To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  Notwithstanding his cautionary words to David, Mawson was not beyond risk-taking himself. Indeed, he seemed to relish such exploits more than David, for whom they seemed mostly a matter of doing his preordained duty.51 This facet of Mawson’s character developed early and never wavered. Upon his high school graduation, his headmaster reportedly said, “What shall we say of our Douglas as an acknowledged leader and organizer? This I will say—that if there be a corner of this planet of ours still unexplored, Douglas Mawson will be the organizer and leader of an expedition to unveil its secrets.”52 Late in life, Mawson reportedly affirmed, “I worship God through nature,”53 and, for him, this nature demanded risks to worship it. Men with him would die in this quest, and twice he barely survived. For Mawson, it was never a conventional Christian faith but more an austere Stoic philosophy imbued, as it was for David, with a profound sense of providence. When leading his own Antarctic expeditions, Mawson read to his men from Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic Meditations, which places humans squarely within the natural cosmos and gives them meaning through it. “No religion, not even Christianity, could circumscribe [Mawson’s] God,” his biographer observed.54

  A top student, Mawson was embarrassed by his father’s failings in business, which forced his mother to take in boarders. Driven to better himself, he entered the University of Sydney in 1899 to study mining engineering and, coming under David’s sway, stayed on to earn a second degree in geology. His passion became fieldwork, with a particular interest in glacial geology, but never to the exclusion of looking for mineral deposits and mining sites. While still a student, Mawson helped to survey the iron-rich Mittagong region southwest of Sydney and later was the first to identify and describe a commercially viable uranium-bearing mineral in Australia. He named it Davidite in honor of his former professor. Soon he was also trekking in the Snowy Mountains.

  In 1903, even before Mawson completed his geology degree, David recommended him to serve as the geologist for the first British scientific expedition to the New Hebrides Islands. This volcanic island group, now called Vanuatu, with mountains over 6,000 feet high, rises in the South Pacific roughly 1,600 miles northeast of Sydney. “Although the existence of the New Hebrides has been known to Europeans for 300 years,” Mawson wrote in his report, “yet on account of the extreme hostility of the natives, and the prevalence in many parts of malaria of an acute type, this group long remained a Terra Incognita.”55 At least it suited him to see it that way.

  While by 1900 Presbyterian missionaries had converted most of Vanuatu’s native people to Christianity, some interior parts of the outer islands had not yet been visited by Europeans. Mawson was warned that head-hunting was still practiced in some regions, and himself wrote of the archipelago’s second largest island, “The Natives of Malekula are the most uncertain of any inhabitants in the Group, having not yet abated from cannibal habits.”56 Despite the risks, he traveled widely surveying the rock strata and looking for minerals, first with armed guards but, as he grew more comfortable, alone or with local guides. He found lofty mountains that he attempted to climb, dense jungles that he crossed, and rugged countryside that he mapped. Nothing deterred him.

  Once, in a particularly remote location, while he was knocking off a rock sample with a hammer, a sharp sliver struck his leg and lodged below his kneecap. As he and two guides paddled his skiff back to the survey ship for thirty-six hours without stopping, Mawson’s leg became badly infected. “For Douglas each movement was agony, especially when he was rowing and had to bend his injured knee,” his wife later reported. “His leg became puffed, red and then blackish up to the groin. He had all his life a stoic attitude toward pain: if nothing could be done to help, one just bore it.”57 Nearly unconscious when he reached the ship, Mawson was told that the leg should be amputated, but the infection abated after the knee was opened and drained. Two weeks later, he was back in the field. Mawson never even mentioned the incident in his field notes or diary, which simply and otherwise unaccountably jump from entries made before the accident to ones about his next excursion. As much as possible, he ignored adversity.

  Mawson’s New Hebrides exploits became the stuff of local lore in Sydney, at least among his classmates at the university. In those years, University of Sydney students celebrated graduation with a rowdy procession through town. “As on former occasions,” a local newspaper reported about the festivities for the year that Mawson received his geology degree, “the various schools tried hard to outrival each other in grotesque make-up, in the methods of vehicular transit, and in their powers to make the most hideous noises.”58 Geology’s float featured the 6-foot-3-inch-tall Mawson in Polynesian garb boiling a howling missionary in a large pot. If these accounts are accurate, then they reflected an aspect of Mawson’s character that would appeal to Shackleton’s lighter, sometimes ribald side. “He was a dear old chap,” one of his Australian classmates said of Mawson, “serious as a rule but had a good sense of humour.”59

  By the time Shackleton reached Adelaide in 1907 on his passage to Antarctica, Mawson was living there as a university lecturer in mineralogy. David had helped him get the post. Despite being in the first year of his teaching position, Mawson asked Shackleton if he could go along. “In South Australia I was face to face with a great accumulation of glacial sediments of Pre-Cambrian age, the greatest thing of the kind recorded anywhere in the world,” Mawson later explained. “So I desired to see an ice age in being.”60 By this point, however, Shackleton was inundated with applications. He gave Mawson the usual reply: no. It was only after Shackleton reached Sydney and David intervened on Mawson’s behalf that a way opened. Shackleton then invited Mawson to join the expedition as its physicist, one of the few available positions. He would be responsible for astronomical, meteorological, and magnetic observations. Mawson lacked training in any of these fields, but that apparently did not bother Shackleton. It certainly did not deter Mawson, who was willing to serve the British Antarctic Expedition in any scientific capacity. Drawn by the allure of adventure and the chance to see an ice age in being, he accepted Shackleton’s terms, and a polar star was born.

  Chapter 4

  The Great Game

  ON DECEMBER 20, 1907, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society feted the Duke of the Abruzzi in a Glasgow ceremony that helped to launch his 1909 assault on the world’s highest accessible mountain. With the thirty-four-year-old duke already a global celebrity for his multiple feats, a reception committee composed of landed aristocrats, middle-class professionals, and local officials chose to highlight his 1903 polar expedition. “The fact that your Royal Highness has penetrated nearer the North Pole than any other explorer will at all times—whether or not the final goal be ever reached—count amongst the greatest achievements ever accomplished,” the society’s official address to the duke declared.1 Never mind that he was not part of the expedition party that actually set the mark, such was the enthusiasm engulfing farthest-north and -south records during the Edwardian era that a leading geographical society could depict setting one as among the greatest achievements of all time.

  What could be next, those in attendance breathlessly asked the duke. What could top the North Pole? The duke was first and foremost a mountaineer, and his response was telling: an altitude record in the Himalayas, the so-called Third Pole.2

  Just as farthest norths and souths had become the rage during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe and America, mountaineering and first ascents of notable peaks were highly esteemed. These fashions carried over into the early twentieth century. It was part of a cult of extreme adventure linked to the wealth and leisure flowing from industrialization; a Darwinian sense of struggle against nature; and eased access to once-remote locales due to imperial conquest, steamships, railroads, and telegraphs. Accordingly, in addition to hailing his polar exploits, the Scottish Geographical Society’s 1907 address to the duke expressed “unqualified admiration” for his “efforts to conquer the summit of Mount Kangchenjunga” in Asi
a, his “splendid achievement in scaling the peak of Mount Elias in Alaska,” and his “ascent of the Ruwenzori Range” in equatorial Africa.3 These were achievements of the age, and, while they set the duke apart from the average aristocrat in what he actually did, they were typical of what an increasing number of wealthy Europeans and Americans sought to do.

  As with the duke, so too for modern sport mountaineering generally, the style was set in the European Alps and radiated out to ever more far-flung and challenging peaks. Mountain ranges in general, and the Alps in particular, typically stood as obstacles rather than objectives for travel until the dawn of the Romantic era in the late eighteenth century. Then they became sublime, and soon adventurers wanted to climb them. Earlier mountaineering manuals, if they could be called that, about the Alps were written for travelers crossing the range and thus focused on passes and ways around the steepest parts. No one reached the 15,777-foot-high summit of Mont Blanc, then considered Europe’s highest peak, until 1786, but a crush of climbers followed, though only forty-five parties had made it to the top by 1850. Chamonix, the rustic, remote rural village at its base, blossomed into a tourist destination where mountain guides outnumbered working farmers. It became a popular stop on a cultured visitor’s Grand Tour of the continent.

  In 1787, the pioneering English mountaineer and naval architect Mark Beaufoy, aided by six guides and a servant, made the first ascent of Mont Blanc by a British climber. As customary at the time, he got the credit; they did the work. Three years later, as a twenty-year-old University of Cambridge student, the budding Romantic poet William Wordsworth joined a fellow “pilgrim,” as they called themselves, on a walking tour of Europe that drew them to the place. “From a bare ridge we also first beheld / Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc,” Wordsworth later wrote in a poem titled “Cambridge and the Alps.” “The wondrous Vale of Chamouny stretched far below.” This scene, he observed, “was fitted to our unripe state / Of intellect and heart. With such a book / Before our eyes, we could not choose but read / Lessons of genuine brotherhood.”4 Countless British climbers, writers, artists, and travelers followed, seeking physical challenge, spiritual inspiration, and natural beauty. Their visits captured the growing appeal of mountains and mountaineering.

  Responding in part to Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published “Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” in 1802. Borrowing from Danish poet Friederike Brun’s work on the same subject, Coleridge wrote of “O Sovran BLANC” that “I gazed upon thee, / Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, / Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer / I worshipped the Invisible alone.”5 With Coleridge here extolling the “secret ecstasy” he felt from a mystic identity with Mont Blanc, others flocked to Chamonix for transcendental raptures through viewing, hiking, and climbing. Beginning in the same year, the English artist J. M. W. Turner exhibited a series of dramatic paintings featuring Mont Blanc that further impressed the Alps onto the European cultural consciousness. And unlike earlier generations, by the Romantic era, such works were not made solely for aristocrats and the landed gentry. They reached a growing educated, middle-class audience. Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sun-rise,” for instance, first appeared in a widely read London daily newspaper, the Morning Post.

  Then, in 1816, the married English poet Percy Shelley and his eighteen-year-old lover and future wife, who traveled under his last name as Mary Shelley, toured Chamonix while summering with the poet Lord Byron in Geneva. It was during this unusually wet, cold summer that she conceived and commenced her gothic novel Frankenstein. Percy Shelley, in contrast, was drawn to Mont Blanc and its glaciers. Hiking to one of them during a storm, he exalted, “Lines of dazzling ice occupy here and there their perpendicular rifts, and shine through the driving vapours with inexpressible brilliance: they pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth.”6

  These comments reflected an obsession with ice that both Shelleys shared with an expanding number of nineteenth-century British polar explorers and Alpine climbers. Reflecting this fixation, Mary Shelley framed Frankenstein as a tale related by an Arctic explorer who meets Victor Frankenstein and his Creature on their way to the North Pole, where the Creature plans to destroy itself. “I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft that brought me hither,” the Creature tells the explorer, “and shall seek the most northerly extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame.”7 In the English mind, the North Pole thus became an ultimate destination, but, given nineteenth-century cultural norms, the Creature might as well have sought Mont Blanc’s summit for its self-immolation. Either it or the pole would have equally served Shelley’s artistic purposes.

  For the Shelleys, the Alps were the icebound destination of choice and, within a year of his visit to Chamonix, Percy Shelley penned his famous poem “Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni” in praise of them. “[W]hen I gaze on thee / I seem as in a trance sublime,” he wrote of his trip to the valley. “Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood / By all, but which the wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.”8 The same year, 1817, Lord Byron published the dramatic poem Manfred, which included a melodic, often quoted, and separately reprinted sixteen-line tribute to the mountain. “Mont Blanc is the monarch of the mountains,” it began. “They crowned him long ago / On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, / With a diadem of snow.”9

  By the nineteenth century, mountains had gained meaning in the modern mind beyond what they previously held. In their respective poems, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley related different reactions to viewing Mont Blanc, but each presented his experience as intensely personal and transformational. Innumerable less poetic visitors reported feelings of wonder, awe, or reverence at Chamonix. Of course, such responses to seeing Mont Blanc need not lead one to climb it, but for some they did. Others were simply drawn to the physical challenge or psychological exhilaration of scaling monumental peaks.

  For serious nineteenth-century climbers, who became known as Alpinists for the mountain range where their passion originated, Mont Blanc crowned but one of many massifs worthy of attention. For the most obsessed, the goal became pioneering new and more difficult routes on that or any similarly challenging mountain or, better yet, making first ascents of major unclimbed peaks. The Alps became the playground of Europe, with Zermatt and the Matterhorn region vying with Chamonix and Mont Blanc for prominence. No one in Britain seized on or fed this mountain mania more than the popular satirist, playwright, and entertainer Albert Smith, an impresario for the middle class.

  ON AUGUST 12, 1851, almost on a lark during one of his annual overseas trips, the thirty-five-year-old Smith climbed Mont Blanc, ostensibly because it was there but surely also as fodder for his popular travel commentaries. He was already well known for his articles and one-person shows satirizing Brits abroad and the people they encountered, typically drawing on stereotyped parodies of different nationalities, races, and religions. In his humor, Smith particularly targeted the rich and privileged in a manner that delighted middle-class audiences without offending wealthy patrons. In an earlier, bestselling book, he had defined a “gent” as a presumptuous clotheshorse that anyone could spot by his stylish shawl and alfresco cigar “even if you meet him at the top of Mont Blanc,” so it was only fitting that, when given the chance, he climbed the mountain to fact-check his work.10

  At Chamonix’s chic Hotel de Londres, Smith fell in with three Oxford students intent on climbing the mountain during their summer holiday and, attended by thirty-four guides and porters, they set themselves to the task. The caravan, “for by no other name can I call our company,” one of the students wrote at the time, proceeded by the then-customary route across the heavily crevassed Bossons Glacier to the Grands Mulets rock outcrop, where the party camped. During this first part of the climb, the porters laid ladders over crevasses so that the climbers could safely cross. Later that day,
along the same sector, though attended by “only” three guides, another British climber nearly died in a fall. For their part, the students reveled in what one of them called “the really awful grandeur of the scene.”11

  Reaching Grands Mulets put the party about halfway to the top before nightfall, with 1 mile of altitude gain to go. To this point, using English collegiate slang of the day, the students had hailed Smith as “a tremendous brick.” By the light of a full moon, the caravan started again at midnight and virtually stair-stepped up the ice and rock to the summit on a trail cut by guides. “I found the walk,” one student wrote, “by far the most unearthly I ever saw.” By sunrise, however, he complained, “Smith was perfectly done up, and had to be dragged the rest of the way.”12 The party certainly had enough guides and porters to do so, and everyone reached the top around nine. “I believe we formed the largest party ever assembled before on the summit,” Smith noted. Then it was cigars and champagne for the gents before they dashed down—“walking, running, sliding, crouching, advancing in all possible ways”– to reach Chamonix by evening, where bands and cannon fire welcomed the climbers like conquering heroes. Given mules for the ride into town, Smith teased the others about being “once more on the Grands Mulets,” and so began a decade of his spoofing the episode. Mountain climbing would never be the same.13