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

by David Roberts

  During 1906 and 1907, Mawson set off into the field to study the geology of the Australian outback in the vicinity of the mining settlement of Broken Hill. Guided by Howchin’s example, Mawson found abundant evidence on his own of ancient glaciation. It was this fieldwork that would earn him his doctorate of science in 1909.

  Yet like his mentor, Edgeworth David, Mawson, at the age of twenty-five, had never seen a glacier. In December 1907, when Ernest Shackleton made a brief stop in Adelaide on his way to Sydney, Mawson offered his services at no cost, just as David had, on the ship to Antarctica and back. “My idea,” Mawson later told a Shackleton biographer, “was to see a continental ice-cap. . . . I desired to see an ice age in being.”

  Shackleton rather brusquely told the eager geologist that he would think over his offer and get back to him in a few days. In Sydney, he was apparently won over by David’s lavish encomiums of his star student. To his astonishment, one day in December Mawson received a telegram from Shackleton, offering him not simply passage aboard the Nimrod to Antarctica and back, but appointing him the official physicist “for the duration of the expedition.” Even though he was not a physicist, Mawson realized the offer was too good to pass up. He quickly found a substitute to teach his classes and negotiated a year’s absence from the University of Adelaide.

  In late December 1907, Mawson sailed with David to New Zealand to catch up with Shackleton. The leader’s quirky, impulsive decision had fixed the compass of Mawson’s exploratory career for good.

  As it turned out, Shackleton had also signed up Edgeworth David “for the duration of the expedition.” On January 1, 1908, hailed by brass bands and cheering crowds, the Nimrod set sail from Lyttelton, New Zealand, bound for the southern continent. Aboard the ship, mentor and protégé keenly anticipated the great adventure.

  The ship’s quarters, however, were squalid in the extreme. Raymond Priestley, the team’s official geologist, later described the aft hold, where the men slept and where most of the scientific equipment was stored, as “a place that under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t put ten dogs in, much less 15 of the shore party. It . . . is more like my idea of Hell than anything I have ever imagined.”

  During the Nimrod’s passage through the roaring forties and the furious fifties, most of the men were seasick, none more wretchedly so than Mawson. Eric Marshall, the chief surgeon of the British Antarctic Expedition (BAE), formed an early impression of the tall, lanky Australian that could hardly have been more contemptuous. “Mawson is useless & objectionable,” he wrote in his diary, “lacking in guts & manners.” Felled by seasickness, Mawson, according to Marshall, simply lay “in a sleeping bag . . . vomiting when he rolled to starboard, whilst the cook handed up food from the galley beneath him.”

  The first mate of the Nimrod was John King Davis, with whom Mawson would form a bond lasting for decades, despite periods of intense friction. Fifty-four years later, Davis would recall his own first impression of the seasick scientist:

  As daylight came, I noticed a man lying prostrate in one of the lifeboats. . . . “What are you doing there, why don’t you get below?” I shouted. All I could get from him in response to my queries was “Can’t you stop this b[loody] boat rocking?” He had been lying there sea-sick and wet through without food or drink since the gale began.

  Davis persuaded the invalid to eat some canned pears, which Mawson managed to digest. But hours later, the mate found him still lying in the lifeboat. He pleaded for more canned pears. At last Davis talked Mawson into going below, where he heated a cup of cocoa for him. Thus began the lifelong friendship.

  Shackleton hoped to make his base at Hut Point, on the southern tip of Ross Island, where Scott had built his Discovery expedition hut in 1901. In that refuge, as the third officer on Scott’s first expedition, Shackleton had wintered over through 1902. But on learning of Shackleton’s BAE expedition in 1907, Scott had written to his former teammate not only forbidding him the use of the hut, but in effect ordering him not to establish his base anywhere in McMurdo Sound. By the first decade of the twentieth century, claiming a piece of Antarctica for one’s country had become a normal practice, but Scott’s preemptive thrust amounted to claiming the whole of the western Ross Sea for his own future expeditions.

  The bitter blood between the two great British explorers stemmed from the Discovery expedition of 1901–04. According to Scott’s early biographer, George Seaver, the two men were jinxed from the start by a “temperamental incompatibility.” Scott recognized in Shackleton a dangerous rival in his quest for the South Pole, and he seems to have resented his former officer’s ambition and popularity among his fellow teammates.

  In 1902, however, recognizing Shackleton’s drive and talent, Scott had chosen him to be one of the team of three who would establish a new Farthest South of 82˚ 17' on December 30. The third, Edward Wilson, turned out to be the peacemaker trying to keep his two strong-willed partners from each other’s throats. All three men developed serious cases of scurvy and were lucky to make it back to their base camp hut alive.

  It was during that grim trudge south, with their sledge dogs giving out daily, that the antagonism between the two men reached its peak. Roland Huntford, Shackleton’s magisterial biographer, illuminates the conflict. One evening early in the trek, Shackleton accidentally knocked over the Primus stove, spilling the precious dinner of “hoosh” and burning a hole in the groundsheet. Scott exploded. According to Huntford, “the burning of the groundsheet was the trigger that exposed a profound dislike of Shackleton.”

  Meanwhile, Shackleton developed a persistent cough that troubled his teammates. Unwilling to submit to his weakness, “Shackleton in his traces [sledge harness] seemed demonic. . . . It was as if he were willing them all on to the Pole. There was urgency and passion in his every, jerking step.”

  Shortly thereafter, the following exchange, recorded in a note by a teammate to whom it was recounted weeks later, occurred:

  Wilson and Shackleton were packing up after breakfast when Scott called out, “Come here you bloody fools.”

  They went over, and Wilson quietly asked Scott whether he was speaking to him.

  “No, Billy,” was the answer.

  “Then,” said Shackleton, “It must have been me.”

  There was silence.

  “Right,” Shackleton continued. “You are the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that you will get it back.”

  Throughout the desperate return to base camp, Shackleton was constantly coughing and short of breath. During the worst stretch, he rode the sledge while the other two man-hauled it, as he coughed up blood and gasped for air. According to Huntford, Scott “now regarded the ‘sick man’ as a burden stopping useful work like sketching and surveying,”

  Back at Hut Point, the men found that the Discovery, the ship that had brought them south and on which they had overwintered, was still stuck fast in sea ice. The team would have to spend a second winter in Antarctica. But when a relief vessel arrived and anchored in open water four miles to the north, this fortuitous event offered Scott a chance to send home eight “undesirables.” Seven volunteered for the escape, but Scott ordered Shackleton to join them, “invalided home,” to his lasting mortification and wrath. Despite his ailments, Shackleton was determined to winter over, but he could not defy the command of the expedition’s leader.

  “Of course all the officers wish to remain,” Scott wrote patronizingly, “but here, with much reluctance, I have had to pick out the name of one who, in my opinion, is not fitted to do so. It has been a great blow to poor Shackleton.”

  Being sent home against his will was an insult Shackleton never forgave. For the rest of their short lives, Britain’s two greatest Antarctic explorers hated each other passionately. The impetus for Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition at the end of 1907, as much as a quest for new discovery, was revenge against the commander who had treated him so severely. In Huntford’s phrase, “Shackleton’s
enterprise was born out of an obsession with Discovery and its captain. Anything Scott had done, Shackleton would do better.”

  Even as he was scrambling to organize the British Antarctic Expedition, Shackleton was aware that Scott was planning his own second attempt to reach the South Pole—an effort that would result in the Terra Nova expedition of 1910–13. In this competition, Scott had all the advantages. Shackleton was Anglo-Irish, the son of a farmer; Scott was a well-born Englishman from a family steeped in naval service. Despite its nationalistic-sounding title, Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition was a privately funded venture, whereas Scott had the official backing not only of the British navy but of the equally powerful Royal Geographical Society.

  In the view of Roland Huntford (whose bias against Scott is relentless), “Scott’s assumption of prescriptive right [to McMurdo Sound] was certainly preposterous, arguably pathological. The barren lands were surely anybody’s game.” But the politics of British exploring were byzantine. Growing increasingly stressed as his departure neared, Shackleton caved in to Scott’s imperious demand. He even put his promise in writing:

  I am leaving the McMurdo sound base to you, and will land either at the place known as Barrier Inlet or at King Edward VII Land whichever is the most suitable, if I land at either of these places I will not work to the westward of the 170 meridian W.

  King Edward VII Land, 500 miles east of McMurdo Sound, had been discovered and named by Scott on his Discovery expedition in 1902. Whether or not it offered a launching pad for a trek to the pole, however, remained a complete mystery. By 1907, the only known corridor leading south over landfast ice was the one pioneered by Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson in late 1902. For all Shackleton knew, a sledging route southward from King Edward VII Land might run into sea ice that surrounded isolated islands, or into uncrossable mountain ranges. His pledge to Scott thus represented a considerable sacrifice.

  The Nimrod first sighted the Ross Ice Shelf, which stretches 600 miles from King Edward VII Land west to Victoria Land, on January 23, 1908. For the next several days, the ship zigzagged along the coast, prevented by floating sea ice from reaching the towering shelf itself, let alone discovering the hypothesized “Barrier Inlet” or making landfall on King Edward VII Land. Shackleton named the easternmost corner of the troublesome Ross Sea the Bay of Whales. Meanwhile, his mood grew dark as he imagined having to scuttle the whole expedition. A great irony would unfold three years later, when Amundsen successfully established his Framheim base in the Bay of Whales, from which he launched his race against Scott to the South Pole.

  At last Shackleton decided that, rather than give up, he would break his promise. Even after embarking on what he privately acknowledged was a betrayal of Scott, Shackleton was thwarted in his effort to reach Hut Point in McMurdo Sound, where the team might have installed itself in the well-preserved storage hut built by the Discovery expedition seven years earlier. Sea ice blocked the sound 16 miles north of that southernmost promontory of Ross Island. In the end, Shackleton chose to debark 25 miles farther north, at Cape Royds, where his teammates would build their own base camp hut from the materials carried on board the Nimrod. Unloading began on February 3. The essential structure was completed within ten days of the men’s coming ashore, but it would take more than a month to improve the hut, in Shackleton’s words, from “an empty shell” to its “fully appointed appearance.” Then fifteen men settled in to spend the winter at 77½ degrees south.

  Of Douglas Mawson’s doings and thoughts during this initial phase of the expedition, we know virtually nothing. He had not yet started to keep a regular diary, and his biographers all gloss over the Nimrod’s wayward course along the coast and the frantic establishment of a base in a paragraph or two. Shackleton himself recorded a one-sentence vignette of Mawson’s exhaustion at the end of the hardest day of ferrying supplies from ship to shore, just before the Nimrod sailed north:

  Mawson, whose lair was a little store-room in the engine-room, was asleep on the floor. His long legs, protruding through the doorway, had found a resting-place on the cross-head of the engine, and his dreams were mingled with a curious rhythmical motion which was fully accounted for when he woke up, for the ship having got under way, the up-and-down motion of the pistons had moved his limbs with every stroke.

  Once ensconced in the hut, the men had little to do but while away the time until the far-distant spring season. Shackleton was anxious to lay a depot of supplies somewhere along the route of next summer’s attempt on the pole, but the steepness of the coastal slopes and a sheet of open water lying between Cape Royds and the ice packed against Hut Point made such a venture impossible.

  The first exploratory deed performed by the BAE, instead, was the ascent of Mount Erebus. The only active volcano on the continent, the peak stands in the center of Ross Island, its summit only 14 miles from the newly built hut. Yet in that short distance, Erebus rises from sea level to the remarkable altitude of 12,448 feet. In 1904, three members of Scott’s party had reached 3,000 feet above sea level on the mountain’s lower skirts, but had made no real dent in its defenses.

  By the standards of mountaineering even in the first decade of the twentieth century, however, those defenses were trivial. Climbing Erebus amounts to little more than a tedious, fatiguing, and bitterly cold slog up snow-covered slopes at relatively low angles. But none of the fifteen members of the BAE was an accomplished mountaineer, nor did the team have proper climbing equipment. The men had ice axes and a modicum of alpine rope, but lacked mountain boots, crampons, and backpacks of any kind.

  The idea, apparently, was Edgeworth David’s. In The Heart of the Antarctic, Shackleton’s narrative of the BAE, the leader—among the principal Antarctic explorers of his day, the least interested in science—went to some pains to justify the climb as a contribution to meteorology and geology. Yet he added, “apart from scientific considerations, the ascent of a mountain over 13,000 ft. in height [the team’s measurement of Erebus’s altitude], situated so far south, would be a matter of pleasurable excitement both to those who were selected as climbers and to the rest of us who wished for our companions’ success.”

  For the ascent team, the Boss (as his men called him) chose David, Mawson, and Alistair Mackay, a twenty-nine-year-old Scot who had served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy, with three other members to act as a support party. Mawson would prove to be a leading force in the exploit.

  Given the men’s lack of mountaineering experience, the gear they had to improvise, and the daunting weather they endured, the climb would turn into an adventure and even an ordeal. For crampons, some of the men poked nails through strips of leather attached to the soles of their finnesko—soft boots made of reindeer hide with the fur still attached on the outside. Instead of finnesko, others donned “ski boots,” equally soft and pliable, made of cowhide rather than deerskin. The wisdom of the day erroneously decreed that only soft boots could prevent frostbite.

  Lacking rucksacks, on the upper part of Erebus the men had to carry their reindeer-hide sleeping bags on their backs, held in place with cumbersome tangles of cords and straps. The team set out with eleven days’ food for the summit party, six for the support trio. At first they hauled their gear and food—600 pounds of it—on a sledge. The assault began in the early morning hours of March 5, with the brief Antarctic summer already a thing of the past.

  Mawson never wrote about the ascent of Erebus. The fullest account of the adventure is a thirty-four-page narrative that Edgeworth David contributed to the expedition’s in-house publication, Aurora Australis. David’s account of Erebus has a jaunty tone, full of comic self-deprecation and inside jokes. Yet he was a felicitous writer, and in his pages both the magic and the misery of the climb emerge.

  By the end of the first day, the team of six had wrestled the sledge to an altitude they recorded as 2,750 feet, traversing seven miles eastward from their base. The labor verged on backbreaking. To cross a rocky moraine, some of the men had to slip their
ice axes under the cargo and “portage” it with brute force while others slid the sledge across the obstacle. On blue ice covered with a thin skin of snow, they were reduced to crawling on their hands and knees lest the sledge’s weight wrench it from their grasp. Sastrugi, the raised ridges of wind-carved snow, further blocked their progress. Not all the men had crafted homemade crampons. Wrote David, tongue in cheek:

  Occasionally we came to blows, but these were dealt accidentally by a long armed finneskoe-shod cramponless sledger, who whirled his arms like a windmill in his desperate efforts to keep his balance after slipping. On such occasions the silence of our march was broken by a few words, more crisp than courteous, from the smitten one.

  That evening, snug in their green tents supported with bamboo poles, the men dined on hoosh—a porridge mingling pemmican, biscuit, and melted snow. According to David, it was the first time any of the six had eaten that staple of polar cuisine. “We had all developed a sledging appetite,” he reported, “and found the ‘hoosh’ delicious.”

  The next day, the men covered only three miles, but gained another 2,800 feet of altitude. As the slopes of Erebus steepened, sastrugi regularly capsized the sledge, sometimes forcing them to repack the cargo from scratch. That night the thermometer dropped to 28 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. As the climbers crawled into their three-man sleeping bags, “Some of us . . . found our socks firmly frozen to our ski-boots, and sock and boot had to be taken off in one piece.”

  From this second camp, the support party had planned to return. But Lieutenant Jameson Adams, second in command of the whole BAE but relegated to the trio of supporters on Erebus, abruptly decided that all six men should push on toward the summit. The team cached the sledge, marking its location with a bamboo pole topped with a black flag, and headed out with loads of about 40 pounds apiece. David described this “procession” as “more bizarre than beautiful.”