During the winter months we had all been drawn together, but between Mertz and Ninnis there existed a very deep bond. Mertz, in his warm-hearted, impulsive way, had practically adopted Ninnis, and his affection was almost maternal. Ninnis, less demonstrative, reciprocated this to the full, and indeed it was hard to dissociate them in our thoughts. It was always ‘Mertz and Ninnis’ or ‘Ninnis and Mertz’, a composite entity, each the complement of the other.
Charles Laseron, South with Mawson
[Winter descended] with the shriek of a thousand angry witches.
Captain John King Davis, High Latitude
5 May 1912, Cape Denison, the cold takes hold at Mawson’s Winter Quarters
Curious. Just as a tame cat or dog can engender a great sense of companionship, so too in this wilderness had the teeming seals and penguins been able to give Mawson’s men some feeling that they were not all alone here, on the edge of this frozen continent. But then, first by the hundreds, then by the dozens, then by the handful, and then one by one, those seals and penguins started to disappear back into the warmer ocean to see out the coming winter, until, as the last penguin flopped into the water and away, they really had found themselves all alone … and have now been all alone for weeks.
Getting darker now. Getting colder. Getting windier.
Best to keep busy, and though performing their scientific duties can be rather humdrum, that only serves to make festive occasions all the more festive when they do occur. Things such as celebrating birthdays. On this day, it is Mawson’s and Hannam’s turn, and the occasion is celebrated with a sumptuous dinner cooked by Hurley and Hunter. Hurley, obviously with some time on his hands – as the only part of the dark that photography loves is the darkroom – produces the cover image for an impressive birthday menu, designed by expedition cartographer Alfred Hodgeman. The result befits such celebratory fare as ‘Penguins on horsebacks with beans’, which will be accompanied by wine, port, Russian stout, café noir and, of course, cigars.
Mawson is a firm believer in having such fare on occasional call:
Luxuries, then, are good in moderation, and mainly for their psychological effect. After a spell of routine, a celebration is the natural sequel, and if there are delicacies which in civilization are more palatable than usual, why not take them to where they will receive a still fuller and heartier appreciation …? So we did not forget our asparagus and jugged hare.1
5 May 1912, Holland, Paquita gives Mawson a cake
Down in The Hague, where the Delprats have rented a house for the duration of their European stay, Paquita is celebrating her fiancé’s birthday in her own fashion, in the company of family and friends who have gathered to celebrate the special day of a man, over 10,000 miles away, whom most have never met.
Missing him particularly desperately by now – it is over six months since she last saw him and she is still not halfway through the time they must spend apart before they can marry – she and her mother have baked a cake, atop which is piled whipped cream in the manner of a mountain, with nothing less than a dollop of nougat, representing a tent, upon it. And it goes on. Beside it, there is a tiny ‘marzipan sledge and dogs and the flag of the Southern Cross flying on a pole of angelica’.2
And there is Douglas! Well, at least a tiny model of him, made out of chocolate and pink fondant, standing by the flag and tent. They toast him. They sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Paquita blows out the candles on his behalf and makes her wishes.
Not long afterwards, she writes him a letter:
9 Wagenaarweg
Haag
My Douglas, mine,
I’m feeling so absolutely healthy and happy tonight despite the distance between us that I want to write to you. I wrote you a letter on your birthday but it wasn’t a success. I know you thought of us thinking of you then.
And we did. It was you all day long. Lots of aunts and things sent flowers. There was one huge bouquet just like a wedding one! Then one aunt gave ‘Us’ a silver old Dutch spoon. They make a lot of fuss over a birthday here more than English do.
I hope you don’t mind but I’m quite Dutch. I’ve never been so patriotic as now. I’m so awfully proud of my country and next year when we are together we must find time to come here, so that you can meet all our relations (and there are a heap) and see my Holland.
I got your letters safely and just when I was wanting something from you. How different our lives are at present! My man, I wish I had been there to help you when you were so worried before you landed. What a lot we shall have to tell each other when we meet again …
I hope everything goes well with you now. We aren’t worrying about not hearing per wireless yet. But I hope we do soon hear. Scott will return about the same time as you. I hope you come first. He will be disappointed at Amundsen’s getting [to the Pole] first. How thankful we are that you aren’t bound for there. Don’t you go and stay away another year!
You’re under contract to return next year less than a year from now …
And as for Mother I don’t know how I shall ever leave her even for you. Yes I do though. There is only one you. I’m sure you don’t love me as I do you. Women always love the most and miss the most. Well I wouldn’t like you to miss me as much as I do you.
With my whole heart and my lips
Your
Paquita3
Mid-May 1912, Cape Denison, Mawson and his men gather at ‘Hyde Park Corner’
In his tiny room, at the end of each day, Mawson is likely to be at his desk, writing his journal, compiling his lists, writing formal instructions for his men and collating the scientific data gathered thus far … Occasionally, he glances up at the risqué painting given to him by Paquita, which he now has pinned above the desk, upon the wall of his small partition – The Swing, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard – showing a Frenchman looking up a lady’s skirt as she rises high on a swing.
Being in such an environment and working so hard, it is important for the others that they be able to relax and keep themselves entertained as well. Beyond the books they have brought with them, and the records they could play, much of that entertainment comes from … themselves. While in the ‘outside world’, the ability to be able to play a musical instrument, recite a poem or tell a story might be valuable, here it is highly prized, and the men quickly become aware where each other’s skill lies.
The young geologist from Melbourne, Frank Stillwell, for example, can play the piano, and though they don’t happen to have one handy, they do have a small accordion, which on many a night Frank is prevailed upon to play while they all sing along, often finishing up with the grand finale of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, bellowing out the well-loved words they know so well.
Other times, Charles Laseron thrills them all with his composition of a comic opera he has entitled The Washerwoman’s Secret, and while Hurley proves to be a great organiser of gambling games he is also a great practical joker with an amazingly theatrical bent, to the wonderment of them all. At one point, when all are gathered around the table for dinner and he is sure he has their complete attention, he stands at one end and begins to sing a riotous song he has written about Dux Ipse’s abilities at shooting birds. Right at the climactic moment, he brings to his shoulder a small wooden gun he has fashioned for the occasion and, as he makes to fire it at a wooden duck that he has placed at the other end of the table, a bell loudly rings, just as if he were in a carnival shooting gallery!
It gets better still. As recounted by Charles Laseron:
There were also numerous loud bangs from beneath the table, where a little carbide had been brought into contact with water by pulling a string and inverting a number of small tins. The lids blew off with quite convincing reports. Moreover, from various points in the roof Antarctic penguins and skua gulls dropped in every direction on those sitting beneath, while the gramophone funnel descended as an extinguisher on Alfie Hodgeman’s head.4
Oh, how they roar!
A favourite activity of them all in quieter, more regular times is to smoke their pipes as they listen to the gramophone, which must be regularly rewound. With only a limited number of records, of course each one becomes exceptionally well known, and this one, with its stirring climax of a loud clash of cymbals, is surely Mertz’s favourite, because it is so similar to his personality. As a matter of fact, they refer to it as ‘Mertz killing seals’, being so ‘suggestive of his emphatic methods’.5
A universal favourite is a chorus from The Mikado, and there are frequent animated and sometimes heated discussions as to just what the exact words to the refrain are. It goes … ‘something, something … the Lord High Executioner …’ but what is that something? It sounds for all the world like ‘Japara’, which coincidentally is the material their tents are made from, but, of course that doesn’t make sense. Again and again, they put the needle on the gramophone back a little, as they huddle close and strain their ears to get it, but it simply escapes them. At least, however, many happy hours are spent discussing it, their minds fastening upon this little bit of civilisation they have brought with them to this polar wilderness and savouring every second of it.
In the absence of any formal entertainment, or games, or listening to records, the default position is to gather night after night, after dinner, in the part of the hut known as ‘Hyde Park Corner’ – formed in the angle between the top bunks of Ninnis ’n’ Mertz and the bottom bunks of Bickerton and Madigan – where they can debate points great and small, argue over anything and everything, recite poetry, do readings of various books or simply tell stories.
In the latter regard, the favourite of them all is Herbert Dyce Murphy, who proves to be a superb raconteur with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of yarns from his staggeringly colourful past. Now, it is not that Murphy – born the son of wealthy Toorak socialites with pastoral interests down Australia’s east coast and educated in Melbourne, London and Oxford; the last only until he dropped out – tells all of his most intimate stories, but he is one with a particular predilection for wearing women’s clothing. This is a passion and talent he discovered while attending Oxford and has engaged in thereafter. It was he, after all, who had been rejected from Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition because he had been too effeminate. Regardless, he has for a long time been comfortable with exploring the feminine side of himself and has been quite open about it.
When, in his early 20s, he had been living in London and fell out of touch with his mother for several months, she journeyed there unannounced and arrived at his church one Sunday morning. There, she found her son in his familiar pew, dressed as the most feminine woman in the establishment – with a hat, veil, long-sleeved jacket, gloves and gorgeous long skirt.
Sitting down beside him, his mother had delicately written, ‘Who are you?’
‘I am your daughter, Edith,’ her son had written back, in his equally elegant hand.
She replied, ‘I always wanted a beautiful daughter.’
Acceptance!
And well, one thing led to another, and in the early 1900s Murphy worked as a spy in France and Belgium. Dressed as a woman and presenting himself as an Australian heiress, Edith Dyce Murphy, he travelled the French railways taking notes on railway infrastructure and resources, before returning to London where, for many years, still dressed as a woman, he lived with an elderly sea captain who was very generous to Edith/Herbert in his will. He also has three Arctic voyages on his résumé.
‘His stories have a curious suggestion of truth,’ Laseron would later write of them. ‘They are convincing and at the same time too impossible to be true. For Herbert is a genius, who from an ounce of fact can manufacture a mountain of entertainment.’6
And so it would go, night after night, gathered in the smoky bonhomie of Hyde Park Corner as, in his light tenor voice, Herbert tells his yarns. They laugh and carouse and carry on before, at last, it is time for bed. Now, as the blizzard continues to rage, and the howling wind makes the roof creak wearily in protest, one by one they head off to their bunks, usually leaving as the second-last man up the nocturnal Bage, who is often to be found doing some sewing or fixing up one of his gadgets.
And then Bage, too, rises, stretches, says ‘Goodnight’ to the nightwatchman and goes to his bunk for some precious shut-eye.
Charles Laseron’s account of what usually then happens is evocative:
The night-watchman rises from the table and puts some coal on the fire … It is nearly midnight, and preparations must be made to take the usual observations. It is a serious business this, though the weather screen is but a few yards from the hut on the eastern side.7
First of all, the watchman draws on his Burberry trousers, which he ties tightly with tapes around his ankles and waist:
Then comes the balaclava, and over it the burberry helmet. Woollen mittens come next to protect the wrists, and over all the blouse, which is tied at the waist, neck and wrists to prevent the entrance of snow. Finally, fingerless woollen gloves complete the outfit. The barometer is read, and the result noted in the record book; then the main adventure begins. Passing into the outer room, from thence to the porch, he crawls through the snow tunnel into the veranda of the main hut …
He now calculates his distance–one–two–three–four–five yards. Now comes the plunge into the unknown. At right angles he makes a rush, and his hand gropes blindly about him. Here it is at last – a thin strand of wire, vibrating shrilly in the wind. As his fingers make contact with the wire, blue sparks spring forth, and the metal rim of his helmet also glows with blue flame. This is St Elmo’s fire, an electric discharge caused by the friction of the particles of snow. But at this moment he is not concerned with the superstitions of the old-time mariners, but instead hauls himself carefully upwards, his mind on the immediate task.8
Making his way out to the instruments, he hangs on for grim death against the marauding wind and manages to open the door of the screen, turn on the small electric switch attached to a battery and, in the resultant tepid light, get his eyes to within a couple of inches of the gauges to read the results, take a mental note, and then close it all up again, before retracing his steps with the same difficulty as before.
He finds the entrance and plunges through with a feeling of relief. In the porch he takes off his burberries, shakes the snow from them, and with his hand melts the ice from his eyes. His balaclava he leaves on until he is in front of the fire, for it has become frozen fast to his beard, and it is apt to be painful to pull it off too suddenly.
In the warm hut again his cheek feels rather numb, so he looks at himself in the glass and sees a round, shrivelled patch about the size of a shilling. It is a frost-bite, and he rubs it gently to restore the circulation. It tingles a bit as feeling comes back, and an hour later there is a blister in the place. He takes the record book and makes an entry, curiously similar to other entries for many pages back:
12 midnight. Temp. -18°F, wind about 80, thick drift.9
One other thing not to forget, and it is the great pleasure of all nightwatchmen: at midnight, they must turn over the calendar on the wall. Another day has passed, bringing them a day closer to the darkness leaving, the warmth returning, the summer’s keenly anticipated sledging journeys beginning and, thereafter, going home …
However, that still seems a long, long way away. And in the face of it all, the bitter cold, their ongoing isolation, some men begin to struggle spiritually, their mood starting to match the growing blackness.
But Xavier Mertz is not one of them. He writes in his diary:
Although I am uncertain about the present or the future and I know that Switzerland lies far away, I have never felt such satisfaction and peace in my life … Raving weather whips up my nerves and blood. The stress caused by natural phenomenon is not to be compared with stress in our civilised world. A lot of people can’t understand why we travelled to an unknown land. The danger, laborious work, and cold weather wouldn’t tempt them. If they could see our satisfaction and enjoy the life with us, they would understand. They would realize how, in this area, hard work and life’s difficulties bring delights. I love this cold area in the same way that I love my Alps, with their natural beauty and dangers.10
Although by this time, outside tasks are down to a bare minimum, still there remains a little building work to do, in the few precious daylight hours when the conditions are good enough to allow it.
By now, it is so cold, even on good days, that all activity outside must be extremely vigorous and for a short time only, or a case of frostbite would be the all but certain result – requiring heavy rubbing in the first instance, even as you get as close as you can to the stove, to try to restore circulation to the affected flesh.
One job that occupies the party’s attention at this time is assisting Bage in building the astronomical observatory, on the eastern side of the main hut. This new building requires many tons of stones for its foundations, and many hands pitch in to carry them from the nearest pile, some 20 yards away, though the bases of many of those stones are frozen in the ice and they can only be shifted by heavy use of crowbars.
After that rock collection is exhausted, it is Ninnis and Mertz who rise to the occasion. They take the opportunity of putting their dog-teams through their paces by loading up the sledges with stones from further afield and then careering across the ice-flat towards Bage and the others, who unload the sledges before the men are cheerfully off again, with the shivering dogs yelping short and sharp and constant in their eagerness to get going.
Little by little, the men and the dogs become used to each other, the dogs growing ever more responsive to the men’s commands. With the sledge laden once more, Ninnis and Mertz get the dogs started with a touch of the whip and some shouted imprecations. Then, once the sledge is properly going, they jump aboard, with Mertz habitually on the lead sledge singing, as Mawson would remember it ever afterwards, ‘some quaint yodel song, [with] Ninnis, perhaps, just behind upbraiding a laggard dog’.11
Mawson, for one, is not surprised to see the two Europeans so heavily involved in all facets of the work. A few weeks earlier, when it was noticed that the ropes anchoring the still inoperative wireless masts were badly chafed, meaning the whole thing was in danger of falling to the ground, Mawson noted that it was Ninnis ’n’ Mertz who were the first to help the wireless operator, Hannam, secure them, an action not necessarily duplicated by some of the others.
‘I was sorry to see,’ he noted crisply in his diary, ‘that others, who were not engaged on special work, excused themselves and one even refused to go. With all due consideration for the frailty of such individuals, this is scarcely a brotherly feeling, to say the least of it.’12
But Ninnis and Mertz? Well, they could not be faulted, and Ninnis, particularly, has come a long way from the callow and lazy youth that, on Aurora, Davis doubted was up to the task.
10 May 1912, Sydney, at the Lyceum Theatre, another curtain rises
Roll up! Roll up!
And so they do. If not quite in their thousands, then at least in their hundreds, as some of the film that Frank Hurley shot on the trip to the south – from Macquarie Island right up until Aurora had departed Cape Denison, before sending it back on that very ship – has been made into a film called With Mawson in the South. In Sydney’s finest theatre, the film is played after a special address by Professor David, and to the accompaniment of a ‘full orchestra and effects’.13
The film will go on to play in Melbourne and Hobart, and if the prime hope of Mawson – that it will do such good box office that a chunk of the expedition’s bills will be paid – is not realised, at least it generates some publicity and gives interested parties some clue as to what conditions are like far, far to their south, where the ice men are living.
June to August 1912, Cape Denison, the darkness deepens at Mawson’s Winter Quarters
It was a dark and stormy night …
On the other hand, as this particular dark and stormy night now goes all but around the clock, day after day, for weeks on end, it is barely worth noting any more.
All but beaten now, the sun glows for no more than a short period each day, and even then it’s not high enough to be anything more than a frozen red orb on the horizon before it quickly slinks away out of sheer embarrassment as the more powerful forces of darkness crowd close.
With that darkness has come ever more freezing temperatures and ever more powerful winds. In March, the average wind velocity was 49 mph, which was more than matched in April with an average of over 50 mph, with only three days of relative calm. On one particular day in mid-May – the 14th – the average had been no less than 90.1 mph, lifting the average for the fortnight to above 70 mph.
Beyond the scientific value of such measurements, they also add to the entertainment: one of the most popular activities is the monthly Calcutta sweep as to what that month’s average wind speed will be. All of the punters keenly anticipate the second-last day of the month, when the available numbers are put on display, just as if they are horses in the Melbourne Cup, and the auction takes place, presided over by Cecil Madigan, who, as the man who takes the monthly readings, is the one person who cannot bet himself, as he already knows the approximate result. For currency, there is nothing so gauche as money available, so instead they bet from their weekly ration of 30 squares of chocolate.
‘How much am I bid for an average of 70 mph?’
‘I bid twenty-one squares!’
‘Twenty-three squares here.’
‘I bid twenty-five squares!’
And so on. It provides endless revelry and even some oddly good-hearted sorrow when, on one occasion, Archie McLean is found to be unable to pay his chocolate debts and declared bankrupt, meaning that some of his precious personal effects, such as candles, matches and tobacco, are placed on the block for another auction, so that his honour can be restored.
Others are able to form a syndicate, and by hook and by crook, and by pooling their resources, they manage to corner the whole chocolate market for weeks ahead.
One of the strangest phenomena of all, beyond the fact that there are wind gusts approaching 200 mph – they still can’t get used to it – is that even in the middle of such a tempest you can often see the stars above twinkling, with nary a cloud in the sky. By the light of these stars and the moon reflecting off the ice, it is as though one is living in an ethereal twilight world, albeit with a screaming banshee devil of a wind and a cripplingly low temperature to spoil it.
In such conditions, fulfilling even the most quotidian of chores is a trial, and, as Mawson discovered on the Nimrod expedition, the colder it gets the more energy men require just to survive.
Take getting water for the hut. Every drop must be melted from ice, and that ice must be chipped from outside, no matter the weather. (Most important is that the ice must come from a place well distant from anywhere the dogs have been – as yellow ice is a disaster.) Getting water is the primary job of Dr Leslie Whetter – a rather prickly New Zealander – and he is rarely happy about it, particularly when the weather is inclement, which is pretty much always.
With an assistant grimly hanging on to a box, Whetter holds a pick. Both must brace against any small ridge they can find to prevent themselves from being swept away by the wild wind. But it is not a matter of simply swinging the pick in the same spot of ice to break it up, because to begin with it is difficult for Whetter to grip the handle properly with his thick mitts, and, each time he lifts it, it is caught by the endlessly varying gusts of wind, making it nigh on impossible to hit the same place twice. This means that what chips are gathered for the box are small, and even such pieces as fly from the point of the pick are instantly caught by the wind and have to be gathered back in.
‘The box itself,’ Laseron later recounts, ‘even when partially filled, is sometimes lost, wrenched from the hands and swept away to sea. No wonder Whetter sometimes growls at the cook’s demands for ice, and the cook, in turn, resists requests for water for such frivolous purposes as washing.’14
Whetter’s particular mistake is to growl at Dux Ipse during breakfast on 4 June, asking when ‘winter’s work’ would begin, assuming that winter’s work would mean that instead of having his men working all day every day seven days a week, Mawson might at last give them half a day a week of free time.
In response, Mawson is terse: ‘Never, as there is too much work to do.’15
Whetter is aggrieved, though as this tends to describe his natural condition, it is unremarkable. Outside, the wind keeps blowing strongly all day, just as it does day after day.
Inside the hut, though, things are cosier than ever, helped by the fact that an enormous drift of snow has first built up against its southern wall and then all but covered it – to the point that the only entrance to the hut is through a tunnel into the snowdrift and then via a trapdoor in the roof of the veranda.
For those with duties outside, it is, therefore, an extraordinary thing when they are finished to go from the roar of the terrifying tempest to a sudden hush and then, only a few seconds after that, hear the strains of a gramophone playing Nellie Melba mixed with gales of laughter from another section of the hut. If they are really lucky, they are also greeted with the wonderful aroma of Mertz’s speciality, which is omelette made of eggs long ago snaffled from the penguins. They have very small yolks with very large whites and, surprisingly, ‘no fishy taste whatever’.16
One whiff of Mertz’s masterpiece and they know heaven is just up ahead.
For Mertz is one of the few in the hut not to hold guaranteed membership of what is known laughingly within the hut as the ‘Crook Cooks’ Association’, nor even their brother guild, ‘The Society of Muddling Messmen’, that group of unfortunates who at every mealtime are assigned, on a rotating basis, to help the cooks do the most menial of work. For true membership, one has to have committed a ‘championship’, as in some mistake such as dropping a dozen plates or burning the porridge, sufficient to attract the derisive mirth of the entire hut and a cry of ‘Championship! Championship!’17
One notable Crook Cook is a junior member (whose name is not recorded) who forgot the crucial ingredient of baking powder in making a loaf of bread. The resultant ‘championship’ was so inedible, so hard that not even the dogs outside would eat it! (Great hilarity results, heightened when it is first found days later in the gathered rubbish that lies to the north of the hut, and then, months later when they are digging out a tunnel, they find it again – the loaf of bread that refuses to die.)
Another championship occurs when Ninnis, very carefully following Mrs Beeton’s famous cookbook, decides upon a salmon dish for lunch. Now, let’s see: ‘Take one tin of salmon, 2 oz of butter, 2 oz of flour, pepper and salt to taste.’ Well, as there are 18 of them to feed, it should be a simple matter of roughly multiplying those quantities by four, which means … 4 tins of salmon, 8 oz of flour, 8 oz of butter, and … yes, I suppose … 8 oz of pepper and 8 oz of salt! Well, it did seem rather a lot, but that is what the recipe seems to say and so that is what he does.
‘The funny thing,’ Charles Laseron recounts, ‘is that the dish looked all right as it came nicely browned from the oven. I … was aroused by the howl of anguish that followed the first mouthful. Ninnis never heard the last of this …’18
For his part, the true ‘artist’ among them, Hurley is always concerned with how the food presents rather than whether it tastes good or not, always insisting, for example, on making pastry very hard so it would ‘stand up in the form of a ship or some grotesque shape’,19 always guaranteed to cause high hilarity.
And this is the hut at its best: a place of laughter, camaraderie and care entirely removed from the oft-cataclysmic chaos and total frigidity of the world outside. Though the average temperature inside the hut is only around 45 degrees – similar to the interior of an icebox at home – compared with the frozen wastelands that lie at its door, being safe inside it feels like lazing in front of a roaring fire.
‘Once passing through the vestibule and work-room,’ Mawson later describes it, ‘one beheld a scene in utter variance with the outer hell. Here were warm bunks, rest, food, light and companionship – for the time being, heaven!’20
Certainly, it is a curious kind of heaven, one where the ‘air pulsates as the roof bends inwards beneath the pressure of the fiercest gusts’,21 but for the men inside the hut that only heightens the sense of privilege that they are not outside.
One thing they all look forward to, as this cruellest of all possible winters gets a true grip on their hut, is midwinter’s day on 21 June, a date of legendary significance for all those who have wintered in the Antarctic. This is the day, of course, that marks the very heart of the winter, meaning that every day thereafter the summer is on its way to returning and the forces of light, thought to have been so completely routed by the forces of darkness, will begin their improbable fightback. After being pinned down for so long, restricted to appearing as a glow just above the northern horizon for only 30 minutes around noon each day, soon, they know, it will start to change. Soon, the golden orb of the sun will begin to gain confidence and start to strike out in all directions, rising higher, shining brighter, appearing earlier and lasting longer each day.
And when that shortest day finally ‘dawns’ – the first day since they have disembarked that Mawson frees them from duties for the entire day – they are not at all disappointed. For with that dawn, just after midday, the wind suddenly falls away, almost as if acknowledging that a crossroads has been reached, and the men are nearly all able to get outside to enjoy the precious light, coming from the moon and even the aurora. After the sun goes down, they manage to go on small ventures around and about the hut, exploring the nearby ice caves and the abandoned penguin rookeries as they glory in the sense that from this point on it can only get better, lighter and warmer.
That evening, the hut is adorned with flags, all the men are dressed in their least dirty cardigans and neckcloths, the table groans under the weight of festive fare, and they enjoy a wonderful meal followed by toasts to the King and each other, together with speeches. And then comes ‘a musical and dramatic programme, punctuated by choice gramophone records and rowdy student choruses … Outside, the wind was not to be outdone; it surpassed itself with an unusual burst of ninety-five miles per hour.’22
‘At midnight,’ as Mertz fondly writes in his diary, ‘the party came to an end, and it was the beginning of Ninnis’s birthday. We gave him congratulations, presents and ovations, then we went to bed.’23
Over on Shackleton’s Ice Shelf, Frank Wild and his men have had a similar celebration. Though on this day the temperature has plummeted to minus 38, still nothing can quell their joy that this auspicious date has been reached. So thrilled is Wild himself that he has proclaimed a general holiday throughout the land he has unofficially named Queen Mary Land. That evening, they too have a celebratory dinner followed by speeches and toasts and a gramophone concert.
With the darkest point of the winter now passed, the focus of Mawson and his men turns to preparing their sledges for their spring trips. Packing them is an art form, the masterpieces of which display a perfectly balanced lightweight load where the things that will be most often required are placed in the most easily accessible spots and nothing crucial is left behind.
At Cape Denison, Mawson supervises the practice packing of the sledges particularly closely. Let us begin with the box at the front of the sledge carefully filled with everything from surveying instruments – such as the theodolite, to measure vertical and horizontal angles, so we can record the contours of the land we see – to photographic equipment, meteorological measuring gear, tools, weapons and ammunition, and a medical kit.
Most crucial – and Dr Mawson insists on this – is that each man makes his own harness out of stout canvas. This is because, firstly, it is important that the harness – which they will attach to themselves to haul the sledge forward – is comfortable. Far more crucial, though, is that if they fall down a crevasse, their lives will likely be hanging by a thread, and it is important that all of that thread – in fact, the canvas of the harness, attached to a rope tied onto the sledge – be fashioned by the man concerned. So long as the canvas holds, and the sledge doesn’t follow them in, they can likely be hauled to the surface or even, in extremis, pull themselves to the surface.
A lot of work is also put into the tents that they will carry, and into practising how to erect them.
These tents, to be sure, are already designed to withstand fierce winds – pyramidal in structure, with a low pitch supported by five bamboo poles so that the wind will be more inclined to flow over them than through them, blowing them away – but Mawson is not satisfied.
Realising how impossible it will be to mount such a tent in a full-blown blizzard, he insists that the bamboo poles be ready-sewn and secured inside the tent, so the whole thing can be mounted as one piece with three men working together. That done, Mawson’s men are obliged to practise raising the tent again and again just outside the hut, most particularly when the wind is at its worse, until they get the hang of it.
First, they must cut large blocks of ice or hard snow to act as ballast and then lay the whole of the tent with its apex pointing straight into the wind and the tent entrance on the top side. Now, as one man crawls inside, the tent is slowly raised, with every foot raised giving more shelter to the men on the lee side. The job of the man on the inside is to spread the three windward legs as wide as possible so that the material is taut … all while not getting blown over … and while giving the other men the chance to heap the ballast on the specially designed long flaps at the tent’s base. Then a canvas tent floor is laid and the reindeer-skin sleeping bags set out. These bags have the tiniest slit at the top, just large enough for a man’s body to fit inside. Once a fellow is in the bag, that slit can be narrowed to nearly nothing, allowing the occupant to be snug as a bug in a rug, practically as if in the womb of a reindeer. Though lack of oxygen could be a minor problem, the key is to have the slit just wide enough for you to breathe easily, allowing your own hot breath to warm the entire bag.
Another thing that occupies them greatly is preparing and packing the food to be taken out on their sledging expeditions. The apportioning and packing of the foodstuffs, which include Plasmon biscuits, pemmican, butter, Glaxo, cocoa, chocolate and tea, together with preparation of sledging ‘compounds’, takes up weeks on end. The pemmican compound is prepared by shaving down the pemmican and mixing it with hand-ground Plasmon biscuits before being carefully weighed and placed into small calico bags. After that, those small bags will be put into larger canvas bags, or ‘tanks’, designed to hold rations for a week or a fortnight. Cocoa compound, made up of cocoa, Glaxo and sugar, is similarly dealt with.
As to dog food, it is Ninnis ’n’ Mertz who look after it – just as they have made the dog harnesses – and they are often to be found drying seal meat over the stove. The reason the seal steaks are dried and not cooked is that this reduces their weight by fifty per cent, and that is always a prime consideration.
And so the winter proper passes. While other animals in freezing climes have the luxury of sleeping or resting through the northern winter, not so Mawson’s men in the south.
Their winter must be spent actively preparing for the coming spring, and as the weeks pass the sense of expectation rises. Indeed, there is so much for all of them to do that, despite the constant protests of Whetter, Mawson insists they continue to work until dinner each and every night – that’s right – seven days a week.
All of their sledges are ready and packed long before that spring arrives, and, as early as the morning of 21 July, Mertz and Ninnis are feeling sufficiently confident that as the wind temporarily drops away for the first time in weeks they may even be able to start ferrying loads of food to the top of the plateau, where they can depot it.24
31 July 1912, Cape Denison, Mertz has a particular reason to celebrate
At the end of this long day, Mertz writes joyously in his diary:
The wind rages and howls above the roof. The grey clouds and the light snow drifts create a gloomy atmosphere. My thoughts linger in Switzerland where now it’s the middle of summer. For the National Day, fires are lit on the mountains. The whole country celebrates 1 August. In the evening, in ‘Adélie Land’, we also celebrated this day. The Englishmen joined me for this holiday. The red Swiss flag with its white cross was hoisted. For the first time since the earth exists, this flag flutters in Antarctica. I am very proud. Honouring this day, Swiss courses were dished up. ‘Lenzburger’ vegetables and fruits and ‘Decksens’ coffee and Swiss Leckerli biscuits. During the cup of coffee, I made a speech about Switzerland, pointing on a map to the mountains, valleys, and lakes. After that Mawson pronounced some very sensitive words. We had a toast to Switzerland.
As a second toast was to me, I had to sit out, and kept my mouth shut. Nin, my oldest friend here, gave Switzerland three cheers, and wished me all the best. These signs of sympathy from my comrades were so warm that I never lived such a 1st August until now. A Swiss has never moved so far away from his homeland, as I did, and no Swiss can feel more intensely than me, how the homeland is beloved.25
9 August 1912 and five days thereafter, Cape Denison, Mawson tests the wind …
On this morning, after the worst of the winter has passed and sufficient daylight has returned, Dux Ipse judges the time is right to make another foray to see what they can see. He sets out in the company of Madigan and Ninnis, this time with dog teams, only to find, alas, that the lull of wind at their hut does not exist higher up. The steep grade softens a little as they rise, and though the hard glacier ice is beset by light sastrugi and small crevasses, by the time they have struggled up to an altitude of 1000 feet – by which point they can no longer see their tiny hut, nor even the islands offshore – that wind is blowing at them so strongly that it is impossible to proceed.
After making camp a little over three and a quarter miles inland, the next day they get their bearings once more. To their far north, they can see the darkness of the blue sea, lightly peppered with the white of the icebergs. But all around them in every other direction it is white, pure white, without any discernible landmarks, apart from the fact that as they look to the south that white clearly moves higher. It is lifeless, utterly lifeless, bar themselves and their dogs.
As they set off further to the south and the sight of the sea disappears, they become more aware than ever of the importance of their compass in heading in the right direction, for there is no other thing with which to get their bearings – except the fact that the wind itself usually blows from the frozen heart of the continent, to their south.
Though with the strength of that wind it is difficult to keep going, they are able to get to the sledge that was abandoned five months before, five and a half miles from the hut. It is with some satisfaction that Mawson notes it is where they left it and still intact, if showing the wear and tear of having been in such a wind for so long. So, too, an aluminium cooker, the windward side of which has been burnished to sparkling by the irrepressible winds. A bonus is that they also find the remains of one of Madigan’s puddings, which is carefully thawed out over their Primus cooker and consumed in double-quick time – tasting as fresh as if it were baked just an hour before. Due to the wind still blowing as strongly as ever, Mawson decides to make camp once more.
As this area is at the point where the ascent ends and the plateau truly begins – just under six miles from the hut, in a clearly distinguishable part of the great whiteness all around – it is decided that it is an excellent place to locate a depot. Given, however, the intensity of what appears to be year-round continuous howling winds, Mawson deems they should excavate a cavern at the site, beneath the icy surface, which would provide far more shelter than anything constructed above ground.
Using ice-axes and some small shovels they have carried with them, they immediately start chopping and digging upon a small fissure in the ice, and by the end of the next day the men are snugly ensconced in their new home, which is a roughly cuboid chamber with six-foot-long sides and a roof about five feet high. Entrance is afforded via an almost vertical shaft with a tent cover for a door, before opening into what is effectively an underground igloo, with an ice roof thin enough that the light from the outside world comes as something of a translucent glow, making the ice walls within sparkle.
Once inside this subterranean refuge, the blizzard is banished and the eerie silence, together with the sparkling of ice crystals, creates an atmosphere of sitting among jewels and treasures, reminding Mawson of the fairy grotto in Lady Betty Across the Water. As he records, they call it Aladdin’s Cave, as it has ‘walls sparkling like diamonds’26 and is ‘a truly magical world of glassy facets and scintillating crystals’.27
Compared to a tent with its furiously flapping canvas, Aladdin’s Cave is a luxury hotel. If water is required, ice is simply hacked from the walls to be melted over a Primus. Shelves are also cut into the walls for Sir’s convenient placement of everything from eating implements and diaries to boots. A place is provided so clothes can be hung to dry, by wetting the corner of each garment and freezing it to the wall. As to the call of nature, a convenient crevasse connected to the cave provides commodious egress for all unwanted matter.28
After carefully marking the site of Aladdin’s Cave with a huge black flag attached to a bamboo pole that pokes out from the top of a large snow cairn, on 13 August Mawson, Ninnis and Madigan begin a foray further south but are beaten back by the weather and return to their icy oasis that night. In thick weather, with a hurricane at their backs, yet without the trailing dogs that have fallen behind somewhere in the drift, they arrive once more at Winter Quarters on 15 August.
The dogs, knowing there is just one source of food and warmth in the whole area, should not be far behind.
1 September to mid-September 1912, Cape Denison, spring springs forth
It is truly wonderful to have made it through the winter, as characterised with typical eloquence by Charles Laseron:
As the first rounding of the Horn is to the sailor, so a winter in the ice is to the polar explorer. It puts the hallmark on his experience. Having successfully emerged from the embryonic stage, he is now fully fledged, and can take his place in the select fraternity.29
Helping the upbeat mood of Mawson and his men after surviving the trials of the winter is the return of more normal conditions.
In recent weeks, the wind has lessened a little and the daylight hours have increased. With the greater capacity to do work outside, on this very day the men complete the first section of the three-section masts for the antenna to be suspended from. In fact, they have long since decided it will be impossible to get all four sections up, but they will try to get the third sections, the top-gallant masts, attached. For the moment, it is enough to suspend the antenna 65 feet above the ground, and Hannam begins to send messages. True, there is no response from Macquarie Island, but there has to be a small chance that the messages are being received, and so he continues to send them.
In these early days of September, the weather continues to improve, and they are treated to a fabulous five days straight of an almost surreal calm. The seals are the first to answer nature’s clarion call of warmer times ahead, as they flop ashore and, at least initially, sleepily bask in the frigid sunshine for all the world as if they are bathers on Bondi Beach at the height of summer – a new craze that was just taking off at home when they left. Mawson’s men are delighted to see them, and they waste little time in killing the first of the seals for their meat and blubber.
Such perfect weather offers Mawson the opportunity to send out three trial sledging parties, so they may reconnoitre at least the beginnings of the routes they will be on in a couple of months’ time, get some crucial experience and test the equipment. All of the men are under strict instruction, however, to go no further than 50 miles from the hut and be back within 14 days.
Webb, McLean and Stillwell’s party get away on 7 September in a 56-mph wind that soon builds to 80 mph, even as day temperatures drop as low as minus 20 degrees. As they soon learn, it is impossible to proceed in such conditions, and they are obliged to lay up for three days, digging out – against the possibility that their tent might be whisked away by the tremendous winds – a cave that becomes known as The Cathedral Grotto. After nine days out, they return, having covered a distance of less than 12 miles south of the hut.
As to the South-Eastern Party of Ninnis ’n’ Mertz and Murphy, after departing on 11 September, they, too, are quickly thrown into the deep end of harsh experience when they quickly find themselves ascending the glacier behind the hut in 50-mph winds as they encounter frequent crevasses – making less than six miles for the day. The following day, the glacier surface is even worse, and they travel less than three miles, finally being obliged to beat a hasty retreat after having made it just 18 miles from the hut.
And finally, the Western Party of Madigan, Close and Whetter set out on 12 September in the same fierce winds … only to disappear for 14 days. Given the experience of the other parties, it was expected they would quickly return, but it is not until 26 September that they finally, mercifully, arrive to tell their tale to the relieved throng.
Madigan recounts to his rapt audience that, despite the conditions, they actually made it to 50 miles out and managed to establish a depot with a black flag flapping on a wide, featureless plain. But they suffered terrible hardship, too, as they stumbled their way back through strong snowdrift while constantly capsizing their sledge in steep country. In winds of up to 75 mph, it had taken them over an hour to pitch a tent, and it had only got worse. They had had to haul their sledge over three-foot-high sastrugi in blizzard conditions.
Not surprisingly, all of them are the worse for wear and have varying stages of frostbite on various parts of their extremities, from eyelid to nose to chin to fingertip to toe. Madigan ends his story with a riveting description of how the temperatures became so low that his helmet froze solid to his face. He is greeted with a silence so profound that you could hear an icicle drop, and probably do. Either that, or it was his nose.
30 September 1912 and a week thereafter, Cape Denison, a signal is sent … and received
Today is the day. Finally, after much work over many months, the men feel the aerial stands at a sufficient height that they may at last be able to contact Macquarie Island. That evening after dinner, they crowd around Hannam as he sits at his wireless, all of them with the fervent hope that the first real long-distance messages from their base to Macquarie Island, and hopefully from there on to Australia, are about to be sent and received. Perhaps, soon, they will be able to communicate back and forth with their families!
Mawson writes, ‘The sharp note of the spark rose in accompanying crescendo and, when it had reached its highest pitch, Hannam struck off a message to the world at large.’30
They all eagerly wait, but there is no response. Yes, the men can hear ‘atmospherics’ – radio reception noise caused by electromagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere – which indicates that something is working, but Hannam cannot hear any messages from the outside world.
Nor are there any responses the following night, or on subsequent nights. The one thing they all do note, however, is that because the wireless works off the effects of electrical induction – sending a strong current across a conductor moving through a magnetic field – it means that the air in the hut is effectively alive with it, and there is great joy evinced when everyone conceives ‘a mania for ‘“drawing” sparks’.31 Merely by moving any part of your body to within a short distance of a metallic object, it is possible to have a delightful spark leap the distance. A particular favourite is ‘to brush one’s head against one of the numerous coils of flexible metal gas-piping festooned about the place. Sparks immediately jump the interval with startling effect’.32
That amusement aside, Hannam keeps going in the hope that even though he can’t hear Macquarie Island, they might possibly be hearing him …
And, sure enough, in faraway Macquarie Island and Australia, they actually can hear something. It sounds like ‘the voice of a deaf man crying out in the darkness’, and like ‘the outermost ripples caused by a stone thrown into the middle of a pond’.33 In short, next to hopeless, but still it is something, an indication that something is happening down at Cape Denison where Mawson and his men were left.
Not all of what is happening at Mawson’s hut, however, is happy.
How to get to the bottom of Mawson’s most recent flare-up with Whetter? Perhaps by starting with Whetter’s inflamed piles as a reason for his grim mood. From Mawson’s side, however, the fact that Whetter seems to have spent the better part of the last six months sitting on that backside for so many hours a day reading is a significant pointer as to the likely cause.
One way or t’other, the bottom line is that Dux Ipse has had a gutful of both the assistant doctor’s indolence and insolence. The two had their first confrontation over Whetter’s laziness as far back as June, and Mawson has ever after been rueing the day he took this laggard on.
Whetter has not backed off an inch in his constant campaign to have the leader relent on the seven-days-a-week work routine. Despite several stern talks, the fact that Whetter continues to work all of two hours a day has hardly supported his case that the men be allowed to finish work by 4 pm and be granted Sundays off.
Mawson, who by now has taken to recording detailed notes regarding Whetter’s recalcitrance, at one stage overhears the medico suggesting Ninnis follow his lead and turn in for an afternoon nap around 4 pm as preventative to feeling tired the following day. Ninnis, a tireless worker who typically hits the hay no earlier than 11 pm, fails to quite ‘cotton on’ to the good doctor’s advice.34
Matters come to a head on 3 October, when once again the assistant doctor fails to obey Mawson’s order to cut ice, preferring to read in bed. Whetter believes he has done enough work for the day, and when confronted by Mawson he declares that cutting ice is not the reason he came on the expedition.
‘[You’re a] bloody fool to come on the expedition if that was the case,’ Mawson uncharacteristically snarls.
‘Bloody fool yourself, I won’t be caught on another one,’ responds Whetter insolently.35 The workload has been so onerous, Whetter continues, that some of the men have been drawing out their work so as not to be immediately assigned a new duty.
Well aware that this is the practice of at least three of the expedition members, at dinner that night Mawson relents. General duties and scientific work aside, from here on the men may knock off at 4 pm and Sundays will be free. Fittingly, the first to fully benefit from the new regime is the hard-working Swiss. Mertz celebrates in his diary:
6 October. My birthday. The first free Sunday … Percy gave me a nice book about photography, Hannam a book by Shackleton, Dad McLean a volume by Chateaubriand, and Mawson an English collection of poems. From Whetter, Hodgy and Nin I received cigarettes, so now I have 150 altogether. All of us appreciate Madi’s cooking. From time to time we were treated to tasty delicacies. The plum pudding was cooked by Mawson’s fiancée. The lady seems to have talent for cooking. In the pudding, Hodgy found a ring (will marry), and Murphy a thimble (remains single). Of course this pudding was served in my honour. In his speech Mawson complimented me, and then ‘cheers!’ rang out with ‘Many happy returns of the day!’36
12 October 1912 and the day thereafter, Cape Denison, the sound of a falling body is heard
As the forces of darkness recede, so too, encouraged, do the forces of life begin to surge forward. On this day, late in the afternoon, from the freezing waters of the Southern Ocean the first penguin of the season, with extraordinary athleticism, suddenly springs out and comes ‘waddling up the ice-foot against a seventy-mile wind’.37
For its trouble, the penguin is quickly captured by Archie McLean, who puts it under his coat, takes it back to the hut and unveils it to the gathering, where the tiny animal receives a welcome almost as rapturous as the one he receives later on when he is on their dinner plates.
Alas, winter is not done with them yet. For the next day is one that the men on this expedition would ever after refer to as ‘Black Sunday’. That evening, Mawson and his men are all seated for dinner while a hurricane rages outside. It is so powerful that the whole hut is quivering under the assault of the freezing air that is tearing down the slopes at them, with speeds that Dux Ipse reckons to be as high as 220 mph. The wind is not continuous but comes in savage gusts, the freezing exhalations of an angry continent intent on blowing them away.
After one particularly ferocious gust, as all the timbers quiver once more, a sudden loud crack is heard, followed by the ‘sound of a heavy falling body’.38 For an instant, they all fear that the roof of the hut itself has caved in, but that does not seem to be the case, for it is soon apparent that there is no sudden rush of freezing wind pouring in upon them. It is the messman who finds the answer. He has no sooner poked his head out of the trapdoor than he sees that the northern wireless mast has crashed to the ground, as three wire-stays have broken. All that work, all that energy, all of their combined expertise – the first top-gallant section on one mast was completed just a fortnight before – now lies in a shattered mess of ropes and broken sections.
Right on the point of opening full communications, they are suddenly totally isolated again. It could have been worse – it could have crashed down on the roof of the hut, threatening their very existence –
But it couldn’t have been much worse.
14 October 1912, The Hague, Paquita writes of good news and bad news
Mawson’s fiancée has had a busy time of it over the European summer, visiting the delights of such places as Milan, Lucerne and Vienna. Oddly enough, one of the chief delights of the Austrian capital was its cold weather, which made her feel closer than ever to her man by giving her some sense that she was experiencing just the barest little bit of what he was experiencing.
Most importantly, though, she knows that the time of their separation is drawing to a close and that now, in a matter of mere months, they will be both returned to Adelaide, to be together again and to marry! She writes to him on this day:
First of all I love you even more than when you left and there has not been a day – an hour almost – that you have not been in my thoughts. You will have a warm welcome on your return – my arms are open for you already as I think of it …
We shall be very happy when you return with the separation behind us. Dear, I know you have done good work down there in the cold – you and your little hutfull of men.39
As to his comment to her in a letter brought back by Davis in March that he has been finding this expedition less cold than his last expedition with Shackleton, she is in no doubt as to the reason:
Of course, it is my love that does it. I warm you every night. You are safer there in a way than many here … I can almost feel your arms round me and involuntarily as I write lift my face to yours. Seventeen months without one caress! One embrace. We shall have something to make up for.
With my heart’s whole love to you my lover
from your
Paquita
PS. You will have later news than I can give from Campbelltown. Am afraid Mrs Mawson is not so well. But hope for the best darling.40
Mid- to late October 1912, Cape Denison, let the winds of hell do their worst
Though the wind remains extremely strong over the next fortnight, with an average velocity of 56.9 mph, the calms are becoming more frequent – no longer do one’s ears throb with silence when it arrives.
Despite that wind, however, more and more penguins start to appear, making their way back to their rookeries, where they start to build their simple nests from pebbles. Soon, the skua gulls, snow petrels and storm petrels reappear too. Weddell seals, soon to pup, heave themselves from the water and flop upon the shore.
Cape Denison is waking from its frozen hibernation and returning to beautiful and bountiful life before their very eyes.
Nearing the end of the month, though, Dux Ipse starts to become notably tense and restless – and not just whenever he happens to gaze upon the enduringly recalcitrant Whetter. Despite his expectation that the wind would have markedly fallen away by now, allowing them to get away on their sledging expeditions, still it blows on and on, day after day, delaying their departure – a real problem, for the sledging season is a limited one at the best of times. They simply must get away soon if they are all to complete their trips and return to the hut by 15 January, when Aurora will have returned to take them home.
Finally, Mawson decides they can wait no more.
On the still blustery morning of 27 October, after the weekly Sunday service, Dux Ipse gathers the men around him and grimly tells the assembly about the sledging program: ‘No matter what the weather, the main parties start … and let the winds of hell do their worst.’41
The program that awaits, he says, is one that, ‘if carried out successfully, is all that remains to make the Expedition a huge success’.42
Six parties of three will set off into the Antarctic wilderness, each assigned to explore a different section of uncharted territory, all to depart, ideally, within ten days.
List of Parties
1 A Southern Party composed of Bage (leader), Webb and Hurley. The special feature of their work is to be magnetic observations in the vicinity of the South Magnetic Pole.
2 A Southern Supporting Party, including Murphy (leader), Hunter and Laseron, who are to accompany the Southern Party as far as possible, returning to Winter Quarters by the end of November.
3 A Western Party of three men – Bickerton (leader), Hodgeman and Whetter – who are to traverse the coastal highlands west of the hut. Their intention is to make use of the air-tractor sledge, and the departure of the party is fixed for early December.
4 Stillwell, in charge of a Near-Eastern Party, is to map the coastline between Cape Denison and the Glacier Tongue, dividing the work into two stages. In the first instance, Close and Hodgeman are to assist him; all three acting partly as supports to the other eastern parties working further afield. After returning to the hut at the end of November for a further supply of stores, he is to set out again with Close and Laseron in order to complete the work.
5 An Eastern Coastal Party composed of Madigan (leader), McLean and Correll are to start in early November with the object of investigating the coastline beyond the glacier immediately to the east.
6 Finally, a Far-Eastern Party, composed of Mawson with Ninnis ’n’ Mertz, assisted by the dogs, are to push out rapidly overland to the southward of Madigan’s party, mapping more distant sections of the coastline, beyond the limit to which the latter party would be likely to reach.43
Mawson hopes his own Far-Eastern Party will push far enough east to link the eastern limit of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition’s charting with the western limit of sledging expeditions launched by the men Scott – more quiet gnashing of teeth – left at Cape Adare.
6 November 1912 and four days thereafter, Cape Denison, once more unto the breach dear friends, once more …
The landscape, obliterated by raging blizzards and snowdrifts, dashes Mawson’s hopes of getting any of the parties under way on this day, as he hoped. And yet, as the weather sufficiently abates the following afternoon, the Southern Supporting Party make a dash for it – only to find themselves 1000 feet up the glacier when the wind returns, forcing them to put down their sledge and head back to the hut for the night.
By 8 November, however, the winds have moderated enough so that it is once again manageable for the men to move around outside. After the false start the day before, the Southern Supporting Party will be able to get away today, together with the Near-Eastern and Eastern Coastal Parties. Cheered off by the others, in the late morning Murphy, Hunter and Laseron are the first to leave, to be followed later in the day by the other two groups.
The next morning, while a particularly heavy drift sweeps through Cape Denison, delaying Mawson’s and Bage’s parties from setting out, Ninnis ’n’ Mertz seize their opportunity.
Since the penguins returned to lay their first eggs, there have been constant expeditions to the rookeries to grab fresh batches of the greenish beauties far larger than a duck’s egg and about twice the size of a chicken’s.
And now it is time for a fresh raid. Fighting off the penguins, the two brothers in arms return from the fray with an impressive count of 22 eggs and with Mertz sporting one pair of ripped Burberry trousers courtesy of a particularly annoyed penguin who wants a piece of him to take home to show his mother.
While Mertz composes three omelettes for his comrades, Mawson takes time to write to Paquita:
This is the first occasion since landing in Antarctica that I have addressed myself to you in writing, though daily a warm glow of life feels to have crept in to me coming from the far distant civilised world and of course it can be from none other but you. I have concluded once again that it is nice to be in love, even here in Antarctica with the focus of the heart strings far away.44
The next morning, however, on the rescheduled day of departure for his own group, Mawson is a tad troubled after a vivid dream the night before about his father, whom he has been worrying about anyway because he knows that, right then and there, Mawson Snr is on his own expedition to the farthest reaches of New Guinea, charting his own new territory.45 What to do to soothe his soul? He dashes off a few more lines of his letter to Paquita:
10 November, 1912: The weather is fine … though the wind still blows. We shall get away in an hour’s time. I have two good companions, Dr Mertz and Lieut. Ninnis. It is unlikely that any harm will happen to us but should I not return to you in Australia please know that I truly loved you. I must be closing now as the others are waiting.46
Ninnis has already closed off the final lines in his own diary, which he will leave behind him with his other personal effects: ‘I must close my writing now, maybe for two months, maybe for good and all, for who knows what might happen during the next two months …’47
Before Mawson’s Far-Eastern Party and Bage’s Southern Party depart, there is something they all want – indeed, after last night, need – to do …
How the soon to be departed clamour around Chef Mertz at the stove, hoping to savour the final omelette for the road – the final omelette ’fore they go – knowing it will likely be many weeks of straight pemmican and hoosh before they once again have the pleasure.
Together in harness, the Southern Party bid their fond farewells and start man-hauling, only to be immediately shocked by just how difficult it is to exert serious physical force after months of relative inactivity in the hut.
‘Our way lay up a steep slope,’ Hurley noted in his diary. ‘Going was very hard, and not being in good sledging “NICK” our muscles felt the strain of the heavy hauling and overburdened sledge.’48
And so it is that, at 12.30 pm on this splendid afternoon in spring, Mawson finally sets out to play his own part in the realisation of his long-held dream. His fervent hope is that the AAE sledging journeys will firmly stamp Australia’s crampon-clad footprint on the part of the Antarctic landscape that lies directly below Mawson’s homeland.
With the help of Ninnis ’n’ Mertz and the full complement of the expedition’s remaining 17 dogs (even though many of the bitches are rather inconveniently in pup) pulling three sledges, he will chart the coastline and geologise a possible 500 miles east, where no man has ever gone before. With Aurora due to return on 15 January, Mawson has just 65 days to complete his self-assigned, groundbreaking, ground-charting mission.
Everything has been worked out to the tiniest detail. Here, starting off on the irregular coastal slopes, the third sledge is carried atop another. For now, the one man who is not driving a team of dogs walks alongside one of the sledges. However, in time the party will fall into a regular procession typically comprising a front-runner (usually Mertz on skis), followed by the other two driving the sledges initially laden with 1723 pounds of equipment and supplies.
Waving them off now are the yet to depart Western Party members Bickerton and Whetter, and Hannam, whose job it will be to keep the home blubber fires burning.
As Mawson and his men head up the slopes, wisps of their shouts are carried back to the remaining men by the wind – ‘Hike, hike, hike!’ – and they soon disappear into the whiteness.
The final sledging frontier awaits …