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

by David Roberts

  In the end, Shackleton and Wild abandoned the sledge and dashed for the hut. There they found a note stating that all the other men had been picked up, and that the Nimrod would linger under nearby Glacier Tongue only until February 26—already two days in the past. Inside the hut, Shackleton and Wild scrounged a meal, then spent a sleepless night wrapped in a piece of roofing felt. As Shackleton later wrote, “If the ship was gone, our plight, and that of the two men left out on the Barrier, was a very serious one.”

  The next day, however, the two men climbed the hill behind the hut and spotted the ship in the distance. A signal from the sun mirror roused an answering flash. By 11 a.m. on March 1, Shackleton and Wild were aboard the Nimrod.

  All that remained was to trudge back south and bring in Adams and Marshall. Wild was too done in for the task, but Shackleton insisted on heading the relief party. As companions, he took the ship’s stoker (a virile athlete) and two of the survivors of the equally desperate return from the magnetic pole—Alistair Mackay and Douglas Mawson. By March 4, all the men of the BAE were aboard ship and headed home.

  What this last ordeal meant to Mawson we can only conjecture, for he never wrote about it. According to Wild, upon the relief party’s return to the ship, “Mackay fell into the wardroom crying out to the ship’s doctor, ‘Into thy hands, O Doc, I deliver my body and my spirit.’ ” He and Mawson were confined to their bunks for the next two days, the stoker for five. Shackleton, more sleep-deprived than any of them, stayed awake to supervise the ship’s departure from Cape Royds as it wove a circuitous path through the ice pack that was forming up steadily. In a few days’ time, the ice would have trapped the ship fast, condemning the whole party to another winter in Antarctica.

  Shackleton may have felt that the BAE ended in failure, 97 miles short of its goal, but upon his return to England in June, he was feted as a national hero. “Edwardian England knew how to honour success,” writes Roland Huntford, “and its ultimate reward was the exclusive, scintillating and exacting summer social round called the London Season. . . . He could hardly have done better if he had actually reached the Pole.” The king himself, vacationing in the south of France, declared the BAE’s achievement “the greatest geographical event of his reign.” In November, Shackleton was knighted by Edward VII—an honor that Scott would never receive.

  In Australia, David and Mawson were likewise greeted by cheering crowds and wild adulation. Met at the railway station in Adelaide, Mawson was carried on his students’ shoulders along North Terrace.

  Despite the intense friction between the men that had burst to the surface at the end of the return from the magnetic pole, David and Mawson patched up their differences almost instantly. David was magnanimous in the extreme. At a reception at the University of Sydney, he lavished praise on his former student: “I say that Mawson was the real leader and the soul of our expedition to the magnetic pole. We really have in him an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, astonishing indifference to frost.” (Fourteen years after his own greatest exploit, reaching a new Farthest North of 86° 13.6', the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen was still considered the greatest polar explorer of the day.) Mawson and David would remain loyal friends for the rest of their lives.

  It would take decades for the magnitude of the feat undertaken by Mawson, David, and Mackay to be put in proper perspective. During 122 days, the trio had pulled their heavy sledges a total of 1,260 miles, 740 of those miles in soul-taxing relay trips. Theirs would remain the longest unsupported man-hauling sledge journey ever accomplished until the mid-1980s.

  As for the scientific results of the trio’s gutsy push to the South Magnetic Pole, Mawson was destined to be sadly disappointed. On a visit to England in 1911, Edgeworth David consulted with the leading experts on terrestrial magnetism. He had his own doubts as to the accuracy of the inclinometer readings Mawson had obtained. The records brought back in 1909 were eventually scrutinized by other experts, and the conclusion, which David himself accepted, was that on January 16, 1909, the three men had unfurled their Union Jack on a spot as far as thirty miles from the true magnetic pole. According to Mawson’s biographer Philip Ayres, knowing how distressing the revised result would be for Mawson, David withheld the glum discovery from his protégé until 1925. After 1930, Mawson rephrased his entry in Who’s Who in Australia from “one of the discoverers of the South Magnetic Pole” to the more modest “magnetic pole journey 1908.”

  Subsequent expeditions would strive to reach the elusive magnetic pole, which Sir James Clark Ross had first tried to find in 1841. It seems likely that the true discovery took place only in December 2000, when Australian geologist Charles Barton reached a point, by his own estimate, within nine-tenths of a mile of the pole. He did so not via an overland trek on Antarctica, but on board a ship—for by 2000, the pole, which oscillates daily and has been moving steadily northwest for at least 170 years, lay at 64˚ S 138˚ E in the South Pacific, well offshore from the continent. Barton’s even gloomier assessment of Mawson’s quest was that the three men in 1909 had reached a point a full eighty miles short of the magnetic pole.

  None of this detracts from the courage and tenacity of Mawson’s first Antarctic journey. As one of the experts who examined the data in 1911 wrote to David, “Everyone, I am sure, appreciates the truly heroic quest made by you and Dr Mawson. It showed that the true spirit of the crusaders still exists.” The south magnetic pole may have been harder to find than the geographic pole, but it remains a place of scientific importance, anchoring the profoundly mysterious phenomenon of the earth’s magnetic field. Today’s best astronomers still struggle to understand that wandering pole, which they know may ultimately provide a key to the very nature and origin of our planet.

  Upon regaining the Nimrod at the end of his ordeal with David and Mackay, Mawson vowed that he would never again go to Antarctica. It would take him only two and a half years to break that pledge.

  Between 1909 and 1911, other duties and projects claimed Mawson’s attention. In Adelaide, he plunged back into teaching at the university. With the conferral of his PhD at the end of 1909, he became Dr. Mawson, a bona fide professor. Meanwhile, he dipped his toe into several get-rich-quick schemes that promised commercial cornucopias harvested in far-flung locations. One, suggested by Mawson’s father, was the establishment of a rubber plantation in New Guinea. Another, Shackleton’s brainchild, was to speculate in gold mines in Hungary. (Mawson took this boondoggle seriously enough to travel to Hungary, where he and Shackleton tried to evaluate the potential of the diggings.) A third was Mawson’s own idea: during a visit to the Flinders Ranges in central South Australia, he identified a mineral vein rich in uranium, and with a partner promptly founded the Radium Extraction Company.

  Fortunately for polar history, none of these enterprises panned out. In August 1909, the chance meeting occurred that would change the course of Mawson’s life as profoundly as any expedition.

  Broken Hill, the remote mining town near the western border of New South Wales, was the scene of the fieldwork that produced Mawson’s doctoral dissertation. He had made many visits to the outpost, and that August, on his way to deliver a guest lecture at the local technical college, he was the dinner guest of Adam Boyd, the underground manager of BHP, or the Broken Hill Proprietary Company. Also present at the dinner was BHP’s general manager, the Dutch-born magnate Guillaume Daniel Delprat, and two of his daughters. The younger was named Francesca, known to her friends and family as Paquita. She was seventeen that Australian winter; Mawson was twenty-seven.

  Tall, lithe, and strikingly handsome, Mawson had become a darling of Australian social circles since his ballyhooed return from the Shackleton expedition. Yet for all his forcefulness in the wilderness, he was shy and reticent in his private life. If he had been romantically involved with any woman before 1909, no vestige of the attachment has survived in the biographical record.

  Paquita had actually caught sight of Mawson at a sporting event in Ad
elaide some weeks before. As she recalled fifty-five years later:

  He had turned and smiled warmly at some friends who spoke to him. That grin did something to me. Throughout the years that passed, whenever he returned from his many absences, that grin greeted me and took me back to the fateful moment: the misty day, the men in their sports clothes, the wet grass and the tall slim figure smiling at his friend.

  In contemporary photos, Paquita looks full-figured, her oval face beaming with serene contentment. One Mawson biographer describes her as “dark-haired, ivory-skinned, patrician-looking.” Almost six feet tall, she had a regal bearing. Born in England, she was, at seventeen, already a sophisticated woman and traveler, fluent in Dutch, Spanish, and English.

  Claiming to base her insight on interviews with family members, Nancy Robinson Flannery, the editor of the letters written during the AAE between Douglas and Paquita, embellishes the love-at-first-sight drama with perhaps a touch of fictional license. At the sporting event, according to Flannery, Paquita whispered to her friend Hester, “Who’s that?”

  “Oh, ’Quita, don’t you know?” Flannery has Hester reply. “It’s Douglas Mawson. You remember—he came back from the Antarctic a few weeks ago. Went with Shackleton. Quite a hero, apparently.”

  And at the dinner party in Broken Hill:

  Her flashing black eyes met his mischievous blue ones. She blushed; and he surprised himself by being fascinated. Always an easy conversationalist, with an innate ability to put people at their ease, Paquita chatted with Douglas about his university work and his Antarctic experiences.

  The hostess, Mrs. Boyd, observed the conversation with interest and pleasure. She had long held a soft spot for the youngest of the Delprat girls, and was heartened to see her coping so maturely as a vibrant dinner guest. While Douglas responded keenly to Paquita’s charm, her father sat back to enjoy the interplay.

  Thanks to an international tour that Mawson launched shortly thereafter, nearly a year would pass before he and Paquita saw each other again.

  The ostensible purpose of the tour was to meet the world’s leading geologists. Once again taking a leave of absence from the University of Adelaide, Mawson sailed for England in December. On January 14, 1910, his ship entered the harbor at Plymouth, and Mawson stepped onto his native land for the first time since the age of two, when his family had embarked for Australia and a new life.

  During the next six months, Mawson not only crisscrossed England, but traveled through Europe as far as Hungary and across the United States as far as Omaha, Nebraska. He did indeed meet prominent geologists, but already the idea of another Antarctic expedition was percolating in his mind. Robert Falcon Scott was immersed in preparations for his second quest for the South Pole, which he would launch in June 1910. Shackleton was in continental Europe on a grueling lecture tour, seeking to raise the funds to cover the massive debt that the BAE had incurred. Yet when he heard that Mawson had arrived in England, he urgently cabled him, “On no account see Scott till I return.”

  The feud between Scott and Shackleton had only intensified since the end of the BAE. On learning that Shackleton had broken his promise not to establish a base in McMurdo Sound, Scott called his rival “a professed liar” and “a plausible rogue.” In Roland Huntford’s pithy judgment, “[Scott] refused to associate with him ever again.” Supported by his patrons at the Royal Geographical Society, Scott even publicly called into question Shackleton’s claim to have reached a point only 97 miles from the pole.

  Scott was sure that his upcoming Terra Nova expedition would succeed in getting to the South Pole, and Shackleton, despite the exhaustion of his recent ordeal, found the prospect of having his lifelong goal stolen from him by his enemy insupportable. Even as he chased the will-o’-the-wisp of Hungarian gold mines, he planned another Antarctic expedition.

  Mawson ignored his former leader’s injunction not to visit Scott. “I have no connection with Shackleton in any way,” he wrote indignantly to Edgeworth David, “and he is foolish to write me so.” Mawson had also learned that David had warmly recommended him to Scott for inclusion on the Terra Nova expedition. Yet at the same time, Mawson was bound to Shackleton, in part because the Boss still owed him 400 pounds of his salary for the BAE. During the first half of 1910, he would follow Shackleton all the way to Hungary, and then all the way to Nebraska, as the two men tried to concoct another Antarctic expedition.

  The meeting with Scott in early 1910 did not go well. Mawson had already made up his mind as to what he wanted to attempt on the southern continent, and it had nothing to do with marching toward the South Pole. He had become fascinated by the huge swath of terra incognita that lay directly south of Australia. Except for several fugitive sightings of land by the captains of ships that had sailed those waters seventy years before, that expanse of terrain at 65° south remained completely unexplored.

  Scott had assumed that Mawson was visiting him to ask for a place on the Terra Nova expedition. Swayed by David’s hearty recommendation, Scott badly wanted the Australian as a member of the team. “He offered me not less than £800 for the two years,” Mawson wrote in an “abbreviated log” of his doings in England, “and that I should be one of the 3 to form the final pole party provided nothing unforeseen happened before the final dash.” Scott seemed nonplussed when Mawson turned down the offer.

  Instead, Mawson proposed that he go along on Scott’s expedition to be dropped off at Cape Adare, at the northwestern corner of the Ross Sea, with three companions, who would then, with Terra Nova’s support, conduct their own exploration westward along the coast. Scott promised to think the idea over.

  A second meeting went even more poorly. This time Edward Wilson, the naturalist and artist who had played peacemaker between Scott and Shackleton in 1902, was in the office with Scott. “I did not like Dr. Wilson,” Mawson recorded bluntly, without elaborating. Scott explained that while he was greatly interested in the “north coast” Mawson wanted to explore, he could not divert manpower and ship support from his all-out bid to get to the South Pole. Mawson ended the awkward encounter with a stiff withdrawal: “I said finally that as I could not be landed on the north coast I would go in no other capacity than as Chief Scientist and that as Wilson had been appointed to that position I would not dream of making the suggestion.”

  Now Mawson turned to Shackleton, who had returned to England. At once the Boss appropriated the whole concept of Mawson’s expedition as if he had thought of it himself. “I have decided to go to the coast west of Cape Adare,” he told Mawson imperiously, “and you are to be the Chief Scientist. I hope you will agree to this. I can get the money.” Taken aback, Mawson dared not repudiate Shackleton’s proposal, for the Boss was indeed a genius at fundraising, and could count on his recent knighthood to garner the support of patrons in high places.

  So ensued a cat-and-mouse game stretching over four months and from Hungary to Nebraska. Shackleton could not make up his mind what he wanted to do. He was torn between the Hungarian gold mines and another stab at Antarctica. The two men never really fell out, but by the time he left Omaha in mid-May, Mawson was convinced that “there was little hope of [Shackleton’s] going.” The Boss magnanimously pledged that even if he did not lead the expedition himself, he would exert all his powers to raise money for it. He had already secured a contribution of ten thousand pounds from Gerald Lysaght, a steel baron who had supported the BAE.

  By the time he returned to Australia, Mawson was convinced that he would have to organize and lead the ambitious exploration of the “north coast” by himself. The last straw came when the Lysaght contribution simply disappeared, a casualty, Mawson thought at first, of a rupture between the Boss and his patron . In desperation, he wrote directly to Lysaght, pleading for only one-tenth of the promised donation. As the magnate was hospitalized at the time, his wife replied, in effect scolding Mawson for asking for more money.

  In this roundabout way, Mawson discovered that Shackleton had already squandered the t
en thousand pounds, perhaps on his gold-mine scheme. As he later reported, Mawson felt “double-crossed” by his former leader. In 1922, six months after Shackleton’s untimely death of a heart attack at age forty-seven, Mawson would write to the Boss’s first biographer, “When it comes to the moral side of things, S. and I part brass rags, as they say in the navy; that is why I have not rushed into print to heap eulogies on him.”

  Back in Australia, Mawson faced the overwhelming challenge of raising money and enlisting a crew for his grand exploration. But there was a great reward in his return home: the chance to see Paquita Delprat again. Using his friendship with Paquita’s father as a pretext, Mawson visited the family several times in Broken Hill. At last he got up the nerve to ask her out on a date. As Paquita later wrote, “One day he telephoned me and asked if I would care to go to the theatre with him and bring one of my sisters. That did rather put ideas into my head. It was a musical comedy but I don’t think I remembered a word of it next morning.”

  According to Paquita’s great-granddaughter, “All of Paquita’s siblings were very much in awe of Douglas.” Gradually they realized, however, that his attentive interest in their doings served mainly as an excuse to spend time with their sister, who that winter was still only nineteen years old. Mawson visited the Delprats not only in Broken Hill, but at their seaside summer house near Adelaide. He and Paquita played tennis together. In December, Mawson finally proposed. Paquita’s memory of that enchanted evening gleams through a veil of Edwardian gauze:

  While the family were making music inside, Douglas and I were out on the verandah, looking at the sea—and the sound of waves will always be associated with the moment that I knew my feelings for him were reciprocated. . . . It all seemed like a dream, He so tall, so good-looking and so much in demand—Adelaide’s hero.