[Antarctica is] a land where loneliness weighs like a giant pall, [where] there is an ever-present feeling of a hostile presence, hovering and waiting for a chance to strike … One had the impression of fighting, always fighting, a terrible unseen force.
Charles Laseron, South with Mawson
8 January 1913 and three days thereafter, Adélie Land, Robert Bage’s Southern Party receive a royal reception
Things are getting desperate. For the last two days, they have been wandering, lonely as a cloud, looking for a depot that simply refuses to be found. A ‘lucky peep’ of the sun at noon on 6 January allowed them to align themselves with the exact latitude of that depot, but despite their resolute marches back and forth along it, east and west, it seems to have disappeared! And they are all but out of food.
Bage has thus decided, and Hurley and Webb have agreed, to make a dash to where they think Winter Quarters lies, 67 miles to the north.
Desperate to make the sledge as light and fast as possible, they ditch just about everything non-essential, including ‘dip-circle, thermometers, hypsometer, camera, spare clothing and most of the medical and repair kits’,1 leaving only what little food they have, plus the tent to sleep in and the precious records they have so painstakingly gathered from the journey. So desperate are they to lighten their load that Hurley even abandons his precious camera, while being careful, of course, to keep the exposed negatives. With one of his eyes bandaged because of snow-blindness, and all of his comrades near collapse, the photographer records his worst fears in his diary on that evening of 8 January, that ‘another two days of this will about make statues of us’.2
Things become even more desperate the following day as they battle through a 60-mph wind with dense drift. At least they are not going directly into it, but as it is coming from their south-east, the tendency is for it to keep blowing them off course.
Nevertheless, after camping that night on all-but-empty stomachs they press on throughout the following day the best they can, and just before midnight on 10 January they spot the most blessed thing: Aladdin’s Cave! With some of the pemmican and biscuits that have been there now in their bellies – and a wonderful night’s sleep within the shelter of its walls – they make it back to Winter Quarters the following day, just after dinner, completing a journey of 600 miles. There, they are welcomed with ‘a Royal reception and were carried into the Hut where Good Old Close had a banquet prepared for us’.3
‘We three,’ Bage noted, ‘had never thought the Hut quite such a fine place.’4
11 January 1913 and the day thereafter, approaching the nearest glacier to Cape Denison, Mawson is close to leaving more than his mere footprints behind
At last, a beautiful, calm day, with bright sunshine and a good surface heading off down a gentle slope. It is just made for cutting down the distance between him and the hut, and Mawson sets off with as much of a spring in his step as his total exhaustion and his overall physical decrepitude will allow.
Alas, after only two miles his feet feel so lumpy and painful that he is obliged to stop and examine them. Using his sledge for a chair, and sitting in the bright sunshine, he slowly takes off his boots … and very nearly peels away the bottom of his feet with them. To his horror, what he sees is that ‘the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer, and abundant watery fluid had escaped into the socks. The new skin underneath was very much abraded and raw.’5
First, Ninnis had gone. Then the dogs had gone, one by one. Then, Mertz had gone. Now, his feet are in danger of going, as his soles are actually separating from the rest of him. All he can do is to try to care for them the best way he can, which in this case is to smear the new skin with lashings of lanoline and then take bandages and wrap them around his flapping soles to try to hold them in place … before painfully putting over the whole lot ‘six pairs of thick woollen socks, fur boots and a crampon over-shoe of soft leather’.6
Time to move off? Not yet. So bright is the sun, so calm the wind that he decides to take advantage of it. Taking off most of his clothing, getting back to nature right in the middle of nature at its most awesome, he lies back and lets mother sun warm him, renew him, allow the life force within him to begin to glow again. His reward is that a pleasant ‘tingling sensation seemed to spread throughout my whole body, and I felt stronger and better’.7
This day, he does indeed cover a fair distance – six and a quarter miles – which is greatly to the good, though his new-found strength does not endure long, and he stops at 5.30 pm, unable to go further. The rest of the evening is spent applying much of the contents of his medical kit to himself, trying to look after those parts of his body, not just his feet, where the skin is festering or inflamed, or rubbed red raw.
The following day, the wind is too strong and the snowdrift too fierce to allow him to move out of his tent, which is frustrating, but at least it allows him precious time to rest his even more precious feet.
13 January 1913, Cape Denison, Australia has won the First Ashes Test
One moment, all of those at the hut are just as they ever were – alone, under a clear sky, a bright sun and a howling wind – and the next moment radio operator Walter Hannam steps outside from their lunch to see the launch from Aurora just ten yards off coming to a mooring in Boat Harbour.
In an instant, he starts waving his arms and shouting, ‘The ship! The ship!’8 before rushing inside to alert the others. As soon as Captain Davis and his companions step ashore, they are awash in the welcome of hairy, wild creatures in the very place where, the year before, they left relatively well-groomed young students from the finest universities of Australia and New Zealand.
Those boys of a year ago had short hair and neatly trimmed beards, clothing without patches and were fleshy in a well-fed sort of way. These men, however, and they really are now all men, are little more than blazing sets of eyes staring through all the hair – ‘their full-grown whiskers bleached almost white by the frost’,9 their faces matured through having known many hardships and their bodies lean and strong. A wild tribe indeed, they joyously dance around the new arrivals and yell with excitement and delight. Davis and the others look closely but cannot see the particular man they are looking for.
‘Where is the Doctor?’ asks Davis.10
Not back yet, Cap’n. Still out there with Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Like all the others, they are expected back in the next two days.
Come to the hut!
Aurora has arrived complete with provisions of fresh fruit, lamb, newspapers and … most importantly, mail. The men fall upon the scores of letters come to them from loved ones, with some men having as many as a hundred missives, even as they devour apples, oranges and the like. And then to the newspapers. Strangely, these do not quite hold the allure they are expecting.
After a wonderful win in the First Test against England at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Australia had, against the natural order of things, gone on to lose the next four Tests, and the Ashes; a massive ship called Titanic had run into an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic, with many lives lost; there had been a war in the Balkans; and, most interestingly, Scott was spending another year in the Antarctic.11
But there isn’t a lot more that is really gripping. It seems to Charles Laseron, for one, that while reading things from day to day is interesting because you know what’s happened on preceding days, so you can read it in context, without that context they are dull. As a matter of fact, the thing that Aurora has brought for them that most interests them is the libretto of the song that has been driving them crazy all these months, so they can at last establish what the missing words of The Mikado are.
A furious scrabbling through the pages and they have the answer.
It is … ‘defer to …’. Of course! Why couldn’t they work that out? The refrain goes:
Defer, defer,
To the noble Lord, to the noble Lord,
To the Lord High Executioner!
Of course!
In the meantime, Captain Davis, who now resumes his position as Mawson’s second in command – and in the Doctor’s continued absence, expedition leader – is getting up to date on where things are with the expedition. Of the six groups that have gone out, just two, the Southern Party of Bage, Webb and Hurley, and the Near-Eastern Party of Stillwell, Close and Hodgeman have returned, while the others are still out.
According to Dr Mawson’s instructions, all parties are due to be back at the hut by 15 January 1913, and the men in the hut are expecting all the others to come in over the next two days. For now, the men content themselves with reading their letters and beginning to pack up, ferrying much of their luggage and all of the specimens they have gathered over the last year out to Aurora, at least when the weather allows. They want to be all ready to go once the last of the sledging parties is in.
13 January 1913, 93 miles from Cape Denison, Mawson hears artillery fire
First, it is a little black dot on his far horizon, all but imperceptible … then it becomes a knob … and then a boulder … and then it starts growing before his very eyes. Can it be …? Yes …? Yes …?
Yes! The further he walks on this suddenly glorious afternoon, dragging the sledge behind him, the better he sees it and recognises it. Way off to his west, about 20 miles, on the other side of the first glacier that they crossed eight or so weeks earlier, the same Aurora Peak that mournfully sank beneath the whiteness two months earlier is now slowly, ever so slowly, rising up to greet him like a courtly old lady of the Antarctic. Most importantly, this enables him to roughly fix his position, and he knows that next to that peak is the plateau leading onwards to Winter Quarters.
It is so thrilling for Mawson that he would have kept going towards it, but with the difficult surface playing havoc with his feet he camps at eight o’clock that evening, having made just on five and three-quarter miles after a late start to the day.
When he removes his boots to examine his feet, they are worse than ever: red raw, oozing pus and beginning to smell … rotten. Despite the joy of now fixing his position, it is debatable just how long he will be able to go on for, something he is contemplating when … it happens.
Mawson is lying exhausted in his tent when suddenly a shot rings out. And then another. They have come from outside and are quite distant, but they are shots all right! And then there is still another …
Four years before, when Mawson was at the Drygalski Depot with the Professor and Mackay and they heard shots, which proved to be Nimrod looking for them, he had the energy to charge out to investigate. Now, however, it is all he can do to gather himself and get up and out of the tent to see what is happening. By the time he has done so, yet more shots ring out. It sounds less like rifle fire than distant artillery. How this can possibly be, up here in the polar wilderness, so far from anyone, let alone anyone with big guns, he has no idea … and in fact it takes a little while to work out.
But he more or less does. It is the glacier. As he steps outside the tent, the noises continue, and, though roughly random, if there is a pattern it is that it seems to start higher up the glacier and move down it in the direction of the sea. There is no disturbance to the glacier itself, but he theorises that it is something to do with the re-freezing and splitting of the ice, owing to the evening chill releasing ‘great jets of imprisoned air’.12 This thing he is on is not just dead ice lying there but is rather like a living thing. It is a massive and even monstrous river of ice moving slowly down a mountain, gouging and cracking as it does so. It lives, it breathes, it swallows, it crackles, it fires off like artillery and does so for the next 90 minutes before it stops and Mawson is able to drift off into a fitful frozen sleep of gnawing hunger and painful joints every time he moves, not to mention his ever more red-raw scrotum and agonised feet.
16 January 1913, Cape Denison, Madigan comes back ag’in
After the excitement of Aurora’s arrival, tension has risen over the last couple of days as first 14 January and then the due date of 15 January pass with no further sign of any of the missing sledging parties. But then, on this afternoon of the 16th, Cecil Madigan’s party appears high on the slope at the back of the hut, and just minutes later they, too, are being warmly welcomed, having been away for 71 days. They have done well and have made a journey of 259 miles to the east as far as longitude 150 degrees 27 minutes east, surveying the entire coast as they went.
17 January 1913, 70 miles from Cape Denison, Mawson puts a foot wrong
In the land of the midnight sun, there is no ‘rise and shine’ to start the day, there is simply ‘rise and get busy’. Another day, another desperate, clawing and painfully slow struggle. And that is just to get up and out of his frozen sleeping bag …
After that, the familiar, dull routine must be followed. He must gather in his frozen mitts that hang from the tent pole, brush away the crystals of ice that have formed on them overnight, put them on to his aching hands and then gather in snow that he can melt to drink, cook a bit of Ginger for his breakfast, squeeze his frostbitten and grotesquely swollen feet into his frozen finneskos, roll up his dank sleeping bag, strike his makeshift tent and its pathetic poles, load up his sad half-sledge with his Nansen cooker and poor excuse for food together with his pitiful personal belongings – all of it now under that wet powder of snow that covers everything – and prepare to get under way. All that remains now is to fight the agony of his frostbitten fingers to rig up the stand-in sledge sail, pull on his gut-wrenching harness and begin to hike, hike, hike, just like the beast of burden he feels.
On this day, the weather is no more vicious than usual – which is not to say it is not appalling – and yet the clouds are so thick overhead and the snow falling so heavily that the light is terrible, limiting his ability to spot danger ahead. But he has little choice. If he does not continue, he must face cutting down his already pitifully meagre rations not just to the bone but right to the marrow of those dog bones to compensate for more lost time. He decides to push on. But it is dangerous all right. Time and again, he becomes aware that he is standing right over a crevasse, and all he can do is thank Providence that he is … suddenlyfallingfallingfalling … ‘So – this is the end!’13 STOP.
From walking gingerly over the snow, just two miles on from his starting point that morning, Mawson only has the barest instant to realise that a snow bridge over a crevasse has given way beneath him, before he really is falling into the abyss, tumbling down, down, down. Strangely, despite how fast it all happens, he still has time for two conscious thoughts. The first, surprisingly calm thought is that his life is about to end, with the sledge likely to fall down right upon him and that he is to go the way of Ninnis. The second thought is that it will be a terrible waste of the uneaten food that he could have enjoyed if only he had known he was going to die anyway … when suddenly his harness pulls tight and he finds himself hanging some 14 feet below the surface.
Up above, remarkably, his half-sledge has stuck fast between the two lips of the narrow crevasse opening. All that separates him from eternity is his severely strained harness swinging him back and forth and, more problematically, his own will to live. For does he still have it?
Mawson has removed his outer clothes due to the warmth of the day, and now his gaping blouse is completely filled with snow cascading from above. Weakened by days of constant hunger, he quickly chills in the significantly lower temperature within the crevasse.
Yet who is he not to accept Providence’s chance, though that chance is slimmer than the rope now chafing at the lip of the crevasse? Slowly reaching up, in the near darkness, he manages to get his bare hands, deformed by frostbite, around a knot in the rope and laboriously pull himself a foot or so upwards. Every muscle is screaming as he does so, calling on energy reserves that by rights should simply not be there. A brief pause, with his legs wrapped around the rope to help maintain the height he has won, and then he goes again and gets another foot higher. And again, and again and again.
After a desperate and seemingly endless struggle, he is right to the top and manages to pull himself onto the overhanging ledge that the rope has cut into when … the whole thing collapses. He tumbles down, in full expectation that the sledge will fall in after him, but again it holds, and again he finds himself agonisingly suspended above the abyss. It is exactly as it was before, except that he is even weaker.
This time, the temptation is nigh on overwhelming to simply surrender the fight. All he has to do is slip out of his harness – the work of a second – and it will be all over.
‘A chance to quit small things for great – to pass from the petty exploration of a planet to the contemplation of vaster worlds beyond,’ is how he thinks of it.14 Yet, recalling that cruel fate of Ninnis’s dog, he balances eternal liberty against the thought of ‘a fall on some ledge below me and [to] linger in misery with broken bones’.15
And yet, and yet, again his will to live proves to be at least the equal of those hopeless thoughts. For one thing, there would be ‘all eternity’ to contemplate those vaster worlds beyond, while ‘at its longest, the present would be but short’.16 He feels better and marginally stronger for the thought.
Plus, there is this. Twice now, Providence has given him another chance by stopping the sledge falling upon him, and somewhere in the world Paquita is awaiting him, expecting him to return to her. While that may not be possible, he is determined that his death will only come after he has fought it to his very last ounce of strength.
Far from ‘shuffling off this mortal coil’, as Shakespeare would have it, he must once more get his hands around this mortal coil and try to heave himself to safety. His hand moves of its own accord towards the rope …
And so, the long haul upwards begins again. Hand over hand, legs wrapped around the rope like a monkey, pausing with each gain until sufficient strength returns to go again, he inches higher. This time, it takes even longer, but at last, at last, with indeed the last ounce of energy he has in him, he emerges feet first and, still gripping tight to the rope, vaults his fully extended body out onto the solid ice. And then he ‘swoons’.17 His soul and his will to live have written a cheque for energy that his body simply cannot pay, and, broken, he lies on the snowy ground for a solid hour without moving, practically comatose, right beside what was meant to be his open grave.
Finally, however, he stirs, stands, and bit by bit retrieves his sledge, unpacks his tent, and cooks and consumes ‘a regular orgy’ of dog meat.18 He climbs into his sleeping bag and thinks things over. For some reason, the words of the Persian philosopher Omar Khayyam appeal to him:
Unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday,
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet?19
And today is sweet. He is still alive, despite everything! And it is good, so good, to be out of the wind and with some food and tea in his belly. He can’t help but contemplate how glorious it would be to stay here … well, forever … sleep, eat his fill and stay warm in his sleeping bag until the end. As far as he knows, he is in a field of crevasses and what has just occurred to him will happen again as soon as he sets off once more. He knows, without a skerrick of doubt, that if he falls into another crevasse, just as he has done today, he will not have sufficient strength to climb out again. The horror of what has occurred, and of what might occur in the morning, keeps him awake that night as he tries to think his way out of his terrible predicament.
And, sure enough, somewhere in the early hours an idea comes to him. If he is destined to go down into a crevasse once more, why not make it easier next time? Why not fashion a rope ladder out of the cords he has, so that, so long as the sledge doesn’t tumble in with him, he can just climb up and out? One end of it would be secured to the bow of the sledge, while the other could be carried over his left shoulder, loosely attached to the sledge harness. He resolves that as soon as he is up and about the following day, he will begin fashioning exactly that …
18 January 1913 and the day thereafter, Cape Denison, a false alarm, and an alarm …
At 1 am, just outside the hut, a cry goes up and echoes back from the nearby penguin rookeries. Another troupe has been spotted, heading their way, coming from the west, and it looks like they have dogs with them. It is probably the Dux Ipse and his men!
But no, when the distant dots form up into real men, they prove to be Bickerton, Whetter and Hodgeman, who have no dogs and report that they reached a point 149 miles west before coming back. Welcome, welcome!
The hut is briefly abuzz and then settles down for the night, waking to the cold reality. All the sledging parties are safe and accounted for, bar the one that had been on the longest and most dangerous journey of all. Mawson, Mertz and Ninnis are still missing, and they are now three days overdue. With every passing day that they continue to be absent, a growing sense of anxiety grips the hut, as bit by bit the feeling builds that something terrible must have happened to them out there. Captain Davis writes in his diary:
I cannot help feeling a bit anxious, as it is so difficult to know what to do for the best. We shall have to do something soon, as we cannot remain here waiting for one party and sacrifice Wild’s. If they turn up in a day or two, all well. If they do not, I shall have to start making preparations for leaving a party here for a second winter.20
Shortly thereafter, Captain Davis tells radio operator Walter Hannam that he wants the men on the ship and those on the shore to combine to resurrect, more solidly this time, the topmast of the radio antenna that had blown down in October, so that whatever happens thereafter there could at least be contact between Cape Denison and the outside world. And this is important, for he further advises that if the Doctor’s party fail to turn up soon, then six men will have to be left here for another year, on the chance that the Mawson party turn up after Aurora has left. That party would also be able to record key scientific data for another 12 months, which would be an important contribution to the overall success of the expedition, so it is important that the final group selected has a wide array of skills.
The first volunteer to stay is the new radio man, Sidney Jeffryes, whom Davis has brought from Australia, which thus allows Hannam to go back on Aurora to Hobart. Though Captain Davis still can’t quite believe that the Mawson party won’t turn up at any minute, he also starts taking soundings from the others as to who else might volunteer to stay.
Preparations begin. Supplies, including more coal, start being offloaded from Aurora so the remaining men will have what is necessary to get them through, while dozens of penguins and seals are slaughtered and their meat put into storage. Though everyone is busy, the mood remains one of quiet grimness, keen eyes constantly scanning the far horizons for the hoped-for black dots coming over the lip of the hill and always finding the same thing.
Nothing.
18 January 1913, Cape Evans, Captain Scott’s ship arrives to pick them all up
With all her flags flying and cabins prepared to celebrate the return of their long-lost companions on the Scott expedition, Terra Nova enters McMurdo Sound. Soon, every telescope and binocular aboard that has been trained on Cape Evans picks out two men standing outside their old familiar hut.
As the ship approaches the fast ice, Captain Teddy Evans seeks out the familiar figure of Captain Scott among the group of 19 men gathered as one by the shore to receive them.
‘Are all well?’ he hails to them through a megaphone as the ship cuts her engines.
…
Finally, it falls to Victor Campbell, whose party eventually walked back to Cape Evans from Evans Cove, to reply. ‘The Southern Party reached the Pole on 18 January last year, but were all lost on the return journey – we have their records.’21
Evans quietly orders the flags be hauled down and the anchor dropped as Atkinson and Campbell mournfully come aboard.
18 January 1913 and the day thereafter, 69 miles from Cape Denison, Mawson presses on
Though at the end of this day he has not moved far, the main thing is that he is at least a little closer to Winter Quarters, and he is still alive.
Yet sleep does not come easy this night, as the gaping maws of the surrounding crevasses emit yet more ‘loud booming noises, sharp cracks and muffled growls’.22 It is now as though the crevasse field is not only alive but also angry at him for not being dead yet. With each growl, boom and crack, he can feel the vibration, and Mawson concludes that the ice on which he is travelling is ‘in rapid motion’.23
The anxiety is debilitating. A few days previously, he felt that his physical condition was actually improving. Now, he knows, with the strain of it all, that his health is going backwards fast.
The following morning, Mawson resolves ‘to go ahead and leave the rest to Providence’, and mercifully, kindly, Providence once again proves to be on duty.24 In the middle of this crevasse field, time and again as he wallows through the deep snow, his feet and legs break through the snow bridge into space, and twice he falls all the way through into the abyss. But in the former cases he is able to haul himself out with his arms, and in the two latter cases the rope ladder works perfectly.
19 January 1913, Cape Evans, Scott’s men and the cross they bear
In the wake of the dreadful news, the men decide among themselves that they must build for Scott and his final party a fitting memorial: a massive cross made of West Australian jarrah hardwood, to be erected upon Observation Hill. Once completed by Terra Nova’s carpenter, it is over 12 feet high and weighs nearly 300 pounds. It is a long process to get the two beams up the hill and into position facing the spot where the dead men lie, around 170 miles away. In the two days necessary to do the work, there are many willing hands and backs available.
To complete it, they inscribe upon its horizontal limb the sacred names of the dead, while, at the suggestion of Apsley Cherry-Garrard – and overriding the views of those who think there should be a biblical quotation because ‘the women think a lot of these things’25 – they carve into the wood the appropriate words from Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’26
The final inscription reads:
IN MEMORIAM
CAPT R.F SCOTT R.N
DR E.A WILSON CAPT L.E.G OATES INS. DRGS
LT H.R BOWERS R.I.M
PETTY OFFICER E. EVANS R.N
WHO DIED ON THEIR
RETURN FROM THE
POLE MARCH
1912
TO STRIVE, TO SEEK
TO FIND
AND NOT TO
YIELD27
Before it, in the shrieking wind, the small grieving group manages to give three sad cheers and snap off a few photographs, before heading back to the welcome warmth of their ship.
20 January 1913 and the day thereafter, approaching Commonwealth Bay, Mawson sees a sign
So wretched are the conditions on this day, so exhausted and weak is he, that it is 2 pm before he can resume his march, though at least by this time the wind is coming from behind him, which proves to be of considerable assistance. Still, the drift is so strong that he can see nowt of his surroundings and the only thing he can be sure of is that the ascent of the rising hills on the west side of the glacier has commenced, and every step takes him a little higher. By the time he makes camp that evening, he has made just two and a half miles.
The first true breakthrough comes just after noon the next day, when after the wind and drift falls away and the sun starts to shine benignly, far away to his north he suddenly can see the sea.
‘It looked so beautiful and friendly that I longed to be down near it.’28 At the end of this day, he has covered a good six miles but is exhausted by the heavy pulling.
22 January 1913, Cape Denison, Captain Davis calls for volunteers
In the lustrous light of the evening, Captain Davis has come ashore to make an inspection of the work on the wireless masts, which he notes with satisfaction has been done solidly and is nearly complete. Already, Hannam, Bickerton and the heavily bearded new radio fellow, Jeffryes, for whom Antarctica is still a place of wide-eyed wonder, are busily hauling the rest of the radio equipment into position. It shouldn’t be long before they will be able to begin transmissions.
It is a pleasant thing to be ashore in relatively calm weather, away from the cloistered confines of Aurora. In an all too rare opportunity to be alone with space around him, Davis decides to take advantage of the moment to walk a mile up the slope. He rises to a point where, gazing back down, the Winter Quarters looks like little more than a heap of stones. Beyond that, he can see Aurora, of course, and beyond that again the dark water of the ocean to the north, leavened by the occasional white of a berg or an ice-covered island. On this fine evening, it all looks so beautiful, but …
‘… but what a terrible, vast solitude, constantly swept by icy winds and drift, stretches away to the south!’.29
On this seventh day that Mawson and his men are overdue, it is hard not to be constantly thinking of them. Again and again, he looks up the icy slopes stretching away to the far southern horizons, hoping against hope to see three black specks starting to descend, but there is nothing but the all too empty whiteness. It is a good thing that his plans for a group to stay behind for another year are well advanced.
Davis has already decided that Cecil Madigan will be the best man to command the party that will remain in Winter Quarters. Madigan excelled in his leadership of the Eastern Coastal Party and is well liked by all in the hut. Most importantly, when Davis approached him about the possibility of staying, Madigan pronounced himself willing, even though it meant deferring his scholarship for another year.
With him and Sidney Jeffryes, Captain Davis has chosen Robert Bage, Frank Bickerton, Alfred Hodgeman and Archie McLean to stay on. Archie’s account in his diary seems typical of their collective attitude: ‘I have consented to stay as one of the relief party. Capt. Davis asked me and I accepted, considering it was my duty to the Expedition and to Dr. Mawson.’30 In McLean’s mind, a duty to a dead man – or at least an almost certainly dead man – is a duty nevertheless, and the others feel broadly the same.
It is on this evening that Davis has the formal announcement of the new plans posted upon the hut wall. In the announcement, he notes that in so doing he is following Mawson’s stated wishes of what to do if they did not return, and that his own instructions to them in this matter:
are for the present intended as a precaution. I know that I can rely on everyone doing his best to assist the work of the search parties, the establishment of the winter station for another year, the rigging up of the wireless installation and the furthering of all work in connection with this proposed relief party.
J. K. Davis31
23 January 1913, approximately 55 miles from Cape Denison, Mawson struggles
Another very difficult day. Though the sun is visible in the early hours, by 8 am the clouds have come down and the winds gone up and Mawson is engulfed in ‘a swirl of driving snow’.32 He presses on, the best he can, though the swirling wind becomes so strong that the sledge frequently capsizes by the sheer force it. Under such circumstances, it is impossible to walk straight, so all he can do is meander along in what he hopes is the right direction. At least the snow underfoot is soft, which helps with his sore feet, even if it does make the sledge harder to pull. By 4 pm, however, he is so cripplingly exhausted, so eyeballs-rolling gone that he knows he must stop, after having covered no more than three and a half miles in a straight line. With his last ounce of strength, he spends the next two hours getting the tent up in the high wind and then collapses, entirely spent, inside.
24 January 1913, Cape Denison, Captain Gloomy comes to a gloomy decision
In the wardroom of Aurora, Captain John King Davis is holding a crisis meeting. Dr Mawson, Ninnis ’n’ Mertz are now nine days overdue, and the rest of the party are all running out of time.
Davis simply cannot keep Aurora here indefinitely in the hope that the lost ones will turn up, for he risks being trapped by the pack ice, in which case the men would all have to spend another year here, and Frank Wild and his men, 1500 miles to their west, would likely perish. Davis is only too aware that, vis-à-vis those faraway men, time is of the essence to be able to safely pluck them out and get away again. Not only will their stock of food and coal be all but gone, the issue is the sea around them freezing over. As Davis is keenly aware, at the same time of the year, 11 years earlier, the German Antarctic Expedition under Drygalski in the Gauss were hopelessly frozen in, being forced to remain there for a year before getting away again. Last time, it took him just over a month to leave here and be able to drop Wild. This time, although they will be quicker, as they now know precisely where they are going, even leaving their departure as late as 30 January will be cutting it fine. They have to get away.
After discussion, Captain Davis announces his plans. They will begin to unload all the stores they have that can be spared from the ship’s own supplies to sustain the half-dozen men who will remain here for another year. A relief party, composed of Frank Hurley, Alfred Hodgeman and Archie McLean, will set out the next day to push into the south-eastern hinterland, where it is expected the lost men will be coming from. They will take with them a supply of food and, if no trace of the men is found, set up a depot marked by black flags at the farthest point they reach, being absolutely sure to return to base by 30 January, when Aurora must sail.
And, as per Mawson’s instructions, Davis will simultaneously take Aurora down the coast to their east to look for signs of them, just as they did four years earlier in Nimrod when they found Mawson, Mackay and Professor David at the Drygalski Depot.
25 January 1913, Cape Denison, the relief expedition for Mawson departs
And so they move. At 8.30 am on this morning, Alfie Hodgeman, Frank Hurley and Archie McLean head off into the teeth of a 50-mph blizzard. Under normal circumstances, they would have waited until the blizzard had passed, but this is an emergency. They are just five days away from Aurora having to set sail, and it is urgent that the Mawson party be located if at all possible. As it turns out, even finding Aladdin’s Cave is not easy, as the snowdrift is so strong that it obscures the icy oasis the first time they pass it. But they cannot simply stay there.
The searchers intend to get as far into the Mawson party’s presumed route of return as possible in the time remaining, in the certainty that Mawson, Ninnis ’n’ Mertz will have all but entirely run out of food, so getting supplies out to them might make all the difference between life and death. If they are still alive, that is.
Five days is all they have to find out.
29 January 1913, 27 miles from Cape Denison, Mawson gives thanks to Paquita
Had Dickens written it, it might have gone like this: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the very best of times.’ The best of times came the day before, when at 1 pm he finally reached the 3000-foot crest of the plateau he was plodding up for the previous three days and at last saw signs that he was in the vicinity of Commonwealth Bay. For there, sure enough, on his north-western horizon, was the darker patch on the clouds he was looking for, the ‘water sky’ that indicated a vast patch of water was ahead.33 This was no longer a nameless wilderness. He knew where he was, where he was going and that evening, for the first time, really felt as if Winter Quarters was getting closer. And yet, he was still so exhausted, so near collapse, that his salvation remained far from assured: ‘For the last two days my hair has been falling out in handfuls and rivals the reindeer hair from the moulting bag for nuisance in all food preparations. My beard on one side has come out in patches.’34
And now, at two o’clock the following afternoon, Mawson is staggering along, wondering if his fate is, after having come all this way, to simply collapse and never get up again. He has been strong. He has fought the good fight. He has survived to this point against extraordinary odds. But there is only so much his body can bear. He has just two pounds of food remaining, which will not go far, his feet and face are frostbitten, possibly gangrenous, and his spirits are as ever caught between a general desperation about all things and a specific desperation to survive come what may.
But in the end, it is exactly as they say: the darkest hour is right before the dawn. For right there in the gloom caused by his mood, the deep cloud cover and the strong 50-mph wind, he spies through the drifting snow something dark up ahead a short distance away to the right, something out of the ordinary, something that is not of nature but is of … man! It is not a man – for it is about twice the height – but it is the next best thing. It is a snow cairn! Stumbling towards it, Mawson sees that wound around the snow blocks is some black cloth, on top of which is, can it be …? Yes, it is …! The distinctive red of … a ‘Paquita bag’!
Fifteen months earlier, Paquita made lots of brightly coloured bags so he and his men could have something cheerful to look at amid all the whiteness, and now here is one of them, indeed cheering him up no end.
With suddenly feverish hands, he opens the bag to find food and a couple of notes. The first of the notes reads:
Aurora arrived Jan 13. Wireless message received. All parties safe. Amundsen reached Pole December 1911 – remained three days. Supporting party left Scott 150m from Pole in the same month. Bage reached 300m SE 1,7’ from magnetic pole, Bickerton 160m west. Aeroplane broke down 10m out. Madigan went 270m west.
Good luck from Hodgeman, Hurley, McLean.35
Another, smaller note tells him his exact bearings at this point, the direction in which he would find Aladdin’s Cave, just 21 miles away and the fact that the search party left the cairn at 8 am that very day, which was just six hours earlier! They had camped the night before only five miles from his own camp, and had it not been for the blizzard-like conditions, in all likelihood he and they would have been able to see each other.
These are but tiny regrets, however. The most amazing thing is that he has stumbled upon the cairn in the first place. In that vast white horizon, in drifting snow, the odds of it are later likened by Charles Laseron to ‘one chance in a thousand … [like] finding a buoy in a fog at sea, when even its existence was unsuspected’.36
As it is, Mawson is just so relieved to have contact, his first contact with what is effectively the outside world in three months, and to have some real food to put in his belly. Redoubling his efforts, his spirits soaring – maybe he really will live to see Paquita again – he reorients himself and begins the long trek towards Aladdin’s Cave. And from there, of course, it would only be a short trek to Winter Quarters itself, the small hut that had once seemed little more than a primitive shack but that now appears to him as nothing less than El Dorado.
The problem he has now is that ten days earlier, upon reaching the western side of the first glacier east of Winter Quarters, he had thrown away his battered and tattered crampons to lighten his load. But now he has reached the coastal slopes with their blue ice, he is unable to walk even a few yards without falling over, putting him in a dangerous situation. But at least the wind is strong and coming from behind, so by setting full sail and sitting on the sledge he is able to continue, even having the comfort as he does so of nibbling on the precious food they have left him and feeling some strength start to return to his limbs.
At the end of the day, he has made a fair distance, about 14 miles, but by his estimation he has headed too far to the east of Aladdin’s Cave. Alas, when he changes direction to move further to the west, the wind hits the sledge amidships, making further progress impossible. The only thing he can do is make camp for the night.
29 January 1913, Cape Denison, Aurora ships out
In the continuing absence of Dr Mawson and his party, one thing is now obvious to Captain Davis. If they are still alive, they will have no food left. They had taken provisions for 63 days, and that was 80 days ago. Thus, if they are still alive, the only sensible thing for them to do would be to hug the coast in the hope of killing penguins and seals. So that is why on this day he has Aurora and her crew cruising along the coast to the east of Cape Denison as he goes looking for them.
And the other thing for sure is that Captain Davis is not going to have it happen twice to him. Four years earlier, as chief officer of Nimrod, he learnt a valuable lesson when he omitted to properly scan the one part of the coast that counted – where Mawson and the South Magnetic Pole Party were found – and was only able to miraculously correct his error when his captain insisted they do it again and get it right.
This time, Davis is barely willing to trust anyone else and relentlessly scans the coast himself, looking for a flag, a sledge pole, a cairn, anything out of the ordinary to indicate that the Doctor might be there, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They fire rockets at regular intervals and fly a kite at 500 feet to announce their presence to anyone a little back from the shore, but the Antarctic coast stares blankly back at them.
30 January 1913, 13½ miles from Cape Denison, Mawson makes a case for survival
Still the blizzard blows, and Mawson, so close to safety, and acutely aware that Aurora will have to leave within a day or two for fear of being iced in, is desperate to finish the last 13½ miles he estimates it will take to get there. What he most needs are crampons and a break in the weather, and while there is nothing he can do about the latter, he spends most of this day trying to fashion himself the former out of the things he has with him. Taking the box that held the theodolite, he breaks it into two big pieces of wood and then, using whatever screws and tacks he can get from the sledge-meter, together with some ice-nails he still has in his repair bag, he turns the underside of the wood into two pincushions. By then strapping these pieces of now-studded wood to the bottom of his boots, he is ready to go again.
At least for a little way. He is able to push west again for a short spell before the wind picks up once more and he must make camp.
31 January 1913, off Cape Denison, with Davis aboard Aurora
No luck. For over two days, those aboard Aurora have searched the coast, but they have seen not the slightest sign. Reluctantly, when they reach the tip of the first glacier tongue east of Commonwealth Bay, Davis comes to the conclusion that he must call off the search.
It is time to get back into Commonwealth Bay, anchor off Cape Denison, pick up those members of the expedition who are coming with them, load the last of their gear and their samples, and get away as quickly as possible.
Alas, just as they are on their approaches to Cape Denison, a strong gale from the south-east blows up, making it way too dangerous to start a boat ferrying from ship to shore and back again. Before too long, the gale has picked up to hurricane force. Davis, increasingly frantic about the passage of time, has no choice but to drop anchor and wait for the hurricane to blow itself out. But it does not, and nor do the anchors hold.
With squalls exceeding 80 mph, Davis is powerless to keep the ship in position within the shelter of the cliffs, for even with the engine roaring on full, it is not strong enough and Aurora is blown out to sea again and again. Each squall announces itself with a great ‘booming roar, with a sound almost like that of heavy calibre gun-fire’,37 at which point the ship is tossed around like a toy in a bathtub, and only when the wind has decreased to ‘a mere fiendish howl’ can they manage to crawl back, until the next burst of frozen fury hurls her seaward again.
1 February 1913, on the approaches to Cape Denison, Mawson breaks through
For two days, Douglas Mawson has been effectively trapped in his tent, using his time to eat, to get some of his strength back and to work on the crampons to make them more effective. And now, late in the afternoon, the wind at last subsides enough for him to once more get under way when … he sees it!
For, as the wind diminishes, the infernal snowdrift starts to dissipate, and away to his west he now clearly sees the beacon, complete with the black flag waving, that marks the entrance to Aladdin’s Cave.
His spirits soar, his staggering step quickens and at seven o’clock that night at last, at last, at last he is able to make his way to the cave entrance, undo himself from the wretched sledge harness and tumble inside.
There, he finds the most extraordinary things: three oranges and a pineapple! They have been brought to Antarctica all the way from distant climes, and the search party has left them there for him on the one-in-a-hundred chance he is still alive.
And he is, by his own indomitable will. By God, by Providence, which he believes in more firmly than ever, he is alive!
Still, he cannot quite believe it as he sucks on the delicious fruit – of course frozen as hard as a cricket ball – and as the trickle of the orange juice slips down his throat like the nectar of the gods, he has the wonderful realisation that he need never again set up a tent in these wretched climes.
The cave offers perfect protection from the screaming blizzard, which is to the good. What is to the very bad is that this particular blizzard would appear to have staggering staying power, making it unimaginable to venture out into. Only five and a half miles from the Winter Quarters, albeit down a steep, icy slope, Mawson has no choice but to sit there, wondering what is happening back there. Has Aurora left? Have some men been left behind at the hut?
Is he now the sole human for hundreds and even thousands of miles in any direction? It feels as if he is the last man left standing on a frozen continent …
First week of February 1913, Cape Denison, time to go
It is time. Time to face reality. In all likelihood, Dr Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz are dead. Nearly two and a half weeks since they were due, there has been no sign of them. Their food would have long ago run out, and the howling blizzard outside is as sure a sign as any that the brief Antarctic summer is nearly at an end and the demons of winter will soon be screaming for their very souls. Even if the lost men are still alive, they cannot last long in these conditions. For some time, the men at the hut had clung to the slender hope that their fellows had merely suffered some minor accident to delay them, but now even that hope is gone.
In the hut, the expedition members who are due to return to Australia with Captain Davis have packed and are ready to go – waiting only for the weather to break, so the ship can send in a launch to pick them up – while the six members who are to stay here for another year on the extremely slender chance that the missing men turn up are settling in. Those who are going are torn between joy at the thought of returning home and guilt that they are not one of the six unlucky ones staying behind.
Outside, on Commonwealth Bay, every now and then those brave enough to venture outside can see Aurora in the blizzard. She is fighting with every ounce of power she has to hold position just off the coast. In those winds, the anchors are useless, and all she can do is go full steam ahead straight into the wind and have a contest with nature. Sometimes, nature gets the upper hand and carries her out of sight. Sometimes, Aurora gains brief superiority and momentarily appears again, like a phantom ship beating into the wind from out of the swirling spray, into the lee of the jutting ice cliffs … but then she is gone again.
Aboard Aurora, gazing to the shore, they can sometimes see a burst of the blizzard hurtling down the slope, picking up surface snow as it goes and then blasting it across the waters straight at them, until the shore disappears in the cloud that engulfs their ship. Sometimes, the cloud is so thick they cannot see the aft of the ship from for’ard. Men lived in such conditions for a year? It is shocking. The only upside the sailors can see, as recorded by one of the Aurora crewmen, Stanley Taylor, is that ‘we do not need to shave. We just take off our happy hooley and let a spray wet our whiskers and when they freeze we just break them off.’38
For those in the hut, as the days pass with still no break in the weather and no sign of the missing party, it becomes more obvious than ever that there will be no miraculous reappearance of the missing trio, and a pall of abject grief hangs over them. Charles Laseron feels it particularly strongly, writing in his diary:
This is 2.30 am, and perhaps the last night I shall spend in Adélie Land. For the last week every night was to have been the last, but we are still here. The same old stove in front, the same old corner where the nightwatchman sits and reads – or thinks maybe – for the last time I feel … homesick – home and the green trees and sunshine [await]. The same old bunks are occupied by the same old chaps, that is nearly all – but there are three vacant. The poor old chief – we loved him with all his faults, Ninnis, Cherub as we called him, and [Xavier] whose Swiss heart was one of gold, are up on the plateau somewhere. Oh that awful plateau … blizzard ridden, treacherous, the most desolate, cruellest region in the world. January has entirely gone, and winter is … on the land again. Last month was a month of [terrible] emotions.39
8 February 1913, Aladdin’s Cave, Mawson makes his move
It is time. Time to get going. For the last week, Mawson has been a prisoner in the oasis of his dreams. It was wonderful to get to Aladdin’s Cave, but he has become so increasingly desperate for the wind to drop that he has been sitting outside the cave for hours at a time, waiting for a lull that never comes.
In extremis, this very morning he reaches his decision, similar to the admonition he gave to his men five months previously: let the winds of hell do their worst, he is going to go. He simply cannot wait any longer. He has to get back to Winter Quarters on the forlorn chance that Aurora will still be there. He will sit on the sledge as long as possible and have it blow him along and …
And what is that? The wind … it is … lessening. It really is!
He must go, now.
He wants … no, needs … to make that ship before she departs so he can all the sooner be reunited with Paquita. Doubling the rope beneath the sledge – putting several turns around the runners, so as to give it more friction and act as a brake – and again putting himself in his hated harness for the times when he can’t allow the gravity and wind to take the sledge downwards on its own, he sets off.
This time, the going is easier, and after a couple of miles the wretched wind abates even further and the day soon turns glorious, calm and clear, almost as if after Antarctica throwing everything it has at him it is prepared to bathe him in its best for the last leg … No hard feelings, and all that.
Coming now over the lip of a large hill, a month after the death of Mertz and nearly two months after the death of Ninnis, a sudden, stunning vista appears before him. A bay! Is it …? It is! The exact shape! Commonwealth Bay! The Mackellar Islets! And down there are the familiar rocks around Winter Quarters! His spirits soar, his heart sings …
And then … he sees it.
As he gazes from his elevated position atop the hill, something catches his attention. On the far horizon, way out to the north-west, he can see a tiny speck, with what looks to be a thin stream of smoke coming from it. In an instant, he recognises it for what it is. It is Aurora. He has missed her by just a few hours. He has made it all this way only to be condemned to arriving at an empty, abandoned hut …
…
Or has he? Again, looking closer, right down by the hut he can see first the familiar contours of the basin of the boat harbour and then movement around it! There, he sees three men working at something on one side of the harbour, three tiny dots of indeterminate shape that really do look just like this:
…
Feeling almost as if he is in a dream, he cries out.
Down by the hut on this day, Frank Bickerton and two others are working away when Bickerton looks up to see the most extraordinary thing. High up on the hill, he suddenly notes something black against white and looks closer. Under the circumstances, he can be forgiven for taking a second or two to realise what he is seeing, as seemingly unlikely as seeing an oak tree in the desert, a baby swimming in the middle of the ocean, life where all is thought to be arid. For it is a man! And he is walking, or at least staggering, towards them out of the polar wilderness.
Bickerton shouts, at which point the other two men look up and see the figure too.
For his part, through his fog of exhaustion, Mawson sees the distant stick figures wave at him, and then the men start running, first towards the hut. (As it happens, McLean is in there preparing dinner when the new radio man Jeffryes bursts in upon him and yells excitedly, ‘There’s someone coming down the hill!’40)
After the dots emerge from the hut, Mawson quickly loses them as they disappear behind the steep rise of the hill that lies between him and them. As absurd as it sounds, it almost seems as if they have run away to hide from him.
Minutes pass, and all Mawson can do is to keep going, his heavy breathing and the crunching of the snow the loudest noises as he hauls his sledge forward, down the hill …
And then there it is! The brow of a head is bobbing above the brow of the hill, the full head now of a man approaching at pace, soon joined by other bobbing heads all around. In short order, the first head proves to have a torso and legs attached, and a complete, breathless man appears before him. It is Bickerton!
Bickerton now stands there, gazing in stunned amazement upon this scarecrow of a man hauling a half-sledge behind him. Rake thin, with a splotchy, frostbitten face, he has a beard grown down to his chest and is clearly only just managing to stay standing.
It couldn’t be … could it? It must be!
Dr Mawson, he presumes?
A few croaked words from the man, and he confirms it. Dr Mawson is alive, and this is he!
In an instant, there is great rejoicing from Bickerton and the others who have now arrived. Archie McLean has left a shoulder of mutton ready for the oven where it stands and rushed up to join them. However, their rejoicing does not last long.
After only a few more croaked words, Mawson hears that the ship indeed left just a few hours earlier, and they come to understand that Ninnis ’n’ Mertz, those two fabulous men, are dead. And though this is only confirmation of what they have already strongly assumed, still the tragedy of it hits them. Together with the joy of Mawson’s own survival.
The mood of the whole group is now a curious mix of elation, devastation and sheer exhaustion, with Mawson himself encompassing most of the last, as he heads with the group down the hill, now mercifully relieved for the first time in three months of the weight of the sledge.
Some 15 minutes later, it happens. Like the spirit of Oates, who has been outside for some time … Douglas Mawson once again steps inside the warmth of a civilised construction, the very Winter Quarters he feared he would never see again.
Upon entering the hut, Mawson’s primary feeling is of course relief, and profound gratitude to Providence for having ensured his deliverance against all odds. For the last several weeks, he has barely allowed himself the hope of survival and has instead concentrated on ‘reaching a point where my remains would be likely to be found by a relief expedition’.41 But now he finds himself alive and safe. He feels entirely overcome with ‘a soft and smooth feeling of thanksgiving’.42
Out on Aurora this evening, Captain Davis is on the bridge, gloomily navigating the ship north-west through the pressing ice pack, considering the terrible fate of his great friend Mawson with his tragic companions, when he looks up to see his radio operator Hannam hovering with a stunned look on his face. It is 8.30 pm on the evening of 8 February. The young man begs to inform the good captain that he has just received a wireless message that is most urgent. Captain Davis takes the proffered piece of paper, quickly scans it and gasps, as he receives ‘the biggest shock of my life’.43
It reads:
To Capt Davis.
Aurora.
Arrived safely at hut. Mertz and Ninnis dead.
Return and pick up all hands.
Signed Dr Mawson.44
Stunned, delighted and devastated all in one – to Hannam, Davis appears to ‘age all at once’45 – the captain immediately gives orders to the helmsman of Aurora to put the wheel hard a’port, and they are racing back to the hut the best they can, through the heavy pack ice that is pressing them close. The mood aboard the vessel is black, as the news of the certain deaths of Ninnis ’n’ Mertz hits them hard. Their last shred of hope concerning their possible survival is now crushed, and from the moment the word spreads, crew members ‘walked around the ship on tiptoe and spoke in whispers’,46 even though the grief is leavened somewhat by the news of the survival of Dr Mawson.
The exception to this mood is Captain Davis. He is, in fact, mightily annoyed, bordering on outright angry, at having been recalled. Yes, it is good that Mawson has survived, but as captain he has a responsibility to all of the men on board, plus Wild and his men, who await them, and heading back to pick up those at the hut means that he is putting at risk all three groups. The days spent searching for the Mawson group have depleted their coal reserves severely, and they simply don’t have time to do this – a problem compounded by the fact that the harsh coastal wind has now started blowing hard enough that he can hear the first shrill notes of it hitting the rigging.
‘Why did they recall us?’ he writes in his diary. ‘It simply means that we are going to lose Wild for the sake of taking off a party who are in perfect safety.’47
A part of his frustration is that it is not possible to communicate with Mawson directly about the situation, as on the ship they have a receiver but not a transmitter. At Macquarie Island, however, they have a receiver and a transmitter, and at this very time wireless operator Arthur Sawyer takes off his headphones, stunned, and reviews the message he has just overheard by pure happenstance from those at Adélie Land to those on the good ship Aurora – it has been months since they have had contact. Dr Mawson is alive! But Mertz and Ninnis are dead. Sawyer is personally saddened in the extreme, as he liked Ninnis, particularly, a great deal and recalls how he used to say how lucky he was to be on this expedition as it meant he was missing out on a whole year of duty in ghastly India. And now he is dead.
Gathering himself regardless, Sawyer hurries off to inform the base leader George Ainsworth, before returning to his post and trying to reach Adélie Land to get more details. He has no luck but is at least able to pass on the news to Hobart, where it is greeted with similar exhilaration and sadness. Mawson is alive! The news is out.
All quiet, back at Winter Quarters. In the next room, an emaciated man who is safe, warm, fed and in a comfortable bed for the first time in over three months is sleeping the sleep of the dead, the near-dead and the dead-exhausted. Douglas Mawson plumbs new depths of unconsciousness as every now and then one of his men takes the liberty of coming into his partitioned room and gazing down upon him, to ensure that he is breathing. His reappearance that afternoon has stunned them, as have even the barest rudiments of his story. But his survival is still far from assured. So devastating is his physical condition – his body riven by starvation, most of his extremities frostbitten, the soles of his feet a mess of puss, his skin flaking, his internal organs suffering – that there is a real fear they may lose him still. Lifting the mood of the men regardless, however, is that Aurora should now be on her way back to them, and they won’t have to spend another year in this godforsaken land after all! They begin to quickly pack, ready to leave, likely the following morning.
9 February 1913, aboard Aurora, Captain Davis has never been gloomier
At eight o’clock the following morning, Aurora again enters Commonwealth Bay, pounding straight into a very strong southerly wind that carries with it enough snow that the combined force hits the ship like God’s fist. Nevertheless, they have steamed close enough to their original anchorage to be able to see the Pilot Jack – the white-bordered Union Jack used by the merchant fleet, and in this case an arranged signal that Mawson has returned – flying from the wireless mast. However, so powerful is the wind, so strong the waves, so dangerous the conditions that it is simply not possible either to get closer or to send the motor launch to go and pick up the men from the shore. There are volunteers to try to take the whaleboat in, but Captain Davis flat out refuses to let them go, as the wind is so strong, the waves so high that it would certainly be swamped.
In the meantime, though inside the hut Jeffryes is furiously sending messages saying they hope Aurora can wait a few days more, those messages are not getting through. On the ship, Hannam is listening closely to his radio but receives nothing. The gods, and the atmospheric conditions, are simply against them. From the bridge of the ship, Davis’s chief officer is using semaphore flags to signal the message ‘Send Instructions’,48 but still there is no reaction, let alone instructions.
From Aurora, it looks as if the hut is filled with dead men – though in fact, since the ship has been spotted entering Commonwealth Bay, inside they are joyously packing all their records, instruments and personal effects so they can be quickly taken down to Boat Harbour, once the weather calms and Aurora can get the motor launch in.
The one bit of contact between ship and shore comes mid-morning when the men on the ship see a figure appear on the hill, wave briefly, then quickly disappear. The seamen continue to gaze at the hut, the snow positively stinging their eyes, but there is no further sign of any movement. But the wind remains so strong that there is simply no chance to get closer in.
Frustrated beyond all measure, and acutely aware that they are chewing up both precious coal and even more precious time, all the supremely exasperated Davis can do is keep steaming back and forth across the bay – through vast fields of highly dangerous pack ice – hoping for a break in the weather. A sure indication of the kind of danger they are in comes every ten minutes or so, when it simply isn’t possible to completely avoid a berg, and instead of sliding by it they glance against it, so everyone is hurled forward and sideways, and the ship shudders from stem to stern. Yes, the ice-soldiers that they so narrowly escaped a year earlier are now clearly massing for another attack.
By 5 pm, the weather is worse, the wind higher, the barometer lower and the haggard Davis’s worry deeper. Desperate, he calls a quick meeting in the wardroom for all those of the land party he has just taken on board. Speaking in spare, low tones, he explains the situation to the gathered men and says he feels that he has no choice but to proceed to pick up the Western Party as they are in grave danger, while those at the Winter Quarters are relatively safe, with full supplies for another year. He cannot see the sense in risking the lives of those on Aurora and the men in the west by waiting for the gale they are now in to blow itself out – it could last anything from a day to a week – when to take the alternative course is to maximise the chances for everyone to survive. He feels, he says, that they must go.
That is … unless anyone else has any ideas?
In response, there is silence, bar the sound of the wind howling through the rigging above, which seems to some of them to be confirming the rightness of the captain’s view. And then one of the land party speaks: they have confidence in Captain Davis. Whatever he decides, they will stand by him in accepting responsibility for those actions.
Hear, hear. Hear, hear. Hear, hear …
With this view unanimously endorsed, Davis uncharacteristically brightens somewhat and announces his decision. ‘Well, gentlemen, I think we should go at once to the relief of Wild’s party.’49
And so they do, with Davis quickly telling Gray, the second officer, to hoist the ensign and dip it as a signal of farewell. At 6.50 pm, Captain Davis gives the key command of this expedition: full steam ahead to the north-west.
In celebration of its victory, the wind whips up anew, sending the ship scudding across the storming sea.