The next day, the newlyweds set sail for England. In Mawson’s immediate future lay an important presentation before the Royal Geographical Society and an audience with the king—but also a grueling round of lectures that took him all the way to the United States, for the AAE was heavily in debt, and Mawson’s fees had to go to paying off not only suppliers but the members of his team whose loyalty and endurance had won the expedition its triumphs.
And there was another doleful duty to be carried out. Mawson had resolved to visit the families of Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, to pay homage to the men who had died “in the cause of science” and to console their loved ones in their grief.
From the harbor in Adelaide, the returning members of the AAE had dispersed to their separate jobs and families. The most poignant of aftermaths was the one that descended upon Sidney Jeffryes. Mawson put him on a train to Melbourne, with a link to his home town of Toowoomba, Queensland, where his sister Norma, alarmed by the madness evident in a letter she had received from her brother, was anxiously hoping to care for him. The bewildered Jeffryes, however, got off the train in the settlement of Ararat, Victoria, still 100 miles west of Melbourne. There he was reported to have wandered in the forest for six days before locals found him and took him to a nearby asylum.
A letter written from that asylum in July 1914 to a friend we know merely as Miss Eckford gives us a sustained insight into what Jeffryes really believed had happened to him in Antarctica, as well as offering details of the aftermath that no other sources supply. In that letter, Jeffryes asserts that “I left Sydney [in December 1912] anxious to succeed. . . . Once away from Australia I entered into the spirit of the thing with zest.” When Captain Davis decided that he would have to appoint a party to winter over again at Cape Denison, Jeffryes “gladly accepted the offer.” In his own account, Jeffryes insists that he almost single-handedly kept the mast up and the radio working for weeks, despite nearly constant hurricane winds. But:
When it seemed apparent that the mast was going to weather the storms, a wave of jealousy swept over the other six members. . . . Evidences of something wrong first appeared in Madigan & McLean, who continually gave vent to cowardly insinuations. . . . I became the central point of attack by all except Mawson & Hodgeman. . . . In trying to finish the [radio] work on in [sic] accordance with Mawson’s suggestion, I unhinged what remaining good was left in the others, and they used all the arts within their compass to drive me from the hut.
Soon, Jeffryes believed, Mawson and Hodgeman went over to the “enemy,” while still pretending to be Jeffryes’s ally.
They then made every effort to hypnotise me, although I could not make out what they were up to at that time, having no knowledge whatever of occult sciences. . . . I shortly after fell into a magnetic spell. . . . The fact is, that my will became suddenly magnetic and I am in a permanent state of mental thought transference, telepathy, or whatever you choose to call it. This is what people cannot bring themselves to believe, and consider it a delusion.
If Jeffryes believed he could read the minds of the other six men in the hut, that may help explain his paranoia during the darkest months of winter. Aboard the Aurora at last, en route to Australia, Jeffryes wrote, “I took an overdose of opium but although I took enough to dispose of any 2 men it never so much as made me feel drowsy.” Once he boarded the train for Queensland, Jeffryes decided to take his own life by “more natural methods.” Getting off the train at Ararat was not the act of a confused man, but of one determined “to starve to death. . . . Well, although I had twelve days without a bite, I felt little the worse for it, and was not roaming the bush, as people may imagine, but calmly awaiting the end, one which seemed so hard to reach.” A meddlesome do-gooder, Jeffryes went on, alerted the authorities, which led to Jeffryes’s commitment to the asylum. “I refused to give any information or explanation to the Law, except that I had been to the Antarctic & I blamed Dr Mawsons hypnotism as being the chief instrument in bringing about my mental condition.”
Writing to Miss Eckford, Jeffryes is lucid enough to condemn the “bug-house” in which he was incarcerated, adding, “I don’t altogether see how they can keep me locked up here.” But he closed his eight-page letter by saying, “I long for the dissolution of mind & body. I have not the slightest fear of death, & would welcome it as my best friend.”
Poor Jeffryes would spend the rest of his life in a series of mental hospitals, dying in 1942 in the Ararat facility to which he had first been committed. Through the middle of 1915, he corresponded occasionally with Mawson. By then, his insanity was full-blown. In March 1915, he wrote:
It is now clear to me that we seven were chosen that scripture might be fulfilled. My mental condition has in no wise changed, but since my advent into asylums I have had God’s truth made manifest to me in night visions. . . .
I am come as Christ in the Spirit of Prophesy & the Wrath of God in the flesh.
Jeffryes promised to ask God to “help the other 5.”
Three months later, in a letter that attempted to strike a conciliatory tone, Jeffryes foresaw his doom: “I have told you that I shall be arraigned before the court, & my death shall draw me nearer to God. Almighty God & myself alone know the whole secret of our second year.”
By September 1915, after stays in several Melbourne hospitals, Jeffryes was back in the Ararat asylum. On the 17th, an official who signed himself “Master in Lunacy” tried to explain the man’s state to Mawson:
Mr. Jeffryes is very delusional. He denies making any charges against the expedition and members thereof. He says that he has nothing against them. He thought highly of Sir D. Mawson, but unfortunately Sir D. Mawson and all the others were quite insane, and insulted by his insinuations. He has numerous delusions.
Whether Mawson wrote back to Jeffryes is doubtful. After 1915, the former radio operator, still only twenty-nine years old, vanishes from the record. In The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson did his best to minimize and camouflage Jeffryes’s madness and the havoc it wreaked during the second winter, and thereafter he never publicly commented about the man. In 2010, the Australian Antarctic Division named a small glacier on the coast of Adélie Land after Jeffryes.
For all the panegyrics that were showered on the AAE, Mawson’s expedition was overshadowed, especially in England, by the tragedy of Robert Scott’s death with his four teammates on the return from the South Pole in 1912. As Scott’s Last Expedition, the leader’s diary had been published in 1913. The eloquence of that firsthand account, culminating in the stoic resignation of its last pages, had seized the attention of a whole nation. A century later, the book remains one of the canonic texts of exploration literature.
Mawson had sent a letter of condolence to Kathleen Scott, the explorer’s widow, whom he had met in 1910 when Scott invited him on the Terra Nova expedition. It had been Kathleen who had arranged Mawson’s purchase of the Vickers monoplane that, after its crash on the test run near Adelaide, had been converted into the all but useless air-tractor on the AAE. Now Mawson wrote, “Ah, but is it not the height of being to accomplish great things against great odds & to sacrifice oneself to a nobler cause. You cannot be the loser though you may feel the loss.”
In England, Mawson visited Kathleen, who promptly gave him one thousand pounds—money earned from the royalties of Scott’s Last Expedition—to help defray the AAE debt. Kathleen insisted on keeping the donation private, and even told Mawson not to thank her for the gift. “Besides,” she wittily appended, “it appears merely stupid in the eyes of most people for a woman who is known (alas!) to have an income of £700 a year to keep giving £1000’s away.” Kathleen knew that Paquita was trying to get pregnant, and that Mawson hoped for a boy. In Scott’s last letter to Kathleen, written as he lay dying in his tent, he had conveyed tender advice as to how to raise their own son, Peter, two years old when his father died. Now Kathleen mused to Mawson, “What fun it will be to have a little Master Mawson—mind you feed him on fruit from the day he�
�s born, and make him as husky a fellow as Peter.”
Over the years after 1914, on various trips to England, Mawson would visit Kathleen again. A letter she wrote to him in 1920 brims with intimacy:
My dear Douglas. I am down at Sandwich which never fails to remind me of you. Do you remember your potato patch, & [the?] little tent on the beach which when the wind blew its canvas used to send you to sleep—No, of course you don’t remember any of these trivialities—but I do.
The letter ends, “Goodbye my dear. I wish you were here. Don’t get completely lost.”
Some have speculated that Mawson and Kathleen Scott may have had an affair. She was a thoroughly bohemian woman and much attracted to men, and it is now known that even while Scott was on his fatal last expedition, she was conducting an affair with the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Without citing his sources, Mawson biographer Philip Ayres states unequivocally that Paquita did not like Kathleen.
Kathleen’s 1920 letter to Mawson also contains this prescient observation: “Shackleton has been lecturing to a very good film but he looks purple & bloated.” Less than two years later, on South Georgia Island, at the outset of his fourth Antarctic expedition, Shackleton would collapse and die of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven.
On June 9, 1914, Mawson spoke to the Royal Geographical Society. The president, Douglas Freshfield, after whom the AAE had named a prominent cape in Adélie Land, introduced Mawson and several teammates in attendance with glowing words:
We are here tonight to welcome the return to this country of the members of one of the most remarkable expeditions that has ever sailed into the polar regions. . . . All men of science will confirm what I say, that there has been no Antarctic expedition the results of which, geological, glaciological or in the way of throwing light on the past history of our planet, have been richer than that of which we are going to hear an account.
On May 13, Mawson had had an audience with King George V at Buckingham Palace. Then, on June 29, the king bestowed a knighthood on the Australian explorer. The day before, in Sarajevo, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated—the event that would precipitate World War I.
Well before being knighted or lionized by the RGS, Mawson and Paquita had paid a visit to Belgrave Ninnis’s family. While he was still in Antarctica, probably through one of the radio messages that reached Australia in 1913, Mawson had conveyed some of the details of his companion’s death to the family. On August 29, 1913, apparently not realizing that Mawson was still marooned in Winter Quarters, Ninnis’s father had written to him, thanking him for informing the family “of the dreadful tragedy of my sons death. The shock to my wife & to myself was dreadful.”
From Australia in March 1914, Mawson had written to Ninnis père: “It was absolutely unexpected and your son must have been instantly killed practically before he realized that anything was happening.”
In person, however, Mawson and Paquita found the family inconsolable. It was only a year later, after Ninnis’s mother learned that the regiment to which her son had belonged, the Royal Fusiliers, “had early been cut to pieces in France,” that she could make a gloomy sense of the notion that “somehow death in an icy crevasse seemed more fitting to his youth than slaughter in the mud of Flanders.”
In July, Mawson and Paquita left England to make a short visit to Europe on the way back to Australia. Stopping first in the Netherlands so that Mawson could meet his wife’s relatives, the couple then made their way to Basel to spend a day with Mertz’s family. Mawson had previously mailed by registered post from Australia some of Mertz’s belongings and his precious diary, secured in a soldered case. From England on July 8, he wrote to Mertz’s father, trusting that he had received the diary:
You will note that the last entry was several days before his death. He appears to have lost interest in the diary before the end came. You will also note that the diary is without a back. The heavy back and a number of unused leaves I tore away to save weight in carrying it back.
Mertz’s diary has since been copied in typescript and English translations prepared (though not yet published). Over the years, however, the original diary has somehow been lost.
The visit in Basel offered Mertz’s family only scant consolation. As Paquita later recalled, “They were very kind to us but, naturally, the day was a sad one. It was a great grief to us to witness their sorrow. We sat for many hours answering their questions hoping in some way to make some response or to touch on an aspect that might lead their thoughts away from the actual tragic happening.”
Once back in Australia, Mawson took up his teaching duties at the University of Adelaide again. He had been absent from his lecturer’s post for two and a half years, during which time he had paid a replacement teacher out of his own salary. But the AAE debt was so onerous that Mawson completed only a single term before sailing for America, where he went on an exhausting lecture tour to raise funds.
Meanwhile, Australia had entered World War I in September 1914, with troops sent to New Guinea to attack German outposts. Several of the AAE men immediately enlisted. Bob Bage, the quiet, competent leader of the Southern Party, the man whom John Hunter had praised as the most popular teammate in the whole AAE, was killed at Gallipoli in May 1915. Cecil Madigan spent only one semester of his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford before signing up for the Royal Engineers. In action in France, he was shot in the thigh at the Battle of Loos. In 1914 and 1915, he wrote several friendly letters to Mawson, none of which hints at the antagonism that marks every page of his son’s family memoir, Vixere Fortes, published fifty-three years after Madigan’s death. In December 1915, invalided back to England after being wounded, Madigan wrote to Mawson, “I had some close shaves in the trenches. . . . I can’t walk far. I don’t feel much like taking a load up to Aladdin’s cave.”
Archibald McLean, whose collaborative efforts with Mawson in preparing The Home of the Blizzard were so extensive that he might justly be regarded as co-author of that classic expedition narrative, served with both the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Australian Army Medical Corps. Late in the war in France, he was felled by poison gas. Though he survived the war, he died in 1922 from the aftereffects of the gas. John Hunter wrote to Mawson about the man’s last days: “Poor old ‘Dad’ McLean passed away on 13th inst. He had a long spin, poor old chap, but was cheerful and optimistic to the last. Hannam & I saw him about a month before he died. Laseron, Correll, Jones, Hannam & myself went to the funeral.”
Mawson himself tried to enlist in various branches of both the Australian and the British war efforts. In 1915 he wrote to Eric Webb, the AAE magnetician, “I have been itching to get to Gallipoli, but all the time am held up by expedition affairs.” It is not clear why several Australian agencies turned down Mawson’s offers to serve. Paquita had given birth to a daughter in April 1915, while Mawson was in the middle of his lecture tour of the United States, but many another young Australian father fought in the Great War. Mawson eventually found employment in England with the Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement, supervising the shipment of explosives to the front, but he never saw action in the war.
One other member of the AAE met an early death. Charles Harrisson, the even-keeled biologist and artist in Wild’s Western Base Party, married with two children, had no sooner arrived in Australia after his year in Antarctica than he signed on as a member of a party sent from Hobart in the Endeavour to relieve the Macquarie Island crew that had replaced George Ainsworth’s five-man team. The government fisheries research vessel reached Macquarie in early December 1914. Picking up the men on the island, the ship headed back to Australia. She was never heard from after December 3, and no trace of the vessel or the men aboard was ever found. The official verdict was that the Endeavour must have been caught in a violent gale and sunk.
Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, lasting from 1914–17, is widely regarded as marking the close of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. As the Endurance set off from Ply
mouth on August 1, 1914, Great Britain was on the verge of entering the war that was rapidly spreading across Europe. The nation’s official declaration of war against Germany came only three days later. From shipboard, Shackleton telegraphed the Admiralty to offer the services of his men, but he was told to go ahead with the expedition. Two years later, when word of the ship’s having been crushed in the ice in the Weddell Sea reached England, Winston Churchill—the man who had approved the Endurance expedition in the first place—wrote to his wife, “Fancy that ridiculous Shackleton & his South Pole—in the crash of the world.”
After the war, when Shackleton lectured in London to recover the costs of the expedition, he often spoke in front of half-empty houses. As his biographer Roland Huntford writes, “London in the aftermath of the Great War was no place to talk about polar exploration.” When he died in 1922 on South Georgia Island, at the head of yet another Antarctic expedition, one saddled with ill-defined objectives, Shackleton had become a quaint, anachronistic figure, far from the heroic survivalist and leader of men so celebrated today.
Likewise, as Mawson lectured about the AAE in England and the United States during the first months of the war, he was often discouraged by the lukewarm responses of his audiences. In a letter to Paquita in February 1915, for instance, he wrote, “The manager at Boston made a mess of it—nobody knew anything of my being there.” The two-volume The Home of the Blizzard, published by William Heinemann in January 1915, was limited because of the war to a first edition of 3,500 copies. Three and a half years later, at the end of the war, combined sales in the United Kingdom and United States amounted to only 2,200 copies.
It would take nearly half a century for the great deeds of the heroic age to gain a broad, enthusiastic audience. The Shackleton cult, so vibrant today, got its start with the publication of Alfred Lansing’s popular 1959 retelling of the story of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, in Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. Similarly, though Mawson remained lastingly famous in Australia, it took Lennard Bickel’s popular (and vastly oversimplified) 1977 résumé of the AAE, Mawson’s Will: The Greatest Survival Story Ever Written, to put Mawson on the radar screens of an international audience.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 30
