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

by David Roberts

  It is a tribute to the men’s hardiness (and perhaps to their good luck) that for all the tribulations of that winter, none of the team suffered a serious injury, not even a bad case of frostbite. The hut they had built was so sturdy that it withstood every gale and whirly the climate could assault it with. The long, dark days of confinement could seem tedious in the extreme, but companionship forged a morale that trumped boredom and depression. In retrospect, that vigil in the “home of the blizzard” could take on for some of its participants the aura of a domestic idyll. Thus Laseron, thirty-five years later:

  The day’s tasks are ended, and all amuse themselves in various ways. At one end of the table Bickerton, Hannam, Hunter and I are engaged in a game of bridge, while Madigan, Murphy and the doctor look idly on. Farther down the table sits Mertz, choosing a record for the gramophone, while Bage, with his favourite old pipe, its stem mended with adhesive tape, offers his advice. Stillwell is reading a book, and Close is writing something in his diary. Lying on his bunk, Whetter has his nose in a medical treatise, and on the other side of the hut Hurley, with facetious remarks, is cutting Correll’s hair, and doing a job that would cause any self-respecting barber to have a fit.

  Or Mawson, at the remove of only a year after the expedition:

  The whole world is asleep, except the night-watchman, and he, having made the bread, washed a tubful of clothes, kept the fire going, observed and made notes on the aurora every fifteen minutes and the weather every half-hour, and, finally, having had a bath, indulges in buttered toast and a cup of coffee.

  The Hut is dark, and a shaded burner hangs by a canvas chair in the kitchen. The wind is booming in gusts, the dogs howl occasionally in the veranda, but the night-watchman and his pipe are at peace with all men. He has discarded a heavy folio for a light romance, while the hours scud by, broken only by the observations. The romance is closed, and he steals to his bunk with a hurricane lamp and finds a bundle of letters. He knows them well, but he reads them—again!

  The last touch was in a real sense autobiographical. For all his enthusiasm for the expedition, Mawson badly missed his beloved Paquita. He had with him the last letters she had written before his departure, and from Cape Denison he wrote longingly to her. One note, scribbled in haste on January 19 so that it could be carried back to Australia on the Aurora, promised, “We have made a successful landing and I don’t anticipate anything in the nature of disaster. Your wandering Dougelly will return with the Olive Branch to his haven of rest in little over a year’s time.” And the letter closed:

  Know O’Darling that in this frozen South I can always wring happiness from my heart by thinking of your splendid self.

  There is an ocean of love between us dear.

  Your loving Douglas

  Mawson wrote to Paquita from Winter Quarters, even while he knew that the letter was not likely to reach her before he himself did: “I have concluded, once again, that it is nice to be in love, even here in Antarctica with the focus of the heartstrings far far away. . . . Good Bye my Darling may God keep and Bless and Protect you.”

  The Home of the Blizzard hews strictly to the convention of the day in expedition chronicles, of keeping conflict and criticism among the members of the AAE out of sight. The practical jokes the men played on one another, the buffoonery and the jesting, supply the good-natured anecdotes that only hint at the tensions of hut life. The men, Mawson seems to imply, may have had foibles and quirks, but not real faults.

  The men’s diaries, however, tell a different and truer story. Among other things, they record the antagonisms that various team members sometimes felt toward their leader, but dared not voice. On September 30, for instance, John Hunter wrote, “It is one of the Doc’s worst traits to speak dogmatically of subjects of which he has only a surface knowledge.” Or Laseron, on February 18, “We now like [Mawson] much better than at first. This is of course all in spite of his faults, of which he undoubtedly has a good many. One of his worst is a nasty sneery way he has of saying things at times, though perhaps he doesn’t mean all he says and evidently forgets it soon after.”

  Among all the teammates, the one most critical of Mawson was undoubtedly Cecil Madigan, but the exact nature of his complaints, and the events that provoked them, are difficult to unearth. Madigan’s decision to accept the invitation to join the AAE was an understandably ambivalent one. Only twenty-three years old when he sailed on the Aurora, he had been Mawson’s student at the University of Adelaide, where he performed so well that he was selected as the Rhodes scholar for 1911 from South Australia. Madigan had actually arrived at Oxford to begin his graduate study when he learned that Mawson had pulled strings to persuade the Rhodes trustees to defer Madigan’s scholarship by a year. When one official in Oxford encouraged Madigan to join the expedition, he sailed back to Australia after only two weeks in England.

  What part these machinations played in Madigan’s growing resentment of his leader at Winter Quarters is hard to judge. It was Madigan who coined the taunting nickname Dux Ipse (or “The Leader Himself”) for Mawson, with its overtones of self-importance and authoritarian rule. That the other men adopted it as “D. I.” (though never to Mawson’s face) suggests that the sentiment was widely shared.

  Madigan kept a detailed diary, but during recent decades it has not been available to scholars. Its contents emerge only in paraphrase in a very curious, privately printed book called Vixere Fortes: A Family Archive, published in 2000 by Madigan’s son, David Madigan. (Cecil Madigan died in 1947.) If Vixere Fortes accurately reflects Madigan’s private feelings on the AAE, the annoyance with his leader began early, while the men were still on board the Aurora. “Cecil had been ‘Maddy’ to his university friends,” writes the son, “and Mawson now began addressing him by this nickname, a familiarity that he resented.” At first, in Winter Quarters, Madigan’s attitude toward the leader seems to have been tempered, but as the winter wore on, his disdain built. One day, according to Vixere Fortes, Mawson attempted to install what he called a “puffometer”—a homemade device to measure peak gusts of wind—but “with his usual clumsiness at such jobs, of which, being the leader, he could not be relieved,” the machine fell apart in the wind.

  Such casual aspersions seam the text of Vixere Fortes. Mawson’s toast on the king’s birthday, Madigan may have thought, was insincere, for the Dux Ipse “was as loyal as a depressed Irish tenant” to the monarchy of the United Kingdom. In general, Mawson not only demanded ceaseless hard work from the men, but “treated them like children, and if he saw anyone apparently idle for a moment he began grumbling and dropping hints, though he did scarcely anything himself.” Madigan may have felt singled out by Mawson’s harsh treatment:

  His temperament was naturally equable but he sometimes became very irritable and peevish and in those moods of polar depression, as they were called, he could be most unfair, scolding everybody and reproving individuals for laziness. Cecil was sometimes the victim of this treatment, which annoyed him excessively, but he endured it philosophically and in silence. Mawson accused him of neglecting the meteorology, although he scarcely had a minute free all day.

  Hand in hand with resentment on Madigan’s part goes contempt—at least according to the son. Mawson’s character is “irremediably prosaic”; he is always “fussing about and dropping hints”; only after it was obvious to everyone else did it “dawn on Mawson that he was driving his men too hard.” With the coming of spring and the first sledging journeys, Madigan’s irritation with his leader only intensified.

  All this must be taken with a generous dose of salt. Short of being able to read Madigan’s original diary, the historian is ill-equipped to judge the veracity of Vixere Fortes, whose tone of escalating contempt hints at some unspoken agenda. Years after the AAE, Madigan worked for several decades as a lecturer in geology at the University of Adelaide. He was thus a junior faculty member in the department that came to be chaired by Mawson. Who knows what long-simmering academic tensions may have under
lain the relationship between mentor and protégé? Or what revenge a petulant son may have tried to enact in print fifty-three years after his father’s death, and forty-two after Mawson’s? A possible corrective to Vixere Fortes is the fact that in both The Home of the Blizzard and in Mawson’s AAE diary, he has scarcely a harsh word to say about Madigan.

  Mawson’s diary, not published until 1988, or thirty years after his death, is far more candid about interpersonal tensions than is The Home of the Blizzard. During the four months from the arrival of the Aurora in Hobart until the firm establishment of the team in Winter Quarters, the diary is cursory in the extreme—one-line entries spaced widely apart. During those hectic times, the leader was evidently too busy to write. Only on February 28 does he begin to record longer observations, but even these are impersonal and telegraphic. (“Hurricane gusty”; “Blizzard as usual”; “Great numbers of seals up around bay.”) Logistics command all of Mawson’s attention.

  Then, suddenly, on May 3, Mawson writes an extended treatise on the various characters of men on Antarctic expeditions, in by far the longest passage yet consigned to the diary. Virtually no names are named, but it is clear that the Dux Ipse has been carefully observing his men and sorting out their performances. The immediate provocation is Mawson’s worry that the guy ropes supporting the radio masts are chafing in the wind and are likely to sever. Hannam, Mertz, and Ninnis immediately rush to the site to survey the damage, “but I was sorry to see that others, who were not engaged on special work, excused themselves and one even refused to go.”

  Mawson’s disappointment in those “others” triggers a taxonomic analysis of the makeup of polar explorers.

  First are the accomplished and painstaking stickers who are the backbone of things. Give them a piece of work to do and you may be sure that it will be done as well as can be. . . .

  Then there are the mediocre people—those who are not really good at anything but can assist under supervision. . . .

  Finally there are the men who don’t fit in—who can’t conscientiously say they are good at anything. Fortunately such a one is a “rara avis.” It is a curious thing that men who are clumsy at doing things show no desire to learn.

  The awkward formality of this entry suggests that Mawson still felt the presence of some future reader looking over his shoulder. He complains about shirkers and misfits without betraying the code of keeping an expedition’s dirty laundry under wraps. It is not until June 4 that his vexation drives him to name “the men who don’t fit in.” In Mawson’s view, two of them are the worst—the forty-year-old ex-military officer John Close and the twenty-nine-year-old medical student Leslie Whetter. (Whetter, with Eric Webb, was one of only two New Zealanders in the Main Base party.)

  Predictably, the initial charge against Whetter was laziness:

  At breakfast Whetter asks when the winter routine is to begin. When I ask him what that is, he says “Oh, you said we would then only work half a day.” This is rot. What I said was that all should hold themselves ready for ½ day’s general work. He has never had more than 2 hours per day.

  The next day, Mawson observed sarcastically, Whetter “bucked up.” Charged with going outside the hut to chop ice for drinking water, he “did not stick to it long,” barely collecting a day’s supply for the team. “I do not think he has been overworked nor do I think he is likely to accomplish his FRCS [Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons],” Mawson wrote. An evening exchange provoked the leader to further ire. “He told me last night that the scientific work of the others was a pastime with them. I told him that he was the most lucky man on earth to have such a job as he had, for it kept him in good health.”

  During the following days, the tension between the two men grew worse. By June 11, Mawson felt outright disgust.

  Whetter was sick last night, diarrhoea. He sleeps all day today though stating that he would get up and get ice this afternoon. Whetter is not fit for a polar expedition. I wish I had minded his mother’s cablegram warning me. When unloading cargo he got dizzy and had to lie up. Of late he has complained of overwork, and he only does an honest 2 hours work per day.

  On June 18, matters came to a head, after Whetter refused Mawson’s request to go out and retrieve frozen penguin carcasses from the veranda, claiming that he had not finished gathering ice for the men’s drinking water. Mawson ordered Whetter to his private room inside the hut.

  We then had a long talk in which I showed him that he was entirely unfit for an expedition, chiefly through lack of determination in character and failing to do his level best towards the interests of the expedition. As usual he attempted to make light of all the charges and seemed to think my opinion of little value.

  For a few days after this dressing-down, Whetter’s performance seemed to improve, but by July, according to Mawson, he was back to his indolent ways.

  What was wrong with Whetter? There are hints that he had a drinking problem, for on July 3, Mawson noted, “Whetter has apparently drunk the Port wine.” Alcoholism among overwinterers in Antarctica has always been a source of dangerous friction, for on an expedition such as the AAE, wine and liquor were strictly reserved for ceremonial occasions. A man sneaking drinks from a communal supply meant to last for months was guilty of one of the more serious offenses an expedition member could commit.

  Whetter’s long hours of sleep and disinclination to work hard, however, hint at a deep depression. “Polar depression” was indeed a real and recurrent phenomenon during Arctic and Antarctic overwinterings. In some cases, it could threaten to wreck an expedition. On the Belgica expedition from 1897–99, the first to winter over in Antarctica, the leaders, Adrien de Gerlache and Georges Lecointe, grew mysteriously ill, took to their beds (on the frozen-in ship, not in a hut), and essentially gave up on life, writing their final wills. Two team members—Dr. Frederick A. Cook, later to become infamous for faking both the discovery of the North Pole and the first ascent of Mount McKinley, and Roald Amundsen, on his first polar expedition—took charge and saved the whole enterprise. The men of the AAE knew all about this Antarctic horror story, for Cook’s vivid account of the expedition, Through the First Antarctic Night, was in the library at Winter Quarters and was read by many of Mawson’s team.

  Mawson was not the only one in the AAE to complain about Whetter’s feckless performance. On March 22, John Hunter wrote, “Whetter of course still pursuing his usual occupation of sitting down.” Three months later, Hunter elaborated, “Whetter is a conundrum; he is a big fairly strong fellow, yet is lazy; chronically so I think & there is no one the Doctor dislikes more than Whetter.” And Cecil Madigan (as filtered through his son’s Vixere Fortes) pronounced, “Whetter was incurably lazy and fearfully careless.”

  Mawson racked his brains trying to figure out what was going on with Whetter. On a loose sheet of paper preserved in the Mawson Collection at the South Australia Museum, he made notes to himself about the New Zealander:

  He appears to have changed since joining exped—appeared willing when he arrived at first. . . .

  Why did he not mention to me at lunch time that he was not well enough to get the ice in during the afternoon as arranged[?] . . .

  Whetter made no bread when cook Friday June 14th. . . .

  The soup so badly burnt that not-fit-to-eat. No bread—the tapioca pudding a damned disgrace. . . .

  According to his own words he came on the expedition so as to have a quiet time to study—I believe he came also for his health.

  This is a criminal matter.

  On October 3, Mawson lost his patience altogether and exploded at Whetter in the most intense outburst of rage recorded by any of the eighteen men in Winter Quarters. As he summarized the confrontation in his diary,

  At something to 4 pm Whetter came in, took his clothes off and intended to read a book. Before lunch I had asked him to dig out the hangar in front after getting in the ice.

  I heard at 4 pm that he had not done this, and his appearance in the Hut to read
a book was in direct disobedience to my orders. I was very wroth about this and asked him why he was coming in under the circumstances. He said he had done enough. I asked him what he had come on the expedition for. He said “not to do such kind of work.” I said he was a “bloody fool to come on the expedition if that was the case.” He said “Bloody fool yourself” and “I won’t be caught on another one.” I instantly told him to come into my room. I was wild but immediately calmed and talked things over with him at length in the most lenient and persuasive terms possible to try and let him see his error.

  It was of little use.

  By now, with the spring and summer’s sledging campaign growing near, Mawson sensed a wholesale crisis looming. Having read the riot act to Whetter in his private room, that evening at dinner he felt the need to exhort the entire team with a pep talk. “I gave quite a long address,” Mawson wrote in his diary, “ended by saying that the united efforts of all are required to make the expedition successful, and a successful expedition meant success to them all.” Afterward, several of the men came up to the leader and pledged their support in the hard work to come.

  If Whetter kept his own diary during the AAE, it has either been lost or remains in private hands. According to historian Beau Riffenburgh, little is known of Whetter’s career after the AAE. He returned to a medical practice in New Zealand, and died in 1955.

  The problem with John Close was not so much “polar depression” as general incompetence exacerbated by anxiety. Mawson’s first diary complaint about the forty-year-old, on June 14, has to do with a botched culinary effort for which Whetter and Close shared the blame:

  Whetter cooks but makes a hopeless failure of it. At 10 to 6 pm he is asleep and the messman also. The latter, Close, has however done almost everything that had been done in the afternoon—afternoon tea, etc. They got kerosene in the water tanks, soup hopelessly burned. No water and Hut cold.