David was delighted. Leading the first party to the south magnetic pole was a Victorian explorer-scientist’s dream, and for a glaciologist like David, it had the added appeal of a long trek over the world’s largest ice sheet. Yet he faced a peculiar problem: no one knew the pole’s precise location. Unlike their geographic counterparts, magnetic poles are not fixed points. Indeed, they are not even points. The south pole of any magnet (and the rotating earth with its molten iron core acts like a huge magnet) is where its lines of induction converge. An explorer reaching the earth’s south magnetic pole does not see or feel anything special except that the southern end of a magnetic dip needle points directly down toward the earth’s center. Further, the pole’s location migrates over time in an unpredictable manner due in part to the earth’s fluid core. Ross used nearby readings to fix the south magnetic pole’s location in 1841, only to have Scott’s team determine that it had moved east by 1902. Mawson would find that it had migrated northwest since 1902, increasing its distance from the coast.
Notwithstanding the transitory nature of “discovering” the south magnetic pole, David knew that it would attract the sort of professional and popular attention that he cultivated. In addition to his many academic publications and presentations, David crafted a public image by writing newspaper articles, giving lyceum lectures, and leading field trips. While others battled seasickness on the voyage to Antarctica, for example, he penned a series of thirteen popular articles about the trip that he sent back with the Nimrod for publication in Sydney’s leading paper. At winter quarters and on the polar journey, despite his senior-scientist status, David did his share of the menial tasks, but in a laborious, conspicuous way that some saw as designed to attract attention and approbation. Polite to a fault and seemingly deferential but actually strong-willed and opinionated, David typically got his own way while appearing to accede to others. On the northern sledge journey, David’s deliberate manner grated on Mawson and exasperated Mackay.4
WITH THE FOUR REMAINING ponies needed for the southern sledge journey and no dogs trained to pull sledges, Shackleton offered David the motor car. Already proved to be useless on snow, it did drive on smooth ice, and the first part of the northern sledge journey was over the Ross Sea’s still-frozen surface. Only the expedition’s motor expert, an Arrol-Johnston engineer named Bernard Day, could keep the temperamental vehicle running, so he played a bit part in the initial polar push, which was delayed by early spring blizzards.
“On September 25 we were up at 5:30 a.m., and found that the blizzard had subsided,” David wrote. “Day and I started in the motor-car, dragging behind us two sledges over the sea ice.” They planned to lay an advance depot for the northern party, which was to depart a week later. They did not get far. First, the engine overheated, forcing one delay; then, a cylinder stopped firing, causing another; finally, 10 miles out, slight but steep sastrugi stopped the vehicle’s forward progress. “A little low drift,” David called it, “brought up by a gentle blizzard.” The sastrugi were too much for the automobile’s frail motor drive to handle. The party left one fully loaded sledge behind and raced back to winter quarters in the car before the storm worsened. David hoped to try again the next day with another load, but the car’s piston rings needed fixing after the last effort, causing more delay. Then Day injured his foot tobogganing, and another storm hit, pushing the next outing with the car back to October 3. This time, it traveled 15 miles before depositing its load. David ripped the flesh from his finger pushing the car, and Mackay broke his wrist cranking the starter. They hobbled back to winter quarters at 10 P.M., David noted, “All thoroughly exhausted, all wounded and bandaged.”5
The northern party set its departure for October 5. With 500-odd miles man-hauling sledges over some of the roughest terrain on earth just to reach the south magnetic pole, David, Mawson, and Mackay faced a Herculean task, and they knew it. After supper on October 4, they gathered with those at winter quarters for an emotional farewell. The gramophone began with the aptly titled “We Parted On the Shore,” a new recording by Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder, then the world’s highest-paid entertainer and the first to sell a million records. “It’s a terrible thing being hundreds and hundreds of miles away,” Lauder ad-libbed on the cylinder. “Of course, there is one consolation; you’re away back from anyone you owe money to.” Then the music became more serious with “Loch Lomond”: “’Twas then that we parted, in yon shady glen / . . . But me and my true love will ne’er meet again.” Last of all came the John Henry Newman hymn “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,” which would be sung by doomed passengers on the Titanic as it sank and imperiled British soldiers in the trenches during World War I: “The night is dark, and I am far from home.” No one knew what lay ahead for the northern party, but everyone took it seriously. David could not sleep that night.
THE PARTY LEFT EARLY the next morning. “Day was there with the motor-car,” David reported, but the snow was blowing so heavily that the car went only 2 miles before the men left it behind. From there they took up their harnesses and “with a one, two, three, and away, pulled off into the thickly falling snow.” They reached their 10-mile depot at 7 P.M. and set up camp. “We slept that night on the floe-ice, with about three hundred fathoms of water under our pillow,” David noted.6
Adding the sledge from this depot, the men now pulled two overloaded sledges with a combined weight of 900 pounds. They could not manage both at the same time, so they left the one behind and hauled the other half a mile forward, then returned for the first and repeated this backbreaking relay throughout the day. The men covered only 4 net miles but marched 12, with Mawson reporting that David, or “Prof” as he called him, was “dog tired all day.”7 Picking up their 15-mile depot early on October 7 raised the total drag-weight to 1,100 pounds, or about 370 pounds per person. It was a mark of their desperation that they took their biscuits out of tins, repackaged them in bags to save 8 pounds, and used some of the tins for other purposes.
The ensuing days proved much the same, or worse. The men rarely covered more than 4 net miles each day, and often much less. The sledges would bog down in snow and capsize on sastrugi. At times the men had to chop a way through pressure ridges with axes, navigate around or over cracks in the ice, or camp during storms. Sometimes a stiff breeze would enable them to hoist sails on the sledges to propel both along, but the wind could freshen into storms that cost more time than the sails saved. During this part of the trip, temperatures often dipped far below zero, and the unrelenting sunlight reflecting off the surface caused snow blindness.
Moreover, the party could never go faster than its slowest member: David. “The Prof is certainly a fine example of a man for his age,” Mawson confided in his diary, “but he is a great drag on our progress. He certainly and admittedly does not pull as much as a younger man.” It was worse during breaks, when David was painfully slow at cooking and making or breaking camp. “The more we bustle to get a move on the more he dawdles,” Mawson wrote. He “takes double the time do to a thing than any ordinary person would.” The men shared a three-person sleeping bag that David typically entered long after the others. “God only knows what he does” before turning in, Mawson complained. “Finally, when we have the chill off the bag, he struggles in all cold and bedaubed with snow. Of course he has the warm middle berth and occupies certainly more than 1/2 the bag as he wears innumerable clothes.”8
David had his own complaints about the sleeping arrangements. “A three-man sleeping bag,” he observed, “where all snore and shin one another and each feels on waking that he is more shinned against than shinning, is not conducive to real rest.”9
Both David and Mawson realized by the end of October that they could not make it to the pole and back in one season at their current rate. The slender David suggested proceeding on half rations with one sledge and without relaying. Mawson wanted to skip the pole in favor of prospecting in the Dry Valley. Mackay sided with David about the pole but seemed
dubious about the half rations. “I cannot do anything but agree,” Mawson conceded in his diary. Yet he added that “the Prof’s idea of 1/2 ration scheme for 21/2 months with same amount of work is ridiculous,” so Mawson ultimately countered with a plan of his own that the others accepted. “We must give up all else this summer,” he proposed, “preserve about a full ration of sledge food for 480 m[ile] journey inland, [and] in order to make this possible we must live on seal flesh and local food cooked by local means as much as possible.”10 It was the pole or bust for the northern party without as much as a nod to the Dry Valley.
Mawson’s plan allowed the party to discard immediately everything not needed for the polar trek and travel with a single sledge once they headed inland, but in the meantime it meant surviving on seals and penguins cooked over a makeshift seal-blubber stove made from a surviving biscuit tin. The men had not planned to hunt such food, did not know how to prepare it, and had not brought along the proper cooking equipment. They knew that Peary lived off the land in the Arctic, but he ate familiar game like bear, deer, and musk oxen.
Further, given their new schedule, the sea ice would be gone by the time they returned from the pole, so they had to hope that the Nimrod could retrieve them from the shore farther north than planned. The party left messages in marked depots along the coast announcing the changed plans, but could not be sure anyone would find them. “At tea this evening,” Mawson wrote on October 29, “the Prof began to talk of the importance of our journey [to the pole] and asked that we should give up all else for it.”11
HUNGER STALKED THE MEN. “About 18 days out I had a food dream,” Mawson wrote, “dreamt that we came upon a depot containing all sorts of choice delicacies.” Instead, their overland sledging rations consisted mainly of dried-meat-and-fruit pemmican and hardtack biscuits, which they boiled with melted snow or glacial ice to make a hoosh stew. While on the sea ice, they lived mostly on freshly butchered seals, which were easily killed as those large, lumbering mammals lounged on the shore or ice near holes and open-water leads, coupled with a much-reduced ration of hardtack. Seal meat was an ongoing experiment for the men. “Young bull seal is always good—steak from loins, liver and blubber,” Mawson reported. “The latter melts in the mouth and appears and cuts like bacon about 11/2" thick.” The kidneys, he noted, were rubbery, and “cow seal in breeding season is to be avoided.” Mawson liked penguin better than seal, with Emperor penguin liver “best of all,” but it proved difficult to get in sufficient quantity.12
The new diet had drawbacks. Though calorie-rich, no amount of seal meat ever seemed to fill the men up, and the unbalanced diet quickly caught up with their digestive systems. “I am now ravenous and delight in blubber though it does not agree with me,” Mawson noted only days after starting the new regimen. “When feeding on seal meat,” he later added euphemistically, “we opened out every hour at least.”13 While sledging, they planned diverse menus for future feasts back home. A Scotsman, Mackay spoke of haggis, “to be played round the table by a piper,” and bramble jam roly-poly.14 English by birth and upbringing, David craved jugged hare with mashed potatoes. Mawson focused on rich foods and sweets. “We don’t intend to let a meal pass in after life without more fully appreciating it,” he vowed.15
While still traveling with two sledges, the party crawled north at roughly 4 miles per day along the coast and over two glacial ice tongues that protruded so far into the Ross Sea that the men could not feasibly go around them. At one point, they ran so low on food that Mackay walked back 7 miles for seals from a place they had sledged past five days earlier. It took him a full day going and coming, which offers some measure of the difference between walking and sledging. “I got lots of seal-meat, and one Adelie penguin,” Mackay reported in his diary about this venture. “The bag which I carried back must have weighed 40 or 50 lbs.”16
This first part of the journey, covering some 250 of the estimated 500 miles to the pole, took over two months, with the crossing of the 20-mile-wide Drygalski Ice Tongue consuming nearly one-quarter of that period. There the men encountered walls of ice running perpendicular to their path and hidden crevasses that could swallow them whole. Their initial attempt to cross the ice tongue failed. “For half a day we struggled over high sastrugi, hummocky ice ridges, steep undulations of bare blue ice with frequent chasms impassable for a sledge, unless it was unloaded and lowered by alpine ropes,” David wrote, before retreating and trying again at another point farther east on the ice tongue. Even there, David noted, “the surface still bristled with huge ice undulations as far as the eye could see.” He likened it to a storm-tossed seascape and noted, “It was obvious, too, that the glacier ice over which we would have to travel, was still very heavily crevassed.”17
One day in camp, while Mackay was away and Mawson was changing light-sensitive photographic plates in the sleeping bag, David fell through a snow-covered crevasse. He saved himself by throwing his arms onto the surrounding snow lid, but the surface was so weak that he feared to move. “Mawson, Mawson,” he cried. When Mawson did not come without some explanation of his dire situation, David politely inquired, “Oh, you’re in the bag changing plates, are you?” and waited, again without further explaining his predicament. Gradually losing his grip, he called again with the same result before finally explaining, “I am really hanging on by my finger tips to the edge of a crevasse, and I don’t think I can hold on much longer. I shall have to trouble you to come out and assist me.”18 It became the two Australians’ favorite story of the trip and acquired legendary status down under.
Before the northern party reached the Drygalski Ice Tongue—their last obstacle along the coast—midday temperatures rose to the freezing point, making the salty sea-ice surface soft and sticky. “It gripped the runners of the sledges like glue, and we were only able with our greatest efforts to drag the sledges over this at a snail’s pace,” David complained. With twenty-four hours of sunlight daily, the men began sleeping in the afternoon and traveling during the early morning hours when the sun was lower and the footing firmer than later in the day. Still, they worried that the ice would break up around them, leaving them unable to proceed north.
After crossing the Drygalski Ice Tongue, the men spied a smooth-looking glacier with a steep snout flowing from the interior around the south side of Mount Larsen to the coast. They had originally planned to travel farther north along the coast before turning inland but, from the ice tongue, they could see the sea ice broken up ahead. The shoreline looked impassable. Larsen Glacier, as the men called it, became the party’s path through the Western Mountains. “Looks good going, icy, and not very rough,” Mackay wrote. His spirits rose. From the day before on the ice tongue, when he had despaired in his diary, “I feel as if we have very little chance of the pole,” now he exulted: “Really a joyful day.”19
With the ice tongue behind them and a seemingly manageable glacier rising from the sea through the mountains toward their goal, the men gained hope. In anticipation of returning here after their dash to the pole, they looked for a conspicuous site near the Drygalski Ice Tongue’s base to cache excess supplies under a well-marked mound of snow. Should all go well, they counted on the Nimrod finding this depot and retrieving them here in early February. Mawson took note of the occasion by starting a new diary, leaving his old one in the depot with a sledge, spare equipment, the geologic specimens collected so far, and letters from all three men.
“These are last adieus, so they ought to be tragic,” Mackay wrote in his diary about the letters, “but I cannot make mine so, as I feel we have such a good chance of reaching the pole.”20 It was mid-December, however, and time was running short.
BY THIS TIME, SHACKLETON and his southern party were on the way to the geographic pole and, in comparison to the northern party, all but flying over the ice. After returning to Cape Royds from his depot-laying journey and giving instruction to those remaining behind on what they should do while he was away and if he did not return, Shackleton set
off for the pole on October 29. His party took provisions for ninety-one days, knowing that it was entering a barren land with no alternative sources of supply. Biscuits, pemmican, oatmeal, cheese, and chocolate were virtually the only foods that it carried, except feed for the ponies and, of course, the ponies themselves, which would become food for the men. Tea and tobacco rounded out the consumables.
Shackleton left behind a letter for his wife, to be delivered if he did not return. “Think kindly of me and remember that if I did wrong in going away from you and our children that it was not just selfishness,” he wrote. “Your husband will have died in one of the few great things left to be done.”21 Peary, of course, expressed similar sentiments to his wife, but about reaching a different pole. Again sounding like Peary, in his sledging diary Shackleton depicted the pole, in his case the South Pole, as “the last spot of the world that counts as worth the striving for.”22 And strive he would with a determination that matched Peary’s stride for stride.
A support party man-hauling one sledge accompanied the southern party for nine days, which included three spent at Scott’s Hut Point shelter and another in camp during a blizzard. This initial 50-mile stretch took the men onto the ice shelf at the place where it presses against Ross Island to the north and Victoria Land to the west. When the support party fell back on November 7, the four ponies took up the full load, hauling nearly a ton of supplies and equipment. Beginning at this point, Shackleton, Eric Marshall, Jameson Adams, and Frank Wild each led one pony and sledge south over a featureless expanse of snow-covered ice. Hidden crevasses and whiteout conditions slowed their progress for the first few days as they pulled away from land, but gave way to better sledging terrain and weather as they moved deeper onto the shelf. Temperatures dipped well below zero at the outset but reached into the low 20s by late November.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 19