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

by David Roberts

  As Bickerton wrote:

  We flung off our harnesses and dived at the cave. . . . In the centre of the floor was a food bag, the top covered with oranges and pineapples artistically arranged, on the shelf was a hurricane lamp covered with notes from earlier arrivals. . . . When I saw all this I let out a shout and the others soon came on top of me. We then set out to make more noise than one would imagine the little place capable of containing.

  It was 1:30 a.m. on January 18 when the trio approached the hut:

  All was very quiet and we sneaked in and all three stood in the doorway of the large hut unnoticed, some were asleep and some reading in bed, we shouted “Rise and shine!” at the top of our voices, and each man was out of his bunk like a Jack-in-the-Box. I still have only a confused idea of what followed. I remember eating strawberries and cream, drinking tea, smoking cigars and talking at a breakneck speed all the time.

  Despite Bickerton’s conviction that his ill-starred Western Party had accomplished far less than he had hoped, Mawson eventually saluted its achievements in The Home of the Blizzard. Noting that the team’s retreat in “atrocious weather conditions remains a nightmare to the participants,” Mawson added, “But the results were amply worth the sacrifice, for they have furnished concrete account of the hinterland of that stretch of coast which Dumont d’Urville sighted from sea and to which he gave the name of Adelie Land.”

  During the five days since the arrival of the Aurora, the men at Winter Quarters had been frantically packing boxes of gear and crates of scientific specimens before carrying them to the shore to load onto the ship. With the arrival of Bickerton’s party, expectations reached a fever pitch. As soon as Mawson’s Far Eastern Party came in, the Aurora could set sail westward, pick up Frank Wild’s team, and head for Australia. So far, it seemed, the expedition had been an unqualified success.

  On the 17th, someone in the hut reported that a party was coming in, apparently accompanied by dogs. “Then Thank God it is M[awson],” John King Davis wrote in his diary. “What a splendid thing. Only one more party now, and then we can away.” The arrival instead of Bickerton’s party came as “a great surprise. . . . The supposed dogs must have been a mirage.”

  On the 18th, Davis wrote, “There is still no news of the Doctor. I cannot help feeling a bit anxious. . . . We shall have to do something soon.” The next day, he recorded, “There is no sign of the Doctor. I do not know what to think.” The following day, January 20: “There is still no sign of Mawson. What has happened to him, I cannot think.” Davis had found the papers ordering him, after a certain date, to leave Cape Denison to go to the relief of Frank Wild’s party. But he could not quite bring himself to take that drastic course yet.

  The vigil continued. Day after day, in his diary, Davis wrote some version of his mantra of mounting worry: “There is still no sign of Mawson.” The men tried to keep dark thoughts out of their heads and free from their conversations, but they crowded in all the same. On January 24, Davis confessed, “There is still no sign of the Dr’s party and I am therefore still feeling low and depressed.” As Charles Laseron later recalled, “As day by day went by the sense deepened that something tragic had occurred.”

  Fifteen hundred miles to the west of Cape Denison, with no possible knowledge of what was transpiring among the Main Base parties, Frank Wild’s eight-man team at Western Base was carrying out its own program of exploration. Reconnaissance forays during the spring months had given the men a good head start on their summer missions, as they had not only broken trails but laid depots of food, fuel, and even sledges to be picked up on the main thrusts.

  Wild’s scheme was similar to Mawson’s, though simpler. Two three-man parties would follow the coastline east and west of the Shackleton Ice Shelf as far as they could before turning back. The other two men would remain at the hut—nicknamed the Grottoes, in homage to the snowpack covering its walls and the long snow tunnel that gave access to the door—as they kept the vital living quarters in good shape and made daily meteorological observations. Wild would lead the Eastern Coastal Party. The Western Party would be in the charge of Sydney Jones, twenty-four years old at the inception of the AAE. Raised in Queensland, Jones had studied medicine at the University of Sydney, where, according to one teammate, he was “considered the best surgeon the Sydney University has turned out in recent years.”

  Jones’s teammates were Archibald Hoadley and George Dovers, twenty-four and twenty-one years old respectively when Mawson had signed them on. From Melbourne, Hoadley was a mining engineer; Dovers, from Sydney, worked for the government as a surveyor. Their mission was a comparatively straightforward one: to map the coastline west of the Shackleton Ice Shelf for some 200 miles. Thanks to the accidents of landscape, the journey of the Western Coastal Party would turn out to be the safest and the biologically richest of the six major journeys accomplished by the AAE.

  Wild’s two parties were burdened by no deadline such as the January 15 ultimatum Mawson had given the Main Base teams. The men at Western Base knew that the Aurora was due to arrive at Cape Denison by that date, but they had no idea when the ship would come to pick them up. Given that the year before, it had taken four weeks to explore west from Commonwealth Bay before finding a landing site 1,500 miles away, Wild’s team knew only that, if all went well, the Aurora would arrive sometime—most likely weeks—after January 15. Wild had been ordered to be ready by January 30 for a pickup, but he was aware that that was an arbitrary date based on an educated guess on Mawson and Davis’s parts. For all the men at Western Base knew, the Aurora (as “Gloomy” Davis had cautioned them the year before) might have been lost on its return to Australia in early 1912. If that were true, there was virtually no hope that the eight men could be rescued. All these uncertainties generated a psychological strain on the men at Western Base far crueler than anything the Main Base teams had to endure.

  Unlike all five other major parties of the AAE, Jones’s trio had a set, predetermined goal. The men knew that Gaussberg, an extinct volcano that had been discovered and climbed by Erich von Drygalski’s German team in 1902, lay about 200 miles west of the Grottoes. There would be little point exploring beyond that peak, since the terrain of Kaiser Wilhelm Land (as Drygalski had named the arena of his exploration) was known. But it would be a handsome deed to map the westernmost stretch of terra incognita along the coast of Adélie Land and link up Australian discoveries with the decade-old German ones.

  The men set off on November 7. Two days later, they reached a sizable depot the team had laid during the spring months. That cache included a second sledge. Loading food for thirteen weeks and all the requisite gear on both sledges, they found that their burden weighed an ungainly 1,200 pounds. Although they tried to haul both sledges in tandem, that feat proved impossible. Instead, the men reconciled themselves to the demoralizing drudgery of relaying—pulling one sledge ahead a few miles, leaving it there, hiking back, then pulling the second sledge up to join the first.

  The men suffered the minor crevasse plunges and the days of tent-bound storm-waiting that all the AAE parties had to endure, but still marched onward with clockwork efficiency—so much so that on November 25, eighteen days out, they indulged in a weeklong detour. That day, Dovers spotted what he thought was an ice-covered island far to the northwest, towering out of the frozen sea. Haswell Island, as the team named this apparition, seemed to be well worth investigating. Leaving behind one sledge and most of their provisions, the trio worked out a devious route to approach the anomalous outcropping of rock and ice.

  There they stumbled upon a biological paradise. A floe attached to the island was a rookery, so dense with emperor penguins that the animals covered a tract of four or five acres. “The sound of their cries coming across the ice,” Jones reported, “reminded one of the noise from a distant sports ground during a well-contested game. . . . We estimated the numbers to be seven thousand five hundred, the great majority being young birds.”

  Intending a visit of
only twenty-four hours, the men were stuck on Haswell by a five-day storm, during which they hiked out each day to explore their novel surroundings. The small, rocky island turned out to be the habitat of immense throngs of birds of all kinds. Here the men found the first nesting ground of the Antarctic petrel ever discovered. There were also hordes of skua gulls that swooped down to steal unguarded penguin eggs and chicks, cape pigeons, southern fulmars, and other species of petrel. The men marveled at the luxuriant green algae floating in meltwater pools, and at lush carpets of lichen furring the rocks. Out on the sea ice, near tide cracks, Weddell seals lounged in great numbers.

  Unwilling simply to observe and photograph, Dovers gathered about a dozen eggs from Adélie penguins. Back in camp, the men fried them up. As Dovers wrote in his diary:

  We had pepper & salt & Jones had with great forethought put in three tea tin lids to serve as plates. How shall I describe those eggs, fried in a little pemmican fat, we each ate three, & all voted them the best eggs we had ever tasted. Jones said there is a flavour about these that goes straight to the heart.

  By December 3, the men had returned to their cached sledge and resumed their main trek. With them they brought all kinds of specimens from Haswell Island. Still relaying, they pushed onward, veering 20 miles inland to avoid gashing crevasse fields near the coast. On December 12, with a favorable wind filling their makeshift sails, for the first time the men were able to haul both sledges simultaneously. And on the 16th, they spotted Gaussberg in the distance. But the approach to the extinct volcano turned out to be even trickier than the route to Haswell Island. Another week passed before the men got to the peak and climbed the 1,200 feet to its summit.

  On top, the men found two rock cairns and, lying beside them, bamboo poles that the Germans had mounted, but that had blown over during the intervening decade. Search as they might, however, they could find no note or written record from Drygalski’s team. It was an eerie, tantalizing moment—the only occasion in the whole duration of the AAE that any of Mawson’s men would behold human artifacts other than the ones they themselves had brought to the continent.

  Jones calculated that, seven weeks out from The Grottoes, the men had marched some 300 miles (including relays) to gain a distance of 215. They could have pushed on for another week, but, as Jones later wrote, “from the summit of Gaussberg one could see almost as far as could be marched in a week.” They turned homeward on December 26, having devoured a plum pudding on Christmas Day.

  The return was essentially uneventful. On January 21, the men’s seventy-sixth day on the trail, they reached The Grottoes, “concluding,” as Mawson rather dryly wrote in The Home of the Blizzard, “an achievement of which Jones, Hoadley and Dovers should feel justly proud.” There they found all five of their Western Base teammates in residence. The latter had quite a different tale to tell from that of the straightforward jaunt to Gaussberg, and a far more frightening one.

  In late August, still under wintry conditions, Wild had led a party 84 miles east to lay a substantial depot for the upcoming summer’s exploration. At a nunatak (an upthrust of bedrock poking through the surrounding ice) that the men named Hippo, they cached six weeks’ food for three men, along with a sledge, which they buried in a three-foot-deep hole, then covered with a six-foot mound of snow with a bamboo pole mounted on top to serve as a landmark. The night before, the temperature had dropped to minus 47 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Even that relatively modest journey was plagued with trials. On the return march, violent winds pinned the men down in an improvised bivouac hole. Wrote Wild later:

  Many of the gusts must have been well over 100 miles an hour. One of them lifted Harrisson clean over my head and dropped him 20 feet away. . . . We remained in this hole five days, the wind at hurricane force the whole time and horrible avalanches crashing down at frequent intervals, every one giving me pains in the stomach; I could not get over the dread of being flattened out like a squashed beetle.

  For the summer’s Eastern Coastal Party, Wild chose Alexander Kennedy and Andrew Watson as his companions. Yet another pair of young Aussie science graduates, they had attended the University of Sydney and the University of Adelaide respectively. To caretake the hut and make daily meteorological observations, Wild appointed the biologist Charles Harrisson and Morton Moyes, another of Mawson’s students at Adelaide who was also a superb athlete, having starred in cricket matches and won the high jump championship of South Australia.

  At the last minute, Harrisson begged to be allowed to accompany the Eastern Coastal Party as far as Hippo Depot. “As on the return he would have to travel nearly 100 miles alone,” Wild admitted, “I did not like the idea, but he demonstrated that he could erect a tent by himself so I agreed that he should come.”

  Of the nine dogs Wild’s team had brought to Western Base, only three were still alive, another having vanished in the winter. The survivors were named Amundsen, Zip, and Switzerland. Ever the dog-lover, Wild resolved to bring them on the journey, hoping they might aid in the sledge-hauling. In the end, the terrain proved too tough for the huskies, who had their annoying habits on the trail. “Zip broke loose one night,” Wild reported, “and ate one of my socks which was hanging on the sledge to dry; it probably tasted of seal blubber from the boots. Switzerland, too, was rather a bother, eating his harness whenever he had a chance.”

  On October 30, the four men set out with two sledges, carrying food for fourteen weeks plus an additional four weeks’ supplies for Harrisson and the dogs. The total weight was 970 pounds. The huskies and one man pulled one sledge, while three men hauled the other. It took them a week to reach Hippo Depot. There they received a rude shock. The cached food bags were scattered across the snow. But the sledge, buried three feet deep two months earlier, had disappeared. The men searched for it all the next day, probing the snow with shovels, but found no sign of it. Apparently the hurricane winds had lifted the heavy sledge out of its snow hole and blown it far away.

  This unexpected setback forced a cruel decision on Wild. He would have to commandeer the sledge Harrisson had intended to pull back to The Grottoes to replace the one that had been carried away. And he would have to recruit Harrisson himself as a fourth member of the Eastern Coastal Party. As Harrisson wrote in his diary, “I cannot go back in any safety without a sledge.” (Sledges, with sturdy harnesses leading from them to the sledgers, had served countless times on the AAE as a dead weight to check a man’s crevasse fall. In addition, Harrisson could not possibly carry all the gear for the return journey on his back.) “The great trouble is poor Moyes. He will be left alone for the 12 weeks, thinking I have ‘gone under’ on the return journey. He will have a bad time, & I am concerned for him; but he is a sensible fellow, & should come thro this ordeal.” Wild added, “I was extremely sorry for Moyes, but . . . it could not be helped.”

  Only two days beyond the Hippo nunatak, the men encountered crevasses and pressure ridges so thick the dogs had to be unharnessed, as the men lightened the loads and ferried the sledges delicately back and forth across the most treacherous passages. One snow bridge collapsed just after a sledge passed over it, leaving, Wild swore, “a hole 12 feet wide and hundreds of feet deep.”

  On November 14, the men left another depot of supplies for their return journey. Only three days later, they ran smack into the edge of a huge glacier. It would later be named by Mawson the Denman Glacier, after the governor-general of Australia, a patron of the expedition. The ice flow, between eight and 12 miles across and 80 miles from head to snout, stopped the team in its tracks. None of the four men, not even the vastly experienced Wild, had ever seen anything like it. Indeed, no one on the AAE would behold a more chaotic piece of topography anywhere in Adélie Land.

  “Cascades of shattered ice, so broken that it stood out a great white scar on the icecap & not a single dark thread of unbroken ice through it!” wrote Harrisson later. Watson added, “To cross where we were was impossible unless we had wings or aeroplanes.” No matter
what an obstacle the Denman Glacier presented to the party’s hopes, Wild later called it “the most wonderful sight I have ever seen.” It was impossible at the time to gauge the glacier’s size, but Wild understood the geologic torment it represented:

  The Denman Glacier moves much more rapidly than the Shackleton Shelf and in tearing through the latter, breaks it up and also shatters its own sides. At the actual point of contact is an enormous cavern over 1,000 feet wide and 400 feet deep with crevasses at the bottom which appear to have no bottom. . . . Enormous blocks of solid ice forced high up into the air beyond. The whole was the wildest, maddest and yet the grandest thing imaginable.

  The only hope for further progress was to skirt the glacier. Faced with the choice of heading north out onto the sea ice to try to round the glacier’s snout or heading south inland to flank it at its head, Wild chose the former course. The work of the next ten days was more grueling, discouraging, and dangerous than anything the Eastern Coastal Party had yet faced. On several days, storms and snowfall kept the men tent-bound. There was no possibility of using the three dogs to pull: instead, the men were reduced to “hauling up and lowering the sledges with an alpine rope and twisting and turning in all directions, with waves and hills, monuments, statues, and fairy castles in all directions, from a few feet to over 300 feet in height.” Visibility was usually limited to a few hundred yards, so the men had to climb ice towers to scout the route ahead.