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

by David Roberts

  By mid-October, Bickerton finally got the radio to work well enough to send and receive the occasional message. One of the first exchanges was with Charles Sandell, one of the two radio men on Macquarie. “This place is awful!” Bickerton sent. To which Sandell replied, “So is this—Hell!”

  In October, the men started packing up the rocks and biological specimens. Out on a walk on the 17th, Madigan and Mawson discovered the first penguins, so Bickerton’s bet with McLean was nullified. “They are 6 days late (allowing for Leap Year),” Mawson scolded the recalcitrant birds. Soon the men were eating scrambled penguin eggs.

  The men’s frenzy to leave Antarctica knew no bounds. Madigan, in particular, could barely stand the wait. In the paraphrase of his son, “As the end of the year approached Cecil became more and more impatient. He could scarcely contain himself and wondered how he had been able to live through the last nine months. . . . He cursed himself for having listened to Mawson’s persuasion to join the Expedition.”

  On leaving Commonwealth Bay the previous February, Captain Davis had given Madigan a set of Thackeray’s novels. Since “the only recreation was reading,” Madigan was deeply grateful for the gift, but found himself unable to concentrate on the books. He picked up Xenophon’s Anabasis instead, hoping to prep himself for his upcoming year at Oxford, but Greek grammar flummoxed him. He turned next to geology textbooks, with which Mawson offered to help him, but before long “Cecil was bored to extinction with it.”

  On October 31, the men were thrilled to receive a message relayed from Macquarie informing them that the Aurora would depart from Hobart around November 15. Mawson’s diary for most of the month of November reverts to one- or two-line entries; sometimes he wrote only two words (“Dense drift,” “Moderate weather”). Now that Jeffryes’s work with the radio was no longer essential, the man seemed to recede into the background, though Mawson could not help recording his seesaw mental state. On the 15th, “Jeffryes appears to think he is going sledging, is preparing, mimicks us in whatever we do.” A week later: “Jeffryes is getting better. I spoke to him. He says he is helpless, that I have a spell on him. I tell him that I put a spell on him not to play monkey tricks when I am away.”

  On November 15, Bickerton picked up a fragmentary broadcast from Macquarie: “Ship goes.” The men unanimously agreed that “the word ‘today’ must have been lost in the ether.” In actuality, the Aurora did not set out from Hobart until November 19. It took the ship ten days to reach Macquarie Island. On the morning of the 29th, the five men who had endured their own two-year vigil on that desolate island, all in the service of a radio link that almost never worked, gratefully boarded the Aurora and started lapping up news of the outside world from Captain Davis and his crew.

  Mawson had decided to make one last sledging journey to recover the instruments that had been cached the year before by two of the exploring parties on their desperate homeward legs. He chose Madigan and Hodgeman to accompany him, leaving Bickerton, Bage, and McLean to maintain the hut. For the first time all year, Mawson put the huskies to work hauling the sledges. Before leaving, he wrote out “orders” to Bage about dealing with Jeffryes: “Do not hesitate to put him in irons if he becomes obstreperous. At all times keep a good watch on him. As he is wont to burn a light in a dangerous position it is not safe to leave him alone in the hut for long. He is told to do his share as cook.”

  One might think that after his terrible ordeal of the summer before, Mawson would have set off in November on a mission whose only aim was to salvage expensive instruments with a certain trepidation, or that the ever-present menace of unseen crevasses would still haunt him. But Mawson’s diary during this journey records only annoyance at sastrugi ridges and crevasse fields, not fear. Intending to start on November 16, Mawson was delayed by bad weather until the 24th.

  The men took along a small wireless receiving kit, in hopes that their teammates in the hut could send them regular messages. Like so much else to do with radio communication on the AAE, this effort failed. On only the second day out, Mawson wrote, “At 4:15 camped, as wished to hear wireless—but heard nothing.”

  With the dogs pulling well, the trio made good progress, covering as many as 21 miles in a single day. On November 28, five days out, they camped on the summit of a peak the team later named Mount Murchison. There the previous summer Madigan’s Eastern Coastal Party had planted a ten-foot flagpole. Now the men were shocked to find less than a foot of pole emerging from the drifts of winter. The pole ought to have guided the men to Madigan’s cache, deposited in the nearby valley, but with nine feet of hard-packed snow overlying everything, the search for the instruments was fruitless.

  Still unwilling to abandon the precious gear, Mawson started the men south toward the depot Bage’s Southern Party had laid the summer before, 67 miles out from Winter Quarters. But on December 2, snow started falling, the wind rose to 40 mph, and visibility closed down almost to zero. The men stayed tent-bound for four days. Realizing that a search for Bage’s cache would almost certainly be hopeless, Mawson decided to turn the team around.

  Meanwhile, the men left at the hut found simply waiting for the Aurora a grueling psychological test. On November 28, McLean wrote, “Good weather. What a day for the ship to arrive. I’m afraid we think of nothing else but that ship. One becomes very impatient and distrustful.” On December 2, Bickerton, the compulsive tinkerer, tried to use dynamite to blow up the ice that still clung to the shores at Cape Denison. The explosions made virtually no dent in the pack.

  For the sledgers out on the plateau south of Winter Quarters, the return journey, in constant wind, with lashing snowstorms, brought back with a vengeance all the miseries they had endured on their journeys the previous summer. Tent-bound on December 11, Mawson at last gave vent to his feelings in his diary: “Nothing visible—no hope of travelling, direction nothing, the very ground invisible. Walking on, one slips and falls, stubs the toes and stumbles on sastrugi.” And:

  The dreary outlook, the indefinite surroundings, the neverending seethe, rattle and ping of the drift. The flap of the tent; the uncertainty of clearance, the certainty of protracted abomination. The dwindling of food, the deterioration of tent, dogs, etc. The irksomeness, bone-wearying cramped quarters, the damp or the cold.

  There was something glumly appropriate in the fact that the last of all the sledging missions of the most ambitious expedition yet launched in Antarctica should end up as a wild goose chase. Yet on the next day, the three sledgers were granted a soul-stirring benediction. As Mawson later remembered it:

  Descending the long blue slopes of the glacier just before midnight on December 12, from an outlook of a thousand feet above the Hut, I sighted a faint black bar on the seaward horizon; with the aid of glasses a black speck was discernible at the windward extremity of the bar—and it could be nothing but the smoke of the Aurora! The moment of which we had dreamt for months had assuredly come. The ship was in sight!

  Dashing down the last thousand feet, the three men brought the good news to their teammates who, even as they gave vent to “wild cheers,” scrambled with binoculars up to the nearest ridge behind the hut to verify the sighting themselves. Then, realizing that it would be some time before the Aurora could anchor close to shore, the men tried to catch a last few hours of sleep in the hut. As Mawson wrote:

  Just as most of us were dozing off an unusual sound floated in from without and the next moment in rushed Captain Davis, breezy, buoyant, brave and true. . . . His cheery familiar voice rang through the Hut as he pushed a way into the gloom of the living room. It was an indescribable moment, this meeting after two years.

  For Davis, the rendezvous was every bit as emotional. As he recalled decades later, “As I shook [Mawson’s] hand I was conscious of a sudden feeling of intense relief—relief that he was manifestly alive and well, relief that I had been able to do my duty. My life has given me few moments that have been more rewarding.”

  It took another ten days to load al
l the gear and specimens aboard the Aurora, but on December 23, the ship pulled out of Commonwealth Bay, bound for Australia. Over a lavish dinner in the wardroom, Mawson at last was free to ponder the meaning of what would prove to be the defining experience of his life:

  The two long years were over—for the moment they were to be effaced in the glorious present. We were to live in a land where drift and wind were unknown, where rain fell in mild refreshing showers, where the sky was blue for long weeks, and where the memories of the past were to fade into a dream—a nightmare?

  Bickerton’s last project on land before nailing the hut closed had been to construct a memorial cross for Ninnis and Mertz. He built it out of huge sections of the now irrelevant radio mast, bound with strips of brass. On November 30, he and McLean erected the cross on top of Azimuth Hill. Hodgeman had manufactured a plaque from a piece of the kitchen table, on which he stenciled an inscription: “Erected to commemorate the supreme sacrifice made by Lieut B. E. S. Ninnis, R. F. and Dr. X. Mertz in the cause of science.”

  Mawson hoped that the memorial cross was “solid enough to last for a hundred years even in that strenuous climate.” Over the decades since 1913, the cross has been blown down several times, only to be reerected by subsequent expeditions. It stands today, a century after Bickerton and McLean first put it up, atop Azimuth Hill, looking down over the hut in which Mawson’s men spent nearly two years—itself preserved, much as the AAE left it, as an Australian National Heritage Site.

  EPILOGUE

  One would expect that after an ordeal such as the forced second overwintering, Mawson would have been eager to head straight for Australia. Instead, so strong was the man’s commitment to science that he directed Davis to steam east and west along the Antarctic shore for weeks so that he and the men on board could conduct further exploration, mapping, and collecting. Much of the time was spent trawling for marine life and dredging for ocean-bottom specimens, but at intervals, Mawson sent men on shore to examine islands and capes that had previously been all but unknown. Between December 23 and February 7, the Aurora coasted eastward as far as the Mertz Glacier, then west beyond the Shackleton Ice Shelf all the way to Drygalski Island, first discovered by the German expedition in 1902.

  This extra voyaging was not without considerable risk. The day after the ship pulled out of Commonwealth Bay, a vicious storm struck. Davis had all he could do to keep the Aurora, dragging anchor, from wrecking. The motor launch, which was dangling off the side of the ship, started smashing into the vessel. “As it was being converted into a battering ram against the ship itself it had to be cut away,” wrote Mawson, “and was soon swept astern and lost to sight.” The next day, Davis confided to his diary, “We had a fortunate escape. I do not think a vessel has ever ridden out such a gale.”

  On December 25, Mawson wrote, “Blowing fresh all day. Everything wet. We have a very miserable Christmas.” During the weeks of added exploring, Davis kept up a constant lookout for icebergs, and never stopped worrying about the ship getting stuck fast in pack ice. The strain took its toll on both men. Wrote Mawson on February 2, “This work is very trying on Capt Davis as he has to be on the alert so much. I wish he would take more rest when he may. . . . For myself—my nerves, damaged by the sledging adventure, are beginning to play up again.”

  By then, Davis was fed up with the extra work and danger. On February 7, he complained, “The party are all anxious to get back and this does not make it easier for M[awson] to decide whether to go on or go back. The consequence is that ever since we left [Commonwealth Bay], I have been in doubt as to what was really our programme. I can see that a relief voyage is, under present circumstance, best not extended into another expedition.”

  On February 6, Mawson finally ordered Davis to head north for Australia. It took twenty-one more days to cross the southern ocean. The first port of call was not to be Hobart but Adelaide, where Mawson lived and where a crowd was eager to greet him. Of that return, signaling the end of the AAE, Mawson wrote in the closing lines of The Home of the Blizzard, “The welcome home—the voice of the innumerable strangers—the hand-grips of many friends—it chokes one—it cannot be uttered.”

  The crowd wildly cheered the battered ship as she pulled into Port Adelaide on February 26. A small coterie of friends, including Edgeworth David, Mawson’s former professor and comrade on the trek to the South Magnetic Pole in 1908–09, rode out in a motor launch to be the first to congratulate Mawson. Once on shore, however, he quickly escaped their company (not to mention the throng of citizens hailing his arrival) and made his way to the South Australia Hotel, where he was told Paquita and her mother, having traveled from Melbourne that same day, awaited him.

  Decades later, Paquita recalled the reunion with her fiancé:

  It is hard to describe the feelings one has when meeting someone whose image has lived only in one’s thoughts for so long. When he entered the room, I just had time to think: “Yes, of course, that’s what he is like!” Douglas said, “You have had a long time to wait,” and then everything was all right.

  We dined in our room at the hotel, just the four of us; Captain Davis and mother sat on the balcony, Douglas and I walked up and down. Mother said afterwards that Captain Davis said at least six times: “My word, I am glad to see them together.”

  Two public meetings were held in Adelaide during the next few days to celebrate Mawson and the AAE. One speaker claimed, “Douglas Mawson has returned from a journey that was absolutely unparalleled in the history of exploration.” Of his survival feat, the speaker added, “It would have been easy to have died in such circumstances as Dr Mawson had then found himself; easy to have got into the bag and to have given in to the difficulties; but it was quite a different thing to go on and on, alone as Dr Mawson did for thirty solid days. That was the finest thing that had ever been done on such an expedition.” At the first meeting, a messenger just arrived from Melbourne read a telegram of congratulations from King George V.

  After dinner on February 26, the day of his arrival, Mawson and Paquita had walked to the telegraph office where “Douglas dictated a long message to be published in the London newspapers as soon as in the Australian.” It was thus that for the first time the details of Mawson’s desperate solo trek back to Winter Quarters reached a public audience. Remarkably, the very next day the London Daily Mail published a lengthy encomium on the man and the AAE, written by Sir Ernest Shackleton. “Mawson was born to be a leader of a Polar expedition,” he declared, then summarized the deeds the man had performed on the BAE from 1907–09. Going on to praise the scientific achievements of Mawson’s enterprise, Shackleton closed with a vivid evocation of “the tragic march in which two lives were lost.” He imagined himself a member of the Far Eastern Party, setting out across the unknown plateau with such high hopes. “And then there comes the sudden change from relief to the shock of disaster.” Shackleton went on:

  And I can picture that terrible march back through the area of crevasses, Mertz becoming weaker day by day, the food giving out, and at last Mawson, no thought of desertion in his mind, placing his sick comrade upon the sledge and dragging him painfully those weary miles—short distances in reality if you will, but age-long in effort and anxiety. Then came the death of Mertz; then the final struggle alone, utterly alone, day after day with no adequate shelter, no nourishing food. . . .

  What those thirty days must have meant to Mawson, he alone can tell.

  Only five months later, on August 1, Shackleton himself set out on the Endurance at the head of his grandly titled Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, intending to traverse the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Although an utter failure, that adventure, lasting from 1914 into 1917, would become—thanks to Shackleton’s heroism and the courage of all his crew, including Frank Wild and Frank Hurley—the most celebrated of all Antarctic expeditions.

  A few days after the Adelaide receptions, Mawson and Paquita set off for Melbourne, where they were to be married on March
31. The evening before the wedding, Paquita’s father gave Captain Davis a half-bottle of champagne, which he was to deliver to Mawson just before the event, as he “would probably need some extra strength to get him safely through the ceremony.” As Davis came to pick up Mawson, he was shocked to see that he was wearing casual blue lounge suit trousers with his frock coat and waistcoat. “You can’t possibly get married like that!” Davis expostulated. “Nonsense,” said Mawson, “Paquita won’t mind”—though he admitted he had probably misplaced his dress trousers in his in-laws’ luggage.

  Davis was adamant, so the two men commandeered a car to go search for the missing formal wear. There ensued a frantic comedy of errors, with Mawson gloomily predicting that he would be late for his own wedding. “Paquita won’t mind that, either,” he insisted. “People often have to wait at weddings.”

  “Not the bride,” Davis rejoined.

  It was then that Mawson noticed the champagne. “What is this bottle for?” he asked Davis, who relayed Paquita’s father’s fear that the groom might need “calming down or strengthening.”

  “Have it yourself,” Mawson airily replied. “I’m all right.” So Davis drank the half bottle—“and I needed it!” he later told Paquita.

  Despite all the confusion, the wedding went off without a hitch. Mawson smiled so broadly throughout the ceremony that Paquita described the look on his face as “a real Cheshire cat grin.” He later confessed, “The Reverend Masters told me brides were always nervous and I was to smile at you.” Instead, it was Davis who was nervous—so nervous, in fact, that Paquita’s mother noted that he “was so afraid of losing the ring that he kept passing it from one hand to another behind his back, and she was on tenterhooks lest he should drop it.”