to his fiancee Paquita Delprat. This message is one of history’s great understatements. Mawson endured a punishing and tragic journey from the relative safety of his base camp to the frozen eastern wastes of Antarctica and back again.
The young Mawson was a geologist and lecturer at the University of Adelaide when he first became interested in Antarctic exploration. In 1907, he joined Earnest Shackleton’s two-year attempt on the geographic South Pole, proving himself an outstanding leader, physically tough and mentally resilient. After successfully raising funds for his own polar investigations, in December 1911 Mawson led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition southwards for what would be more than two years in the home of the blizzard.
After almost a year on the ice, in company with British army officer Belgrave Ninnis and Swiss lawyer and champion skier Xavier Mertz, the 30-year-old
Mawson set out on a scientific survey of the almost unknown far eastern glaciers. They left their base at Cape Denison on 10 November 1912. The first five hundred or so kilometres went reasonably well. But then things began to go wrong. There were accidents, minor but irritating ailments and some unsettling incidents. A petrel smashed into the side of one of the sleds. How a seabird came to fly this far into the frozen inland was deeply puzzling. One of the huskies gave birth and devoured its offspring. Not unusual behaviour in the extreme conditions but troubling, especially as they began to hear the ominous sounds of ice cracking deep beneath them.
Around 1 p.m. on 14 December, Ninnis vanished down a 45-metre crevasse that his companions had just safely crossed. Peering into the gloom they could just make out one dead and one dying husky on a ledge. There was no sign of Ninnis and the vital supplies that Mawson had commanded, unwisely as it now turned out, be loaded onto the one sled. They did not have enough rope to descend and so could only call out to their lost companion for five despairing hours. There was only silence from the frigid depths.
Now endangered by the loss of their supplies, including the shelter for that night, the two survivors decided to head back along their trail to Cape Denison. They reached their previous night’s camp where they had left a sled. Mawson used the runners and some canvas to make a temporary tent. They had little food so killed and ate their weakest dog, including the liver. After a few more days’ travel Mawson went snow blind. A whiteout slowed them further as did Mertz’s deteriorating health, probably due to the toxicity of the husky livers they were consuming, as well as hunger and exhaustion. By 5 January, Mertz was losing the skin from his legs and struggling to find the will to continue. The next day he developed diarrhoea and began convulsing.
They travelled unsteadily on for another day with Mawson dragging his disabled companion on the sled. But Mertz’s condition worsened and they had to camp. He began to rave and thrash about, breaking a tent pole. Eventually Mawson could only hold him down. Mertz became calmer but died in the early hours of 8 January.
So heavy were the winds that it was two days before Mawson could get out of the tent to bury the body. Despite his own fading physical condition and feeling ‘utterly overwhelmed by an urge to give in’ he prepared his remaining equipment for a last desperate trek.
Before he had staggered far though, he discovered that the skin was separating from the soles of his feet. He smeared lanoline on the raw new skin and bandaged the bottom of his feet together, all covered with six pairs of woollen socks. Then he took most of his clothes off. The polar sun bathed his decaying body: ‘A tingling sensation seemed to spread throughout my whole body, and I felt stronger and better.’ Despite this, he wrote in his diary that night, ‘My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment.’
He rested for 24 hours or so then managed to push slowly on. Nine days after Mertz’s death and still far from base, it almost ceased to matter when Mawson fell through the lid of a crevasse. Fortunately, his cut-down sled became jammed in the gap of the crevasse, leaving him to dangle 4 metres below the surface, spinning slowly at the end of a rope. He managed to drag himself back up but as he was climbing out the snow gave way and he plunged back into the crevasse once more, his fall again arrested by the rope tied between himself and the sled.
Miraculously, the sled remained wedged into the ice above. With bare hands, exhausted, and dangling over a black abyss, he was tempted to slip his harness and end the pain. Instead, he hauled himself up the rope with ‘one last tremendous effort’. This time, the snow at the lip of the newly opened crevasse held and he was able to pull himself onto it. He lay there for an hour, unable to move.
In his tent that night he made a rope ladder he thought would help if he fell into any more crevasses. The next day he did and the crudely fashioned rope ladder saved him from a dark death.
After a bad night of troubled sleep, Mawson resolved to push on and ‘leave the rest to Providence’. He marched doggedly on through a blizzard. Ill and with his hair falling out, he was now 65 kilometres from base and still about 50 kilometres from a cache of food. He came across some emergency supplies left by another party of expeditioners that gave him enough strength to reach the food store—aptly named Aladdin’s Cave—on 1 February. He was snowed in there for five days. When the blizzard cleared he made a last push for the base camp, arriving just as the expedition’s ship, Aurora, sailed away. A small party had been left behind but Mawson would have to wait until the following year before he could be taken home.
Nursed slowly back to relative health Mawson now had to contend with the madness of one of his companions, even while fearing for his own sanity. As the days of their enforced solitude passed slowly by in the howling Antarctic winter, Sidney Jeffryes, the radio operator, became paranoid and aggressive. He was particularly obsessed with Mawson who, as leader, had the unenviable task of managing a delusional companion. Jeffryes would be hospitalised on his return to Australia.
Mawson finally arrived back home in Adelaide at the end of February 1914. On 31 March 1914, Douglas Mawson and Paquita Delprat were married.
Mawson’s 1911–14 expedition was the first to use radio communication from the Antarctic. Valuable contributions to scientific knowledge were made in their exploration of around 6500 icy kilometres. They found new species and collected meteorological and geomagnetic data.
Mawson was knighted and showered with many other scientific honours from around the world. He served in munitions management during World War I and was admitted as an OBE in 1920. Between 1929 and 1931 Mawson returned to the ice. Among other advances, this expedition mapped much of the Antarctic coastline, establishing the extent of the Australian Antarctic Territory. He died in 1958 and has at various times been featured on Australian postage stamps and the hundred-dollar note. His dreadful journey across the ice, not only to save himself but also to tell the fate of his companions, is widely considered to be the greatest epic of polar exploration and survival.
LIFEBOAT NO. 7
The voyage of Lifeboat No. 7 is a tale of mariner skills and perseverance across more than 2000 kilometres of unforgiving South Atlantic Ocean. The hero of the story was a young naval officer from Victoria’s Western District.
Sub-Lieutenant Ian McIntosh was a passenger aboard the merchant ship Britannia out of Liverpool during World War II, in March 1941. Off the west African coast the ship was attacked by the German raider Thor. Outgunned, the Britannia’s captain gave the order to abandon ship and McIntosh found himself and many others desperately launching Lifeboat No. 7 beneath the starboard side of their sinking ship. McIntosh organised some of the men already in the boat to push it off with oars while the European, Goenkar [from Goa], Sikh, Lascar and Madrassa traders making up most of the ship’s complement clambered aboard.
They cleared the sinking ship but with over eighty souls aboard were well over the lifeboat’s limit. They soon discovered that there were more shrapnel holes in the hull than they originally thought and the wooden boat was taking water badly. But with frantic bailing the lifeboat remained afloat as they watched their ship disappear, beneath the waves: ‘Soon Britannia’s forward hold filled, her bows went down and, with her stem vertical, she finally slid under with a great bubble and swirl of water and the last of the steam blowing off with much loose wreckage shooting to the surface . . .’
Lifeboat No. 7 now gathered other survivors and set a sea anchor to keep their damaged craft near the other lifeboats from the lost Britannia. But despite this they soon they drifted apart and were faced with some life or death decisions.
As a child, Ian McIntosh had been fascinated with tales of the sea, particularly the voyage of Captain William Bligh, cast adrift by the Bounty mutineers in 1789. He read all he could about navigation and dreamed of joining the Royal Australian Navy. At that time and at the age of thirteen, the only way of enlisting was as a cadet. But McIntosh missed the deadline for applications and so remained at Geelong Grammar School
until he was 18 when he won a Commonwealth scholarship for the Royal Navy, in England, in 1938. His boyhood reading and subsequent naval training gave him a set of skills and knowledge which complemented his determined nature. This would determine the fate of Lifeboat No. 7 and those aboard.
McIntosh and a small group of others, mostly with naval experience, soon took control of the lifeboat. According to his account, many of the 82 aboard were apathetic and reluctant to assist with their own survival. Although McIntosh did not say how, these men were organised into groups for bailing and other tasks vital to keep the 28-foot vessel afloat.
They had little equipment and less food. There was a small axe, scissors in an inadequate first-aid kit and some blankets. There were 48 tins of condensed milk and some ship’s biscuit but hardly any water. The men in Lifeboat No. 7 were rationed to just one biscuit, a smear of condensed milk on the palm of their hands and an eggcup full of water twice a day.
In the frantic time before launching the lifeboat, they had filled the few shrapnel holes in the hull with cloths. But there was still too much water pouring in and they soon discovered several more serious holes. McIntosh fashioned a number of makeshift patches from empty condensed-milk tins. They still needed to bail but nowhere near as much as before.
The challenge now was to make for the nearest land. Or was it? They were around a thousand kilometres off west Africa but the prevailing winds meant that the waterlogged and over burdened lifeboat would take a long time to get there, if it ever did. McIntosh’s navigational knowledge, together with that of a retired sea captain Bill Lyons among the survivors, now came into play. They realised that the trade winds and sea currents meant that they should steer for South America. That continent was at least 2500 kilometres away. McIntosh calculated it would take them 24 days. Recalling the logs of old sailing ships that he had read and taking account of wind and current, McIntosh found a few scraps of paper and set a westerly course to 33 degrees, at which point he would change to a south-west course to catch the south-east trade winds to the isolated coast of Brazil.
Great Australian Journeys Page 5