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

by David Roberts

  Mawson spent the rest of the night lying beside his dead comrade. “All that remained was his mortal frame,” he later wrote, “which, toggled up in his sleeping-bag, still offered some sense of companionship.” Late on the evening of January 8, Mawson “took the body of Mertz, still toggled up in his bag, outside the tent, piled snow blocks around it and raised a rough cross made of the two discarded halves of the sledge runners.” Beside the grave, he read the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer.

  At the time, Mawson thought he could explain the cause of his teammate’s demise. “Death due to exposure finally bringing on a fever,” he wrote in his diary, “result of weather exposure & want of food.”

  Want of food, indeed. By January 8, twenty-six days had passed since Ninnis’s fatal accident. Supplementing their intake with stringy, hard-to-chew dog meat, the men had stretched normal rations for a week and a half into almost four weeks’ survival fare. But now there was almost no food of any kind left, with still 100 miles to go.

  In his diary on January 8, Mawson coolly weighed his chances:

  For many days now (since 1st quite), Xavier’s condition has prevented us going on and now I am afraid it has cooked my chances altogether, even of a single attempt either to the Coast or to the Hut—lying in the damp bag for a week on extremely low rations has reduced my condition seriously. However, I shall spend today remodelling the gear to make an attempt. I shall do my utmost to the last.

  Ever since 1913, students of exploration history have wondered why Mertz, who had been in superb condition throughout the expedition, should have succumbed so much more rapidly and disastrously than Mawson. And they have puzzled over the symptoms that attacked the health of both men, as reported in Mawson’s diary.

  In 1969, eleven years after Mawson’s death, two Australian medical researchers published a paper in The Medical Journal of Australia titled “Hypervitaminosis A in the Antarctic in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–1914.” It was the hypothesis of John Cleland and R. V. Southcott that Mertz and Mawson had been poisoned by overdoses of vitamin A caused by eating the dogs’ livers. The fact that the huskies were from Greenland had everything to do with these toxic doses. For centuries, the Greenland Inuit had refrained from eating the livers of polar bears, wolves, and seals—and, in extremis, dogs—because they had apparently learned from immemorial trial and error that such food could cause a fatal poisoning.

  Cleland and Southcott argued that symptoms such as shedding of skin, muscular weakness, weight loss, damage to the central nervous system that manifested itself in fits like the ones Mawson reported Mertz undergoing, and others that Mawson suffered after Mertz’s death, such as his hair falling out in clumps, were all consistent with vitamin A poisoning. Some but not all of those symptoms would be produced by scurvy or slow starvation alone.

  Riffenburgh calls the Cleland and Southcott analysis “the most plausible cause for both Mertz’s death and the terrible symptoms that plagued Mawson in the ensuing weeks.” As for why Mertz suffered more intensely than Mawson, Riffenburgh cites a letter that Mawson wrote to Mertz’s father after the expedition. In it, Mawson speculates that “the actual final cause of his death was that his digestive system, becoming weaker by living on poor food, could not cope with the indigestible and non-nutritious dogs’ meat. He told me that he believed my greater capability to deal with that food was probably due to the fact that Swiss people are not used to a large meat diet, whereas English people and especially Australians eat a large proportion of meat.”

  Other experts, however, disagree. Phillip Law, an Australian scientist and expedition leader and a good friend of Mawson, told Mawson’s biographer Philip Ayres that the hypervitaminosis A theory was “completely unproven. . . . The symptoms that were described are exactly the ones you get from cold exposure.”

  For that matter, other explorers, including Amundsen’s South Pole party in 1911–12, had supplemented their rations with the meat of the huskies that had pulled their sledges without suffering from the ravages that afflicted Mertz and Mawson. To be sure, Amundsen’s team never came close to starvation.

  Mawson set about “remodelling the gear” for his desperate dash toward Winter Quarters at 9 a.m. on January 8, a mere seven hours after Mertz’s death. With only a serrated pocket knife as a tool, in a bravura feat of carpentry he sawed the sledge in half, keeping only the forward portion on which to stow his diminished supplies. He cut up Mertz’s burberry jacket and a waterproof cloth bag and sewed them together to make a lighter sail than the one he and Mertz had improvised with the tent cover. He made a mast out of a rail from the discarded rear part of the sledge, with a spar fashioned from another rail as a crosspiece. Finally he discarded every possible piece of gear that would not be essential to his survival. The most painful of those sacrifices was the last of the exposed film packs from the outward journey, containing the only photographs of Ninnis and Mertz on the final journey of their lives. Yet Mawson kept Mertz’s diary, determined to bring it back to the man’s family.

  Bad weather—winds up to 50 mph, with heavy snow drift—stalled Mawson through January 9 and 10. By himself, he thought that there was a good chance that if he took the tent down, he couldn’t get it pitched again in the fierce gale. A single night out without the tent would be fatal. “I have more to eat today,” he wrote with grim satisfaction on the 9th, “in hope that it will give me strength for the future.” On the 10th, he cooked the rest of the dog meat.

  His body was continuing to deteriorate. “One annoying effect of want of food is that wherever the skin breaks it refused to heal,” he noted, “the nose and lips break open also. My scrotum, like Xavier’s, is also getting in a painfully raw condition due to reduced condition, dampness and friction in walking. It is well nigh impossible to treat.”

  On January 11, Mawson got underway: “Almost calm, sun shining—a beautiful day,” with “surface good, slow downhill.” Although he “did not expect to make a very long day of it,” he was determined not to stop before he had covered ten miles.

  Almost at the outset of his march, however, Mawson made an appalling discovery.

  From the start my feet felt curiously lumpy and sore. They had become so painful after a mile of walking that I decided to examine them on the spot, sitting in the lee of the sledge in brilliant sunshine. I had not had my socks off for some days for, while lying in camp, it had not seemed necessary. On taking off the third and inner pair of socks the sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer, and abundant watery fluid had escaped saturating the sock. The new skin beneath was very much abraded and raw.

  In that despairing moment, Mawson wondered whether he could walk at all, let alone haul a sledge.

  However, there was nothing to be done but make the best of it. I smeared the new skin and the raw surfaces with lanoline . . . and then with the aid of bandages bound the old skin casts back in place. . . . Over the bandages were slipped six pairs of thick woollen socks, then fur boots and finally crampon over-shoes.

  “Treading like a cat” to try to minimize the pain, Mawson limped ahead. By 5:30 p.m., he had covered a creditable six and a half miles. He felt “quite worn-out—nerve worn. . . . Had it not been a delightful evening I should not have found strength to erect the tent.”

  Yet even in this latest agony, Mawson could taste joy as the sky cleared. “So glorious was it to feel the sun on one’s skin after being without it for so long,” he wrote, “that I next removed most of my clothing and bathed my body in the rays until my flesh fairly tingled—a wonderful sensation which spread throughout my whole person, and made me feel stronger and happier.”

  The good weather did not last. Mawson woke on January 12 to find falling snow and wind up to 45 mph. He spent the whole day trying to “give my feet a chance,” while he itemized his remaining food. “I sincerely wish it were twice as much,” he wrote in his diary. “As it is I have been continually pi
cking fragments from the different bags.”

  In the middle of the night, Mawson discovered that his watch had stopped because he had forgotten to wind it. This was a serious blow, for without an accurate reckoning of the time, it was difficult to calculate one’s longitude, even with a perfect sun sight. In the morning he reset the watch, guessing at the time. Dinner the evening before had consisted of “I bisc., less ½ pem[mican], little dog meat, cocoa.”

  Slowly the weather improved, allowing Mawson to pack up and start by 2 p.m. Pulling the half-sledge on descending terrain, he covered five and a half miles in six hours. Shortly after noon, he topped a rise and suddenly recognized the Mertz Glacier ahead of him. The familiar landscape compensated for forgetting to wind the watch. “My heart leapt with joy,” Mawson later wrote, “for all was like a map before me and I knew that over the hazy blue ridge in the far distance lay the Hut.” But back inside the tent, he discovered “feet worse than ever. Things look bad, but I shall persevere.”

  At 11 p.m. that night, camped near the glacier, Mawson was startled by “loud reports like heavy gun shots.” Lasting half an hour, they seemed to begin in the south and travel in a percussive wave toward the far-off coast. “It was hard to believe it was not caused by some human agency, but I learnt that it was due to the cracking of the glacier ice.” On December 13, the day before Ninnis had died in the huge crevasse, the men had heard similar gunshot reports from the creaking ice. If the memory of that earlier fusillade, possibly prefiguring the disaster of the 14th, gave Mawson new apprehensions a month later, he did not confess them to his diary.

  The next day, during which Mawson “had all I could do to pull the sledge downhill in the slop,” he covered five miles. He was also able to calculate an approximate latitude and longitude. But the desperation of his plight was never far from his mind. “If my feet do not improve,” he wrote that evening, “I must turn down the glacier and endeavour to reach the sea.” This remark is somewhat puzzling. The seacoast, of course, was closer than the hut, but travel down the Mertz Glacier, Mawson knew, would be more difficult than across the plateau on a path parallel to the men’s outward trek in November. Without the rifle, on the coast Mawson would have little chance of killing seals; even penguins might scuttle away from his feeble grasp. Perhaps Mawson hoped against hope that on the coast he might run into a search party or even the Aurora out looking for him.

  Mawson opened his diary entry the next day with the lament, “We should be at the Hut now.” The “we” is poignant. It was January 15, the deadline Mawson himself had set for the return of all sledging parties to Winter Quarters. He was still, by his own reckoning, 87 miles in an airline distance away from the hut. Even if he could stagger five miles a day without a break, it would take him at least until February 2 to reach Cape Denison. By then, surely, the Aurora would have departed. Meanwhile, Mawson was growing very short on food, his feet were not getting better, and general debilitation closed its grip on him with each passing day.

  On the 15th, Mawson managed only a single mile of sledging, thanks to a head wind and warmth that had softened the snow into a slush across which it was almost impossible to pull the sledge. During the day, inside the tent, “Try to sleep but cannot. . . . Am keeping food and mileage list at end of book now as checks on each other.”

  A day of such disheartening progress called for a redoubled effort on the morrow. Mawson was up at 2 a.m. on January 16. Even though heavy snow was falling, he got everything packed and was cinched into his sledge harness by 6:30. The wet snow made for miserable going. “It clung in lumps to the runners, which had to be scraped frequently,” he later wrote. “Riven ice ridges as much as eighty feet in height passed on either hand.” Without explaining why, Mawson had given up the idea of making a beeline for the coast. A grueling, daylong effort yielded only “an extremely heavy five miles.” That evening, “I treated myself to an extra supper of jelly soup made from dog sinews. I thought at the time that the acute enjoyment of eating compensated in some measure for the sufferings of starvation.” In his diary, he commented, “It takes quite a while dressing my feet each day now.”

  In the middle of his sledging push, Mawson had had a bad scare. Having slogged up a steep snow slope in bad light, he suddenly found himself sliding almost out of control down the other side.

  A glance ahead, even in that uncertain light, flashed the truth upon me—I was on a snow cornice, rimming the brink of a great blue chasm like a quarry, the yawning mouth of an immense and partly filled crevasse. Already the sledge was gaining speed as it slid past me towards the gaping hole below. Mechanically, I bedded my feet firmly in the snow and, exerting every effort, was just able to take the weight and hold up the sledge as it reached the very brink of the abyss. There must have been an interval of quite a minute during which I held my ground without being able to make it budge. It seemed an interminable time; I found myself reckoning the odds as to who would win, the sledge or I. Then it slowly came my way, and the imminent danger was passed.

  Had the sledge plunged into the crevasse, it would have pulled Mawson with it. He would have died a death very much like Ninnis’s.

  It was, Mawson knew, a close call. The next day would bring an even closer one.

  On January 17, snow still fell under an overcast sky. Planning to take advantage of the nighttime hours and move over relatively frozen snow, Mawson overslept. He got off that morning only around 8 a.m. The light was terrible: “Everything from below one’s feet to the sky above was one uniform ghostly glare.” Mawson’s progress had brought him into “a dangerous crevassed valley.” It was so hard to discern even the little ridges and hollows in the snow surface, let alone the faint blue tint of bridged-over crevasses, that he would normally have rested on such a day, “but delay meant a reduction of the ration and that was out of the question.”

  In late morning, he crossed several hidden crevasses without even realizing it until he was past them. Then, on an uphill slope, he plowed through new snow so deep and soft that he sank in at times up to his thighs. Despite these annoyances, Mawson thought “the sledge was running fairly well.”

  Shortly before noon, on another uphill slope, he broke through a snow bridge. He fell in thigh-deep, but caught himself on the edges with his arms. Carefully he extricated himself from the hole. In the faint light, he could not detect the orientation of the crevasse, but, probing with a stick, he thought he could figure it out. He decided to try a second crossing about 50 yards to one side.

  Alas! It took an unexpected turn catching me unawares. This time I shot through the centre of the bridge in a flash, but the latter part of the fall was decelerated by the friction of the harness [rope] which, as the sledge ran up, sawed back into the thick compact snow forming the margin of the lid. Having seen my comrades perish in diverse ways and having lost hope of reaching the Hut, I had already many times speculated on what the end would be like. So it happened that as I fell through into the crevasse the thought “so this is the end” blazed up in my mind, for it was to be expected that the next moment the sledge would follow through, crash on my head and all go to the unseen bottom. But the unexpected happened and the sledge held, the deep snow acting as a brake.

  The sledge sticking and acting as an anchor had prevented Mawson from duplicating the fatal plunge of Ninnis. But as his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness inside the crevasse, Mawson realized just how hopeless his situation looked. The reprieve, he sensed, was only temporary. The harness rope was 14 feet long. The crevasse walls were six feet apart, out of reach of even a wildly swinging boot. Mawson dangled free in space, 14 feet below the surface, which was visible only as a small hole directly above. The fall had filled his clothes with snow, which began to chill him at once.

  In mid-plunge, Mawson had felt a “great regret” sweep through his mind: “that after having stinted myself so assiduously in order to save food, I should now pass on to eternity without the satisfaction of what remained—to such an extent does food take possession
of one under such circumstances.”

  The only hope of salvation was to climb hand over hand up the harness rope. Even for a fit man in dry, warm conditions, such an athletic feat would have been barely possible. Only a chance precaution that Mawson had put into effect days before gave him the slightest edge: he had tied knots in the harness rope. Almost at once, Mawson began the “great effort.” He seized one of the knots, hung from it for a rest, then pulled himself violently upward until he could grasp the next knot. Hauling with all his waning strength, his legs still flailing in air, he reached the lip of the crevasse and tried to wrench his body past it.

  Suddenly, the lip broke loose, and Mawson fell back in all fourteen feet until the rope caught him again with an abrupt jerk. Once more, the sledge had held as an anchor. But Mawson felt only despair.

  There, exhausted, weak and chilled, hanging freely in space and slowly turning round as the rope twisted one way and the other, I felt that I had done my utmost and failed, that I had no more strength to try again and that all was over except the passing. It was to be a miserable and slow end and I reflected with disappointment that there was in my pocket no antidote to speed matters; but there always remained the alternative of slipping from the harness. There on the brink of the great Beyond I well remember how I looked forward to the peace of the great release—how almost excited I was at the prospect of the unknown to be unveiled.

  By “antidote to speed matters,” Mawson seems to mean some kind of suicide pill such as cyanide. In the expedition medical list, there was no such potion: the closest approximation is veiled in the ambiguous phrase “an assortment of ‘tabloid’ drugs for general treatment.” Yet on their doomed return from the South Pole the year before, Scott and his four companions had carried opium tablets for just such a purpose, but never used them.