Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  On 13 December, after just one day’s travel, Ninnis’s finger became so bad that Mawson had to lance it. Although it was a day earlier than planned, they took the chance while he was recovering to discard their worst sledge, redivide the load between the remaining two, and throw aside various pieces of broken or superfluous equipment. When they started again it was with Mertz skiing ahead to find a path, Mawson following on the lightest sledge and Ninnis trailing third with the bulk of their supplies, notably their tent and most of their food. Ninnis’s sledge was considerably heavier than the others, but had been placed last on safety grounds: if by mistake Mertz led them over a weak snow bridge it would be Mawson’s sledge, with its inconsequential burden, that fell into the crevasse, not Ninnis’s valuable one. The fallacy in this reasoning became evident on 14 December. That day, at about 1.00 p.m., Mertz waved his ski stick to signal that he had passed over a crevasse. Mawson, seated on his sledge writing his journal, was unconcerned: they had survived countless snow bridges already and this one looked no more dangerous than any of the others. He crossed it without mishap, casually passed Mertz’s warning back to Ninnis, then continued with his journal. Unlike Mawson, however, Ninnis was on foot; his weight, concentrated on a small area rather than spread over the broad runners of a sledge, broke the snow bridge. He, his six dogs, his sledge and everything upon which the expedition’s survival depended fell into the crevasse.

  Mawson and Mertz travelled a full quarter of a mile before they realized what had happened. Returning to the hole they saw two dogs, one fatally wounded, the other dead, lying on a shelf 150 feet down. Beside them were the remains of Ninnis’s sledge. Of Ninnis himself there was no trace, and despite waiting for three hours they heard no calls for help. He was obviously dead – which was some consolation, for had he been alive there was nothing they could have done to rescue him: all their ropes joined together were insufficient to reach the bottom of the crevasse; they had to use field glasses just to spot the dogs. Mawson read the burial service over the hole, then concentrated on his and Mertz’s own predicament. They had one week’s rations for three men, a small bag of raisins and a box of chocolate, a Primus stove, a very light tent that they had been using as a sledge cover and, of course, Mawson’s sledge. Fourteen miles behind them were the bits and pieces they had deposited the previous day. This, plus their six dogs, was all they had to see them the 300 miles back to base. As Mawson wrote, ‘May God help us.’

  They did not camp where they were, partly because it would have been too chilling to sleep alongside their companion’s grave, but mainly because their tent had no supports. The only way to keep it upright was to cannibalize the sledge they had earlier abandoned. They departed at 9.00 p.m., and five and a half hours later were at the cache where Mawson produced their one tool – a ‘Bonzer’ knife, whose blade could be swapped for a hammer, a file or a miniature saw – and hacked the broken sledge into tentpoles. The entire stock of dog food having fallen into the crevasse, he fed the animals a pair of discarded wolfskin gloves and two worn-out shoes. As for himself and Mertz, they agreed to cut their daily rations from 40 to 8 ounces of food. In Mawson’s words, ‘It was to be a fight with Death and the Great Providence would decide the issue.’

  The following morning Mawson cut another strip of wood from the sledge and tacked a Union Jack to it. Planting his makeshift flag in the snow, he formally took possession of the territory in the name of the British Crown. To this forbidding part of the world he gave the name King George V Land. The day was marked by another, far more symbolic event: they shot and ate their first dog, feeding the least palatable parts to the rest of the team and roasting the haunches for themselves on an upturned pot lid balanced over the Primus. No explorers had ever relished killing a dog, but most accepted it with equanimity. Mertz, however, was particularly affected by the act. It was not just that the dogs were loyal workers and friends, the only other living beings on the ice apart from themselves; it was also that they made a revolting meal. The meat had no fat, so was charred on the outside and raw in the middle. It also had an indefinable musty taste. The liver was a bit better, braised lightly so as to conserve goodness and make it easier to swallow (the legs required heavy chewing).

  The dog meat gave them strength to travel the 15 miles a day that Mawson had stipulated as their minimum goal. But it was debatable how long their walking larder would last. By 18 December another two animals became so weak that Mawson had no option but to shoot them. On the 21st a fourth went the same way. What they did not eat immediately they stored on the sledge for the future. With only two dogs left, their progress became noticeably slower, even though Mawson and Mertz were now harnessed to the sledge. To compound matters, both men felt unaccountably ill. They were seized by a weariness that could not be accounted for by the extra toil alone. Their stomachs hurt, their skin started peeling and their hair fell out. It did not seem to be scurvy: the telltale symptoms of swollen gums and aching joints were absent. Mawson assumed it was merely the effect of general malnutrition. Then, as the days passed, he wondered whether it might not be the absence of some particular element in their diet. Whatever the cause, there was nothing they could do about it at the moment. He could only hope that the disease got no worse.

  In fact, their illness was caused not by an element missing from their diet but by something they had recently added to it: the dogs’ livers. It was common knowledge that the livers of polar bears were dangerous to eat. Nobody knew why this should be, but the effects were so unpleasant that nobody was ever foolish enough to try it twice. The reason, which was not discovered for another 30 years, was that bear livers contain a toxic amount of Vitamin A. If taken in excess Vitamin A causes nausea, dizziness and a peeling of the skin as if badly sunburned. With repeated doses, these symptoms are supplemented by hair loss, the opening of fissures around the eyes, nose and mouth, dysentery, weight loss, stomach pain, lassitude, irritability, dementia, delirium, convulsions and, finally, death from brain haemorrhage. Mawson and Mertz were well into the initial stages of Vitamin A poisoning. Why they should have contracted this disease was a puzzle, the solution to which was not found until 1971. In that year scientists proved that the husky liver was a miniature version of the bear’s. Its Vitamin A content was not as great as that of the bear, but at an average weight of two pounds contained ten times the amount reckoned safe for human consumption. Ironically, Mawson and Mertz counted for their survival on a food that was steadily killing them. Already they had taken an overdose of Vitamin A.

  By Christmas they were struggling through fresh snow on the Ninnis Glacier and had only one dog left, a bitch named Ginger. As the crow flew, they were 180-odd miles from Cape Denison, theoretically within a fortnight’s march of safety if they covered 15 miles a day. But the crevasses of the Ninnis Glacier had already reduced their daily average to less than half that, and there was one more glacier and a crater to cross, not to mention stretches of sastrugi. Moreover, the mystery illness still plagued them, for some reason affecting Mertz more powerfully than Mawson. The only means they had of increasing their speed, and of reaching Commonwealth Bay before the 15 January deadline, was to lighten their load. Out went the camera, along with most of its film. The hypsometer that Mawson had used to take their altitude on every day of the march was dumped, as were the thermometers, the rifle and the ammunition. They tossed aside their logbooks and almanacs, keeping only their diaries. The sledge runners that had acted as tent supports were likewise jettisoned: from now on the canvas would be kept up by the telescopic legs of the theodolite. As for the dog carcases, they stewed them to a jelly and fed the bones to Ginger. To celebrate the new regime they put a pat of butter in their cocoa and gave themselves a slice of dog liver. While they were eating it, Mertz noticed something dangling from Mawson’s head. Leaning over, he removed a piece of skin that was a perfect cast of his ear. Mawson remarked that their bodies were falling apart. Mertz, who still resented the loss of their dogs, said they should never have eaten
them in the first place.

  Three days later Ginger collapsed. Lacking a rifle, Mawson killed her with a much patched and mended spade. ‘I can never forget the occasion,’ he wrote. ‘As there was nothing available to divide it, the skull was boiled whole ... after which we took it in turns eating to the middle line, passing the skull from one to the other.’ His distress, however, did not diminish his appreciation of the food: ‘Had a great breakfast off Ginger’s skull – thyroid and brian.’

  On the evening of New Year’s Day 1913 they camped on the Mertz Glacier. Its namesake confided to his diary that he and Mawson had made just five miles, the sky so overcast and the light so poor that they could hardly see their way – not that they were strong enough in any case to make decent progress. Instinctively, he suspected the cause of their weakness. ‘I cannot eat of the dogs any longer. Yesterday the flesh made me feel very sick.’ They were the last words he wrote. From that date he became more and more apathetic. Rather than make a day’s march, he preferred to lie in the sleeping bag until the weather improved. He also refused to touch another scrap of dog meat. When Mawson coaxed him to his feet he managed only a few miles before subsiding with frostbitten fingers. He rode on the sledge, but even that did not seem to help. Soon he was so weak that it took Mawson three hours to dress him for the day’s journey. By 6 January Mawson was in a predicament. ‘I could perhaps pull through – with the provisions at hand – but I cannot leave him. His heart seems to have gone. It is very hard for me – to be within 100 miles of the hut and in such a position is awful... If only I could get on. But I must stop with Xavier, and he does not appear to be improving – both our chances are going now.’

  On 7 January Mertz descended into madness, shouting in English and German, fouling himself intermittently and thrashing so violently that he broke one of the legs of the theodolite. Occasionally he fell unconscious, only to wake clutching his head and complaining of earache. Perhaps his brain was already beginning to haemorrhage. ‘Obviously we can’t go on today,’ Mawson wrote in his diary. ‘This is terrible.’ At midnight Mertz slipped into a coma. By 2.00 on the morning of 8 January he was dead.

  Mawson had neither the strength nor the means to dig a grave. The best he could do was drag the body out of the tent, erect a small cairn of snow, and place in Mertz’s sleeping bag a short note describing the tribulations he had faced and the manner in which he had died. Then, as with Ninnis, he read the burial service. In his journal he wrote a sad epitaph: ‘My comrade has been accepted into “the peace that passeth all understanding”. It was my fervent hope that he had been received where sterling qualities and a high mind reap their due reward ... [Myself,] I seemed to stand alone on the wider shores of the world – and what a short step to enter the unknown future!’

  So much time had been lost during Mertz’s illness that Mawson doubted very much if he could reach the hut before the Aurora’s deadline – it was unlikely he would make it back to Cape Denison at all – but he resolved to press on regardless. If he had to die, the least he could do was die as near the coast as possible, making it easier for a rescue party to find his body and the expedition journals. Alone on the world’s most inhospitable continent, Mawson, prepared for the trek with calm efficiency. As with the last reorganization of the sledge, many things now seemed superfluous. He cooked the remaining dog meat in a single batch and, wondering why he had not done so before, threw out the two gallons of fuel which had thereby become redundant. Using the ‘Bonzer’ knife, he sawed the sledge in half, using the left-overs to make a mast, to which he attached a sail made by sewing Mertz’s coat to an old food bag. The excess pieces of wood and metal were stuck on Mertz’s cairn to make a cross. With the same knife he mended the theodolite leg that Mertz had broken. Then, on 11 January, with an estimated 20 days’ subsistence rations, he pulled his sledge over the glacier towards Cape Denison.

  Why Mertz and not he should have succumbed to the strange ailment Mawson could not tell. But there was no mistaking the signs that he would soon go the same way. When he undressed to see how far the disease had progressed, long strips of skin and hair fell around him. At every point where his clothes had rubbed against him – his knees, shoulders, armpits, back and genitals – there was raw flesh. Here and there, clusters of boils were coming to a head. ‘My whole body is apparently rotting from the want of proper nourishment,’ he lamented. The seriousness of his condition became even more obvious during the first day’s march from Mertz’s cairn. As he laboured over the ice, he noticed a lumpy, squelching sensation in his boots: when he removed them he saw that the hard soles of his feet had fallen off. Grimly, he smeared the flesh with lanolin, stuck the soles back on and bandaged them tightly into place.

  As he adjusted to the new horror, the sun emerged. Hoping that sunlight might do something for his condition, he spread the sledge sail on the ground, stripped naked and became probably the first person in history to sunbathe on Antarctica. ‘I felt the good of the sun as I have never done before,’ he wrote. ‘A tingling sensation seemed to spread throughout my whole body, and I felt stronger and better.’ By the end of the day, however, he had covered only six and a quarter miles, and on changing his bandages discovered that he was in even worse condition than he had suspected: his feet and ankles were covered in blisters; his mouth and nose had dried up; he no longer had any sense of taste and smell; his fingers and toes were blackened by frostbite. Later he found his watch had stopped. Then, as he was comforting himself that at least the sun was out, he was hit by a 30-hour blizzard.

  At midday or thereabouts on 13 January he resumed the march. He could now see Aurora Peak, but it seemed hopelessly distant. For a moment he dithered between descending the glacier to the sea or continuing overland. If he went to the coast he might, even without his rifle, be able to kill seals and penguins, and would at last be able to recuperate. If he carried on, there was a chance he might be met by a rescue party. Wisely – for the Antarctic wildlife would vanish come winter and a journey round the coast to Cape Denison was beyond him – he opted for the latter.

  On 15 January, the deadline he had set for the Auroras departure, he was still on the Mertz Glacier. ‘I don’t know what is on ahead at all,’ he wrote. ‘Trust the sky will clear ... It takes quite a while dressing my feet each day now.’ Two days later he fell through a snow bridge. Luckily, the sledge stuck a yard from the lip and, luckier still, he had been dragging it with a sturdy alpine rope, up which he was able to climb to safety. ‘Exhausted, weak and chilled ... I hung with the firm conviction that all was over ... it would be but the work of a moment to slip from the harness, then all the pain and the toil would be over. It was a rare situation, a rare temptation – a chance to quit small things for great – to pass from the petty exploration of a planet to the contemplation of vaster worlds beyond.’ After another fall he made his tow-line into a rope ladder. Again and again he fell into crevasses, blinded by the constant drift. ‘If only I had light,’ he raged. If only I could get out of this hole.’

  On 19 January Mawson emerged from the Mertz Glacier, the snow falling so thickly that he could barely see the ground underfoot. On the 21st he made two and a half miles over steep slopes, and at the end of the day threw away his crampons. He would need spikes for the final descent to Cape Denison, but there were a pair of good steel crampons in Aladdin’s Cave. To reduce the load he even tore the cardboard covers from his journals. On the 22nd, he caught a glimpse of the eastern coast of Commonwealth Bay. Three days later, however, with less than 50 miles to go, a blizzard made further progress impossible. How long the storm would last he could not tell. Nor had he any idea what he would find when the snow cleared. Given his earlier instructions, it was unlikely the Aurora would still be in Commonwealth Bay. But as he wrote, ‘I am full of hope and reliance on the great Providence which has pulled me through so far.’

  In fact the Aurora was still in Commonwealth Bay, its captain having delayed his departure until the 30th; and on the 24th a rescue team
was already climbing the slope to Aladdin’s Cave. Pinned down by the same blizzard that hit Mawson, they were able to advance only 21 miles over the ice. They turned back at 9.00 a.m. on the 29th. Behind them they left a cairn of ice wrapped in black cloth, beneath which they placed a cache of food containing a message giving the position of Aladdin’s Cave and the date they expected the ship to leave. While the rescuers had been marching west, Mawson had been hauling east. He reached the cairn six hours after their departure. On the previous night their two camps could not have been more than five miles apart.

  Mawson struggled after the rescue party, over slopes so steep and icy as to be insurmountable without the crampons that he now wished he had not discarded. Once again the ‘Bonzer’ knife came into play. Dismantling the theodolite case, Mawson cut some planks to length, banged nails through them, and strapped them to his feet. In this manner he scraped his way into Aladdin’s Cave on the evening of Saturday 1 February. After 80 days under canvas the ice-hole seemed to Mawson a haven of luxury. It was sheltered, warm and silent. Its floor was strewn with a cornucopia of valuable rubbish – half-eaten cans of pemmican, a tin of biscuits, old shoes and socks, sacks, boxes, a copy of some Sherlock Holmes stories, even a pineapple. He could have rested happily for several days, but he dared not. Possibly the Aurora was still in Commonwealth Bay. If he made a swift overnight descent, using the steel crampons he had left in Aladdin’s Cave, he might just reach the coast before the ship raised anchor. But, having left so much behind, his rescuers had taken the one item he needed most. The crampons were not there. For a moment Mawson was tempted to start straightaway with his own nail-and-plank crampons; but when he looked at the ice and realized how weak he was he decided to delay his departure until early the following morning. If the Aurora had left, so be it; if it was still there, it would not be leaving before daybreak. It would be good, too, to come home on a Sunday. That night the katabatic winds flowed from the interior, inaugurating a blizzard that did not break for six days.