Situated as we were, Time became quite an object of study to us and its imperceptible drift was almost a reality, considering that each day was another step towards liberty – freedom from the tyranny of the wind. In a sense, the endless surge of the blizzard was a slow form of torture, and the subtle effect it had on the mind was measurable …
Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard
The long Antarctic winter was fast approaching and we turned to meet it with resolution …
Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard
‘Polar madness’ can erupt without warning. You can get it when someone sits in your chair. You can get it while they are combing their hair. It can come at any time … dishing up chow or telling them how! As a matter of fact, some have it right now. It might be as trivial as the way you dress. It might be as provocative as being served a glass of chilled urine at dinner. It might just be the sound of your voice …
Tom Griffiths, Slicing the Silence
10 February 1913 and several days thereafter, Winter Quarters, the six men remaining awake to news
The following day, when the marooned men come out of the hut, there is no sign of Aurora! Nor that afternoon, nor that evening. Reality starts to set in. They actually are going to have to spend another year here. It is a bitter blow so soon after they thought that they would shortly all be on their way back to their families, but there is simply no way around it. True, they do have the faint hope that after picking up the Western Party Captain Davis might be able to bring Aurora back to retrieve them, but that is regarded as highly unlikely.
For his part, Mawson is so stunned to have survived the 629-mile round trip, and so weak, he has neither energy nor emotion to express frustration, while the others realise that their position is at least a lot more joyous than it had been at the same time the previous day – Dr Mawson is alive!
And following them around …
Time and again over the next few days, they look up, or turn around, to find their leader hovering close. Somehow, after everything that he has been through, his long journey solo across the ice, he now feels a spiritual need to be close to other humans. It is not quite that he is a lost puppy seeking solace, but he is certainly unrecognisable from the slightly aloof, patrician figure with whom they arrived in these parts.
As Mawson himself describes his first few weeks back in the hut, he does ‘little else than potter about, eat and doze, with frequent interruptions from internal disorders’.1
10 February 1913 and four days thereafter, news from New Zealand stuns the world
It is just after half-past two in the morning of 10 February 1913, the most silent watch of the night, when …
What’s that? For a few restless souls sleeping near the water, the unmistakable muffled sound of an engine is heard, coming from just beyond the heads of Oamaru Harbour, midway down the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island. But who would be moving in or out of my harbour at this ungodly hour? Straining his eyes in the gloom, the lighthouse keeper can see what is either a small phantom come from the aquatic netherworld where all lost ships go, or a real ship, a small one, with three masts. No lights ablaze, no flags a’flying, she appears indistinctly abject and forlorn.
A signal from the nightwatchman at the harbour entrance is quickly flashed out to her in Morse code: ‘What ship is that? What ship is that?’2
No reply.
Again, he signals, impatiently opening and shutting the shutters in a slightly faster manner, insisting on a reply. ‘What ship is that? Please identify. What ship is that?’
And now a signal comes back, still not identifying itself but informing the nightwatchman that they are sending a dinghy ashore. Other night owls aroused around the harbour watch closely, if silently, as – can it be? – yes, in the dim light of the wan moon, a dinghy is seen to be ghosting towards the shore.
As it pulls into Sumpter Wharf, it is met by the stunned nightwatchman, who asks its crew what ship they are from. The four men reply that they ‘don’t know’, before two men alight, while the other two in the dinghy immediately head back to the ship.
The nightwatchman, in a surprisingly familiar accent – for Neil MacKinnon is a Scotsman – tells the two who have alighted that they had better start cooperating or he’ll call customs and the police. The men, in British accents, reply that he is quite welcome to call anyone he pleases. Meanwhile, by this time other people are aware that something is up, have been drawn to the lights on the shore and want to know just what is going on, but the Englishmen have no interest in telling them.
At last, however, the men soften a little and explain to the night-watchman what they need and why they need it. After hearing their urgent request, the nightwatchman quickly wakes the harbourmaster, Captain James Ramsay, who is instantly cooperation and hospitality itself, inviting the two men to stay the rest of the night on the floor of his modest cottage – an offer they happily accept.
As soon as the post office opens the next morning, the telegraphist’s finger works the Morse key, as directed by one of the men from the dinghy. For the first time, heavily coded word of Scott’s unsuccessful attempt on the Pole is sent out, intended for the bereaved relatives and friends so they shouldn’t learn first-hand of their losses through the press.
Under agreement with Central News, who are Scott’s sole agents for worldwide distribution of his cabled story (and who have paid £2500 for the rights), the first instalment of the story of the death of Captain Scott and his four companions – penned by Teddy Evans and including Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ – then heads out first to Christchurch, and from there to the wider world, with the story first breaking in London’s Daily Mail.3
Another cable goes to the War Office in London to formally inform the British authorities what has happened to some of their finest officers.4 For the ship just outside Oamaru Harbour is none other than Terra Nova, and the men in the dinghy are Dr Edward Atkinson and Lieutenant Harry Pennell, rowed ashore by Tom Crean, with one other.
Tom Crean, meanwhile, with his companion, has returned on the dinghy to Terra Nova, reporting to Evans, in a thick Irish brogue, ‘We was chased, sorr, but they got nothing out of us.’5 Yet despite the crew’s best intentions, the next day the regional papers announce that Terra Nova is back and has landed two men at Oamaru, ‘supposed to be Scott and one of his officers’.6
The real news, however, is out.
When Terra Nova, with her ensign at half-mast, pulls into Lyttelton at dawn the following morning, it is to find that the world has changed. As recorded by Cherry-Garrard:
How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe we were not dreaming still …
Indeed we had been too long away and the whole thing was so personal to us and our perceptions had been blunted: we never realised. We landed to find the Empire – almost the civilised world – in mourning.7
And so it is.
The harbourmaster, arriving in the tug with Pennell and Atkinson, on learning the news first-hand, soon breaks down and weeps. And now, as the men of Terra Nova come ashore, the locals of Lyttelton form a grieving guard of honour for them. So affected is Atkinson by once again being in the middle of the mourning, awakening his own grief to a new pitch, that, as is soon reported by the papers, ‘he is gone into the country to rest’.8
On this same day, Oriana Wilson is on a train coming into Christchurch when she becomes aware that a newspaper hawker at a station she has stopped at is shouting excitedly some news to do with the ‘South Pole’, and ‘Scott expedition’ …
What is it?
‘All found dead!’
For the news has indeed burst on the stunned world, first via the pages of the Daily Mail, beneath the headline:
DEATH OF CAPTAIN SCOTT
LOST WITH FOUR COMRADES
THE POLE REACHED
DISASTER OF THE RETURN
STARVATION IN A BLIZZARD
FINDING OF THE BODIES
FATE OF THE LAST THREE
We regret to announce that disaster has overtaken the British Antarctic Expedition. The news is brought by the expeditionary ship Terra Nova, which arrived in Oamaru, in the south of New Zealand, yesterday from the Antarctic.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on January 18 last year. He died ten weeks later on 29 March, and with him perished his four comrades in his dash to the Pole. Their names are:
Captain Scott, R.N. Expedition leader, ultimately responsible for all aspects of the expedition.
Dr E. A. Wilson, chief of scientific staff, zoologist and artist.
Lieut. H. Bowers, of the Royal Indian marine, in charge of the commissariat.
Capt. L. E. G. Oates, of the Iniskilling Dragoons, in charge of the ponies.
Petty-Officer Evans, of the Royal Navy, in charge of the sledges and equipment.
Thus the British Antarctic Expedition which set forth with such bright hopes has ended in the deepest tragedy – in a tragedy unmatched in Polar annals since the disaster which befell Sir John Franklin and 129 officers and men in the Arctic in 1847–8.9
The editorial of the Daily Mail is nothing less than the overture for the full symphony of violins, trumpets and cymbal clashes that is to follow in that same paper:
A great blow has fallen upon the nation. Captain Scott has attained the goal of his life’s endeavour, but the price he has paid is his life … they have died for the honour and greatness of their country as truly as any seaman or soldier who falls in battle. And by her they will be ever lamented and their memory cherished as a sacred inheritance.10
The words of the former Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from many years before, on the death of the explorer Sir John Franklin, are quoted prominently:
Not here! The white South11 has thy bones; and thou
Heroic sailor soul
Art passing on thine happier voyages now
Towards no earthly Pole.12
From the pages of the British press, news of the deaths of Scott and his men reaches into the far corners of the British Empire, spreading out across the western world and then beyond. The outpouring of global grief it generates – as both the grandeur and tragedy of what has occurred seem to have combined to form a patriotic tidal wave of emotion – is unprecedented.
Nowhere, of course, is the grief so great as among the dead explorers’ families.
Scott’s mother, Hannah Scott, is hosting a tea party in her quiet home at Henley-on-Thames – all ivy, picket fences and smoke from the chimneys – when a knock on the door reveals a uniformed boy with a peaked cap proffering a telegram from London, a telegram that is opened by Captain Scott’s sister. That good woman tries the best she can to break the news to her mother gently, to save her ‘the pangs of such a sudden and painful shock’, but, of course, there is simply no stopping the outpouring of grief that results.
Scott’s three-year-old son, Peter, is playing with his blocks, in the care of his maternal grandmother – Kathleen Scott left for New Zealand several weeks earlier, telling her son ‘I am going to fetch him home’13 – when the news comes to that very home. By way of explanation for the black, pressing pall of grief that hangs over the house, young Peter is told by his grandmother that ‘Daddy is ill’, until she can muster the strength to tell him the truth.14
He had been just ten months old when his father had departed on Terra Nova. The veil of babydom had no sooner been lifted than, with the help of his mother, Peter had started tracking Daddy’s progress by helping his mother place tiny flags on the map of Antarctica, and the place names were among the first words he had ever learnt.
‘Mother has gone to fetch him back,’ he has constantly been declaring to household servants, in his mother’s absence, ‘and then she is going to bring him home and I am going to meet him at the station.’
Alas, as the grandmother and those house servants now know, that will never happen.
Elsewhere, all across the nation, other children are badly affected. In the preceding two years, many of them have saved their sweet money and collected pennies to raise funds so that their schools might sponsor aspects of Scott’s expedition. They know full well, and have even studied, which party would be using the specific tent their school’s money has purchased, which pony they have nicknamed, which school’s sledge they have dragged … and now they know which of their travellers lies frozen, dead and buried in the sleeping bag they have worked so hard to contribute to the cause.
The Daily Mail, meanwhile, appeals for the public to make donations so that the debts of the expedition can be cleared, ‘as well as for provision for the dependents of the dead, and a temple of fame worthy of those British heroes’.15
Amid it all, however, there is some muted criticism, even from members of Scott’s original expedition. Herbert Ponting is to the point in his own quoted remarks:
It is my genuine personal opinion that had Scott had dogs with him on the last journey, this disaster would not have happened. But Scott did not like the idea of employing dogs and then having to kill them. It is an interesting point whether such an act is justifiable where human lives are being affected.16
For the most part, though, such words are lost in the tide of national grief that is at its height in Great Britain and high enough to simply swamp the rest of the British Empire and the English-speaking world from there, before making its way to all other parts of the globe.
On the late morning of 14 February, three days after the news breaks, a requiem service is held at St Paul’s Cathedral, where it is standing room only inside, with no fewer than 10,000 people outside. Inside, the sovereign King George V himself sits near the centre of the front aisle, almost like any other member of the congregation, which includes members of other polar expeditions, foreign ambassadors, leading members of the government and opposition and representatives ‘of all the great nation’s activities’. As the service begins, King George is seen to ‘bow his head a little and then straighten his back, as if to brace himself against the onset of great emotion …’ as the muffled drum of the dead march from Saul, played by the Coldstream Guards, begins. And now the king kneels along with the rest of the congregation as a special prayer is offered and all of them repeat in full the names of the five men who died among the snows. ‘We humbly leave in Thy Fatherly keeping the souls of our brothers Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, Edward Adrian Wilson, Henry Robertson Bowers, Edgar Evans.’17
There is something about the manner of their deaths, the heroism of it, while on a patriotic calling for the Empire – the Empire! – that strikes not just a chord but also a hymn, and the nation weeps as it sings with patriotic passion. At St Paul’s, that hymn is most appropriate to Scott and his men:
While I draw this fleeting breath
When my eyelids close in death
When I soar through tracts unknown,
See thee on thy judgement throne,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.
Simultaneous to this service, to try to help the children understand and appreciate the glory of their men’s deaths, a special account has been written in language they can comprehend and is read out in every elementary school in London, as well as in another 50 towns around Great Britain:
Children, you are going to hear the story of five of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began … they feared no danger, never complained and did their very best, each one willing to give up his life for the others, and when they knew that there was no hope for them, they laid down their lives bravely and calmly like true Christian gentlemen … 18
And so it goes. A Daily Mail journalist happens to overhear a group of boys discussing the death of Captain Oates as they linger after school at the gates.
‘He was a brave man,’ says one.
Another replies proudly, ‘He was a British officer!’19
Indeed, the adulation for the manner of Oates’s death is universal.
When the telegram from the War Office arrived at the home of Lawrence Oates’s mother, Caroline, at Gestingthorpe in Essex, to inform her of her son’s death, she was mercifully not there to receive it, as she was down in her London flat at the time. It is her eldest daughter, Lawrence’s older sister, Lillian, who hears the news first, when she sees a newspaper poster on a London street, blaring the dreadful tidings. Buying a paper with shaking hands, she soon takes in that the worst has happened and with heavy heart and heavier tread goes off to find her mother and break the news.
That good woman would at least be heartened by the adulation for the heroic act of her son that is reflected across the nation. For just as there is the service at St Paul’s, so too are many other services held around the country as the nation mourns with an intensity usually reserved for the death of monarchs alone. Shackleton’s words to his wife Emily three years earlier – ‘I thought, dear, that you would rather have a live ass than a dead lion’ – have particular resonance now. For Scott, though dead, is now being lionised as never before, and far more than had he lived, even if he had beaten Amundsen and his men to the Pole.
As to the Norwegian expedition leader, he is on a lecture tour in New York, capitalising on his own stunning feat, when the news hits and he is asked for his reaction. ‘I am unwilling to believe the report is true,’ he states flatly. ‘I was reported to have died and so was Shackleton.’ Shortly thereafter, however, his tone changes, as if he has accepted it as fact after all. ‘Scott was a brave man,’ Amundsen says, ‘whose first thought was for the safety of his men. He took no thought of his own danger or comforts. I am grieved beyond measure at the report.’20
He reserves special words, though, for Lawrence Oates:
Oates went bravely, you know, out into the blizzard that his sickly condition might not hinder the others. He knew the others wouldn’t desert him so he deserted them. That was an epic deed – wonderful, wonderful! A great sacrifice – but it did no good.21
For his part, Shackleton, first up, also simply refuses to believe it. He tells the Daily Mail:
I only hope there has been some mistake. Everyone knows that a polar exploration is largely a game of chance … If the reports are true and Captain Scott has been lost it will be a tremendous blow to explorers the world over. To me it is a fearful shock to think the man I served under may be gone.22
It is Rear Admiral Robert Peary, however, the self-proclaimed conqueror of the North Pole, who is the most eloquent:
Mingled with their feelings of sorrow, there must be a swelling sense of pride to the countrymen and relatives of Captain Scott and the other heroes with him that they made ‘good’ and by their courage and dogged persistence carried the British ensign to that far and frozen goal that they had set out for. It is a splendid tragedy – a splendid epic, written like many another British epic dotted over the globe in a language which every creed and race and tongue of man can understand. Captain Scott’s name and work are imperishable, and as eternal as the icy heights on which he died.23
Mid-February 1913, Cape Denison, the ether strikes back
Success! After seemingly endless difficulties with all of the radio equipment and antenna, on the night of 15 February, Sidney Jeffryes is doing what he has been doing every night – firing up the petrol engine that runs the dynamo that sends the electrical current he needs to send the radio signal up the mast and out on the antenna, even as he secures his headphones – when suddenly something happens. He hears something! He clearly hears the base at Macquarie Island sending the Morse code weather report to Hobart.
Once told, the others immediately crowd around the 27-year-old as he tries to join in their conversation, and though it doesn’t work on this occasion, all are excited. Five nights later, it gets better still. Jeffryes has no sooner sent out a message to Macquarie Island – where all the men in Ainsworth’s team have agreed to remain at their post for another year so that the radio link between Cape Denison and Hobart can be maintained – than he hears their distinct reply: ‘Dah-dah-dit, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-di-dit, dit, di-di-di-dah, dit, dah-dit, di-dit, dah-dit, dah-dah-dit.’ (‘Good evening.’)24
True, something then breaks, but they know they are close.
In the meantime, bit by bit, Douglas Mawson is coming back to himself, getting physically, mentally and emotionally stronger, less dependent on the others to look after him and more capable of looking after himself. It is a slow process, grounding himself back in the real world, such as it is, but one thing that helps is reading, over and over and over again, the four letters that his Paquita had written between February and October of 1912 and which, courtesy of Aurora, had been waiting for him at the hut when he got there. After all the coldness he has known, all the fear, all the sense of total isolation, here, here is love, warmth and companionship, as she assures him:
You will have a warm welcome on your return. My arms are open for you already as I think of it … Don’t I long for the first quiet hours together. I make no promises to meet you as I can only answer for myself and not for my family on whom it depends. But my heart will be there if not in flesh in spirit.25
He aches to be with her in turn. What, he frequently wonders, is she doing right now?
Mid-February 1913, Gulf of Aden, aboard Roon on the Indian Ocean, as Paquita gets news
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. On this fine day, out in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Henrietta Delprat, Paquita’s mother, answers a knock on her door to find a cabin boy standing there. Begging your pardon, Madam, but the captain has asked me to pass this cable on to you. She opens it and gasps. Her future son-in-law, Douglas Mawson, has met with disaster in the Antarctic, and though he has narrowly survived, his two companions, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis, are dead!
On the bunk before her, Paquita lies sleeping. How will her daughter react when she hears the news? Not quite sure what to do, but needing some moral support, Henrietta drops the cable on her bed and goes next door to the cabin of her other daughter to talk to her and get some advice.
Awaking to the sound of the door opening and closing twice within the space of a minute, Paquita opens her eyes to see the cable on her mother’s bed, and her mother gone, just as the door opens once more as her mother returns, with a devastated expression on her face. Wordlessly, Henrietta Delprat hands Paquita the cable and says to her, ‘You must be thankful …’26
And, ultimately, Paquita is: devastated that two of Douglas’s companions have died, but thankful at least that he is still among the living. She also feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude to those men in the hut who have sacrificed another year away from their own families so they can look after him. Bless them.
18 February 1913 and three days thereafter, Pacific Ocean, between Tahiti and Raratonga, aboard RMS Aorangi
Though not classically beautiful, Kathleen Scott is an alluring woman. She is something of the toast of the ship, frequently invited to dine at the captain’s table. After all, she is married, don’t you know, to the dashing Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the polar explorer who is due back in Dunedin very soon. She is on her way to meet him, coming via a cross-continental trip through the United States before embarking from San Francisco.
Kathleen spends her days chatting to all and sundry, playing whist with those lucky enough to make up her four, but on this day she is taking some sea air in her deckchair, not feeling very well, when she looks up to see the troubled-looking captain looming above her …
Might he have a word with her in his cabin?
Of course.
Strangely, the nautical gentleman seems to be almost ill when they arrive at the Master’s cabin and is distinctly grey of complexion. What on earth can be the matter with the good man? She is not long in finding out.
‘I’ve got some news for you, but I don’t see how I can tell you,’ he says.
‘The expedition?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, let’s have it.’
With his hands shaking, the captain passes her a piece of paper on which is written a message that the ship’s wireless operator has received from the Marconi station in San Francisco just a few minutes earlier:
Captain Scott and six others perished in a blizzard after reaching the South Pole January 18th.27
She staggers momentarily and then quickly straightens.
‘Oh, well, never mind!’ she says to the kindly old captain. ‘I expected that. Thanks very much. I will go and think about it.’
Kathleen then goes about her business, in the first instance to receive an hour and a half of Spanish tuition. She then returns to her cabin, where she records in her diary:
I acquitted myself well … I was sure I could control myself … My god is godly. I need not touch him to know that. Let me maintain a high, adoring exaltation, and not let the contamination of sorrow touch me.28
Nevertheless, as she emerges once more from her cabin to play five games of deck-golf, she can’t help but notice a young third officer who, ‘like a big dog sits by me and is sorry’. Only later does she find out that his job, assigned by the captain, is to ensure she does not throw herself overboard.29
‘It is good that I do not firmly believe in life after death,’ Kathleen records in her diary, ‘or surely I would have gone overboard today.’30
Stoically, she goes on. Two evenings later, as the ship approaches Raratonga on the Cook Islands, she is alone with the wireless operator as more details emerge, including the fact that, instead of dying of exposure as she thought, they had suffered the even more ghastly death of starvation. Now, her control wavers.
‘The operator is an Irishman,’ she records in her diary. ‘We have never had any conversation. He just hands me the papers as he has finished writing them. I took my papers and went to bed; I didn’t want to hear any more.’31
23 February 1913, Shackleton Ice Shelf, Frank Wild sees a ‘penguin’
In these waning days of February, the situation of Frank Wild and his companions is beyond desperate. For the past year, they have survived, and even prospered on occasion, fulfilling all their scientific tasks – meteorology, geology, biology, magnetic observations – and completing all their sledging expeditions, reaching out to the east and west of their base, but for the last three weeks their anxiety day by day has risen with the ongoing failure of Aurora to pick them up. The ship had been scheduled to appear on 30 January, but they had continued to search the horizon in vain.
With winter already starting to close in, and few supplies beyond penguin and seal meat and next to no coal to get them through the long, dark, freezing night, their survival will be a close-run thing if the ship does not arrive. All the men can do to heighten their chances is to lay in more of that meat, by killing more seals and penguins, and that is their task on this morning – quietly, desperately, ever conscious that any day now these aquatic wonders will be returning to the ocean for the winter.
Out on Aurora this morning, Captain Davis is feeling almost equally desperate. He is the one, after all, who had taken the responsibility the year before of leaving the men camped on the ice. If they are now dead, or disappeared – perhaps the cliff where he left them has by now floated out to sea? – then it will be on his conscience and his record for the rest of his life. It has in fact been an extraordinary journey just to get back here, bashing westward, ever westward, through blizzards and bergs alike. Vast fields of pack ice have constantly thwarted progress, and though he is navigating ‘by guess and by God’32 and danger has attended their every torturous mile, Davis has decided that even in darkness, even with bergs everywhere – and despite what happened to Titanic a year earlier – he wants his ship for the most part at full speed. This is so he can be certain she will answer the helm quickly, with the bonus that, if they survive, they will get to Wild and his men all the sooner. And it has more or less worked, because Davis now knows he is roughly in the area, even though there is no sign of the Wild party.
All of his crew are out on deck as they steam past cape after cape, bay after bay, looking for the tiniest sign of human life, but there is still nothing. Presently, Davis can stand it no more, and even though he knows that the third mate, De La Motte, who is up in the crow’s nest, would have called him the instant he has seen anything, still he calls out, ‘Can you see the hut, Mr De La Motte?’
‘No, sir,’ the third mate replies gloomily, before softening a little and trying to offer the cap’n something. ‘But I can nearly see it.’33
The resultant roar from Davis would have done Roaring Tom himself proud and gives those on Aurora the first real laugh for some time.
What’s that?
At 11.20 on this freezing morning, Frank Wild and Dr Evan Jones have descended from the ice cliff to retrieve a sledge when their attention is drawn by some tiny movement out on the pack ice. At first, they think it is a penguin, but then the stunned realisation hits. It is a crow’s nest, followed by the mainmast of a ship. It is Aurora! Their ship has come in! Shouts of joy abound as the men on shore realise they are saved after all, curtailed only by Wild giving orders to Jones to head back to the others and tell them to instantly start getting their gear, records and specimens down to the water’s edge.
There they are! Distant figures waving on the lip of the high ice confirms to Davis that there is a God after all, and he instantly alters course. They’re alive! In an instant, his worries of the last year are swept away with the wave of sheer relief that now washes over him. Even then, however, it is the Devil’s own work to get close, as the little ship bashes and breaks its way through the broken floe to get to the solid ice at the bottom of the cliffs where Aurora dropped the land party the year before.
By the time the ship is getting close, Wild and his men are waiting patiently for her at that spot, and now a new fear hits Davis and his men. How many of the ‘castaways’ are there? Are they about to find out about another calamity, just as happened at main base when they arrived there? Anxiously, Davis begins to count the distant figures to see if any of the eight are missing.
One, two, three … they keep counting … until they get to … 20?
Have these blokes somehow been breeding? And then they realise: the shorter group to the side of the main group is in fact an interested gathering of Emperor penguins, just come along to check that everything is shipshape.
From the shore comes the sound of a resounding three cheers as Wild and his men offer thanks for their salvation to the captain and crew of Aurora. The captain and crew return the three cheers in kind.
As before, once the ship is moored alongside the floe, it takes some time, amid all the warm handshakes, to work out just who is who, and Wild’s men have similar problems with Mawson’s men who are onboard – even though the latter by this time are looking more human than they were a few days earlier.
And, as before, these wild men are not only overjoyed to see the arrivals but also pleased to quickly take them back to their quarters for the last year, to show them around. Davis and his men are stunned to climb the hill, to visit the hut, which is half-covered by the winter snows, and see how these men have been living ‘the lives of troglodytes. Tunnels extended into the drifts on every side – tunnels that had been used to store the food cases in order to save the ceaseless exertion of digging them out of the snow above.’34
By the time the men return to the ship, with their two surviving dogs, more Emperor penguins have gathered to farewell them, solemnly bowing their salutations. ‘They were very stately and dignified,’ commented Charles Laseron admiringly, ‘and lacked the bustling self-importance of the Adélie penguin.’35
After the men pile on board with all of their gear, it is only a short time before they are under way. For all the joy of everyone being safe and well, there is still no time to lose.
24 February 1913 and into March, Winter Quarters, there is another breakthrough
At last, some 15 months after Mawson planned, their whole radio system is now working, which is an enormous step forward. A slew of excited messages about how they are getting on at Winter Quarters is traded for what is happening in the rest of the world. Mawson is, of course, deeply saddened to hear of the death of Scott and his companions, as their first bit of news from beyond their shores. There but for the grace of God …
Then Mawson sends another message, this one to Lord Denman, the Australian governor general, to apprise him of their situation and the death of his loyal comrades, while also requesting of the King his ‘royal permission to name a tract of newly discovered country to the east, “King George V Land”’.36
Of course, the person with whom Mawson is most keen to make contact is Paquita, but for the moment that is not possible, as she is still on the high seas heading back to Australia. At least he is able to get confirmation from her father via a brief exchange of messages that she is fine, which is something. Against that, he also receives news of his father’s death three months earlier, while on his own trip to New Guinea – curiously, at the time he had the disturbing dream about his father – which saddens him.
And there are terribly difficult cables to send, too. Several days after the radio has begun to work, after gathering the spiritual strength necessary, Mawson reluctantly hands to Jeffryes two cables destined for distant shores that he has been working on with heavy heart – messages that simply now must be sent via Macquarie Island and Hobart, to England and Switzerland:
Deeply regret to advise you by wireless Lieut. Ninnis killed instantly December fourteenth by falling into crevasse whilst sledging. Dr Mawson.37
And:
Deeply regret to advise by wireless telegraph the death of Dr Mertz on January seventh whilst sledging from causes arising from malnutrition. Dr Mawson.38
The news of the deaths also provides more headlines for the English press soon afterwards:
NEW TRAGEDY OF THE ANTARCTIC
DEATH OF TWO EXPLORERS
MESSAGE FROM DR MAWSON
FATE OF BRITISH OFFICER
LEADER AND SIX MEN LEFT BEHIND
Two more explorers have lost their lives in the Antarctic. One is Lieutenant B. E. S. Ninnis, of the Royal Fusiliers, and the other Dr Mertz, a Swiss champion ski-runner.
Lieutenant Ninnis fell in a crevasse (fissure in snow or ice) on 14 January, and was instantly killed … 39
In response to the news, Sir Ernest Shackleton is quick to the point:
A portion of the press is speaking of the Mawson Antarctic Expedition as a tragedy. Undoubtedly the deaths of Lieutenant Ninnis and Dr Mertz are sad, but they are the outcomes of accidents which come in the ordinary course in all Polar expeditions. Apart from these two accidents the expedition seems to me to have been a brilliant one.
When the story comes to be written of Mawson’s journey it will, to my mind, be a fascinating one, for I can imagine the lonely struggle he made, his two companions dead, moving northwards40 through blizzard, snow, and fog over crevasses for three weeks on his lonely way. Knowing Mawson as I do, I am not surprised at his achievement. To a man of less equable temperament or less determination the result would have been fatal.41
Back at Cape Denison, many further communications follow, including a full report to Professor David of exactly what the last year has consisted of, and there is a flood of messages back, of both sympathy and congratulations. Lord Denman sends a message expressing his sorrow at the death of Ninnis and Mertz, a sentiment royally echoed by the King himself, who also graciously allows that Dr Mawson may ‘affix the name, “King George V” Land, to that part of the Antarctic continent lying between Adélie Land and Oates Land.’42
Other cables, of course, of far less momentous content are also flowing back and forth, and it is quite a frequent occurrence that those who have gone to bed before midnight awake to find a pile of messages awaiting them, which is the highlight of their day – taking the place, in many ways, of a morning paper.
Whatever news is general and of common interest – more details on the death of the Scott party, for example – is discussed over breakfast ‘from every possible point of view’.43 (Being careful, of course, to talk quietly, so the nightwatchman can at last get some sleep.)
While this is a wonderful thing for most in the hut, the actual process of receiving the distant messages places a great strain on the radio operator, Jeffryes, for whom it involves long hours of tedium interspersed with signals through such difficult things as atmospheric static, the sometime howling of the dogs, noises within the hut and interference from the aurora australis and St Elmo’s fire. On a bad night, he spends hours on end trying to send or receive a single message, all for no result, and when it is particularly bad he can try for a whole week – enough to send any man spare. Fortunately, though, he seems mostly to cope. One of his key duties is sending through to Hobart the daily weather reports from Cape Denison, and though it frequently takes a long time to do this, they usually do get through by evening’s end.
14 March 1913, Port Esperance, Aurora returns
For all the still half-frozen wild men who spent the previous year on Antarctica, this is a magic time. They have survived. They have done well. They are on their way home. And the sea is now calm, after battering the ship as she headed north through the Southern Ocean. And there, up ahead, on the far-northern horizon, they can see land! Tasmania, ho!
Sure enough, as they steam into Port Esperance – on Tassie’s far south-western coast – they can spy, for the first time since two Decembers earlier, green hills! And they can even sniff the scent of trees on the wind – a scent that they had not previously known existed but do now, after a year without. But it gets better still. For there, do you see? There are the shapes of houses emerging from between those trees. Civilisation!
But now a greater wave of excitement quickly spreads through the men eagerly lining the rail near the bow of the ship. For the more eagle-eyed among them have just spotted something that tops all the rest put together, something that makes them jostle each other in their eagerness to get their hands on the field-glasses so they can get a better look. There is a figure standing in a garden at the front of a cottage.
Is it …? Can it be …?
Yes, it is. It is a girl.44
March to May 1913, Cape Denison, autumn in the Winter Quarters
Shortly after Aurora arrives in Hobart, back at Cape Denison Mawson and his men learn over the radio that Davis has succeeded in picking up Wild and all of his men, and the whole lot of them have returned safely. Mawson is not long in sending Davis instructions to proceed with all pace to England, where he believes his friend will have the best chance of raising the funds necessary to meet the bills attendant on them staying in Antarctica for another year.
In the here and now, though, there is great rejoicing to hear the news from Hobart, and an all too rare evening of exuberance follows, in what is otherwise a dour time.
For … the ambience in the hut is now entirely different to what it was just a few months earlier, when, just before they headed out for their summer sledging expeditions, the whole place crackled with optimism, laughter, excitement, life. Then, there were 18 of them crowded around the dinner table, in Hyde Park Corner, smoking their pipes, playing instruments, listening to records, telling stories and laughing into the night. Then, there were the effervescent Ninnis ’n’ Mertz, the riotous Hurley, the spellbinding Herbert Dyce Murphy, with his endless supply of stories. Then, the delicious waft of Mertz’s penguin omelettes had filled the entire hut.
Now, now there are just seven of them quietly rattling around in the suddenly cavernous shelter, of whom one, Mawson, still has a long way to go before resuming his full place in the life of the hut, such as it is.
While the bunks of 11 men now lie empty, there are none emptier than those of Mertz and Ninnis, their absence a constant reminder to all of their dreadful fate. They’re still out there, of course, both of them, their bodies perfectly preserved in their frozen resting places, and it is impossible not to think of that too. Their deaths hang like a black shroud over the entire hut, a pall that does not dissipate as the days and then weeks pass. Some nights, Cecil Madigan can hear Frank Bickerton ‘sobbing under his blanket’45 as he grieves for his dear friends.
As time hangs heavy on all of their hands, it is impossible, too, not to reflect on how close they came to being safe aboard Aurora, to now being home with their families, only to be here, in this frozen wasteland, once so invigorating and fresh but now, as Mawson himself puts it, ‘decidedly duller’. For that which once was new no longer is, and, in Mawson’s words, ‘the field of work which once stretched to the west, east and south had no longer the mystery of the unknown’.46
The one thing that helps is that they are relatively busy. For Dux Ipse is determined that this year will be more gainfully than painfully spent, gathering data for a total of two years and not just the one previously planned, and this means that the seven men must do what nearly three times that number have previously accomplished.
Now, for example, McLean, as well as keeping the biological log and making general observations, does all the ice-cutting and coal-carrying. (And he also, apart from pursuing his personal passions of collecting and preserving parasites from birds and fish, throws many sealed bottles with messages in them into the ocean, in the hope that information can be gained, if they are picked up, about the direction of the currents.)
For his part, Bage takes over Webb’s role as magnetician, while also being astronomer and storeman. Bickerton, beyond his regular role as general mechanic, also, as radio engineer, has his hands full most nights, ensuring the link to Macquarie Island is up. Hodgeman, as assistant meteorologist, is responsible for continuing to collect a lot of the scientific data on a daily basis, as well as, in his role as cartographer, spending ‘much time drafting, engaged upon the maps and plans of the Expedition’.47
And then there is the final member of the troupe, the new man, Sidney Jeffryes. Mawson first met him over two years earlier when he applied to join the AAE, and though he rejected his application then, this time he has been employed by the expedition secretary, Conrad Eitel. Jeffryes has continued to be kept more than busy, night after night, into the wee hours – when the transmissions work best – trying to send and receive messages, not always with success, but still going hard all the same. Of them all, Jeffryes, being relatively new to it, still gazes with wonder upon the environment, and, for the most part, he seems to fit in.
Mawson himself is kept busy collating much of the data and information recorded in the previous summer’s sledging, while also drafting the book he has agreed to write for William Heinemann, detailing the entire expedition. In the latter task, he has the great help of McLean, a highly literate man who, with the exception of Mawson’s epic sledging trip, has of course lived through much of what Mawson is wanting to describe. As well as writing some chapters from scratch, McLean works hard on compressing and refining Mawson’s drafts and greatly contributing to the book’s overall style.
Beyond such professional duties, however, the fact that there are seven of them in the hut makes the division of chores relatively easy, with each man obliged to spend one day a week being the cook and one night a week being nightwatchman.
And so the hut settles down to wait the year out, with mixed degrees of ease. It is perhaps most difficult for Mawson himself in these early weeks, as he is not yet recovered from his physical and emotional ordeal and frequently pushes himself too hard. To try to relax, he often reads – including The History of War and Peace by G. H. Perris – but even reading can be fraught. Though he finds fascinating the book by Frederick A. Cook, Through the First Antarctic Night – concerning the ill-fated expedition of Adrien de Gerlache in 1897 – parts of it deeply shock him. For, as Cook so evocatively details, not long after the darkness of the polar winter night descended, it brought with it a terrible melancholia, and, from there, madness was not far behind.48
Speaking of which … even though they have not begun their own second polar winter in this hut, Mawson himself sometimes fears for his own sanity. Though flesh is slowly returning to his bones and he has stopped shedding skin, he still cannot sleep well, is frequently anxious far beyond an immediate cause, is irritable and sometimes irrational, has terrible headaches and keeps thinking of his own near-death experience and of the all too real deaths of Ninnis ’n’ Mertz, now reunited in death.49
The spectre of their bodies out there in the frozen wastelands is something that continues to haunt Mawson in the darkness, a darkness that is now starting to rapidly lengthen as winter approaches. ‘I find my nerves are in a very serious state,’ he quietly confides to his diary in late March, ‘and from the feeling I have in the base of my head I [have the] suspicion that I may go off my rocker very soon.’ The cause, he feels, is obvious. ‘Too much writing today brought this on.’
The way forward, in his own opinion?
‘Take more exercise and less study, hoping for a beneficial turn.’50
In the meantime, in an effort to keep everyone else’s spirits up, at the beginning of April Mawson asks McLean to resuscitate an idea he had the previous winter of producing a monthly magazine, called the Adélie Blizzard, in the tradition of the South Polar Times, which Shackleton and Bernacchi edited during the Discovery expedition and which was continued by Cherry-Garrard during the Terra Nova expedition, along with Aurora Australis, which had been produced during the Nimrod expedition.
McLean could be the editor and all of them could make contributions in the form of poems, articles, stories or anything that took their fancy ‘on every subject but the wind’, as Mawson put it.51 It included anything and everything from ‘light doggerel to heavy blank verse … original articles, letters to the Editor, plays, reviews on books and serial stories … within the limits of our supply of foolscap paper and typewriter ribbons’.52 It is McLean’s idea to have a column exclusively devoted to news of the day, incorporating the more interesting of the cables that have come to them from the outside world over the wireless.
The plan got nowhere the previous year because Mawson himself had carriage of it and neither he, nor anyone else, had time to produce anything, absorbed as they were with getting themselves established and then in making preparations for their summer sledging journeys. This time, it should be easier.
True, in the absence of a printing press, each edition has to be laboriously typed up and pasted onto the pages, but McLean is nothing if not energetic and proves to be up to the task – so much so that he is himself admitted as a member ‘by wireless to the Journalists’ Association (Sydney)’.53
The first edition is a particular success, with McLean reading some of the best of it to the others over dinner one evening, to their great amusement. After that, the one and only copy of the newspaper, running to 40 pages, is passed from hand to hand. Extra, extra, read all about it!
‘An “Ode to Tobacco” was very popular and seemed to voice the enthusiasm of our small community,’ Mawson later recalls, ‘while “The Evolution of Women” introduced us to a once-familiar subject.’54
There also continues to be some wonderful correspondence coming and going, courtesy of Jeffryes straining at the radio night after night. To Mawson, none is more important than the cable he sends to Paquita on the first day of April, by which time he knows, from his previous correspondence with her father, that she should be just returned to Adelaide from her long sojourn in Europe. After long thought, he composes and sends a telegram that makes clear that while he still loves her, he realises that her own feelings may have wavered during their long absence from each other:
Deeply regret delay stop only just managed to reach hut stop effects now gone but lost most my hair stop you are free to consider but trust you will not abandon your second hand Douglas stop55
Oh, the relief, the indescribable relief when all but instantly Paquita replies with her own cable, not long after her ship has reached Port Adelaide:
Deeply thankful you are safe stop warmest welcome awaiting your hairless return stop regarding contract same as ever only more so stop thoughts always with you stop all well here stop months soon pass stop take things easier this winter stop speak as often as possible stop56
So she will indeed be waiting for him upon his return, which is the best news imaginable. From that initial exchange of cables, the two begin to write infrequent letters to each other – alas, letters that will have to wait many months to be read by the other, as Mawson is reluctant to tie up the precious radio link on purely personal matters – but even in such few letters as there are, the warmth of their love for each other is affirmed again and again.
In his first letter to her, Mawson confides just how poor his physical, mental and emotional states were when he returned, which was also the reason he was inclined to liberate her from her commitment to marry him. ‘Though this demonstrated my physical ability at the time,’ he explains, ‘it was a great shock to my entire system and the effects of it left me more than ever convinced that I did not merit your appropriation.’57
Her letter, written only a short time afterwards, seeks to record the warmth of her feelings for him, and all the more so for what he has been through:
My Douglas,
Oh my dear, dear man. If only I could come with this letter. Oh that terrible journey all by yourself if I could have had it instead of you – did my love help you then? It is worth less than nothing if it didn’t … Miraculously spared to do great things – a life is not spared like that for nothing and I shall help you do them. Poor, poor Ninnis and Mertz. Correll tells me they were so much liked. Mertz was not so wiry as you. They both knew the risks they took. Thank heavens their deaths were not due to anything that could have been prevented …58
Still, he must understand that while her love for him has not changed, it is quite possible that she has changed:
Douglas I have grown so much older in these months and I came back from Europe with my head full of things to discuss with you. And now everything has to wait. I feel the need of you now – am at a sort of turning point … I do want you so badly.59
It is precisely the love he needs to help keep him warm during the long, dark night to come, and already there are signs that it is not far away.
When a lone penguin stands on a rocky ledge overhanging the freezing ocean, steels himself, dives in and is not seen again, 16 April 1913 is marked down as the last sign of summer disappearing this year.
Happier communications come from Australia, where Mawson and his men are being lionised in absentia:
24.5.1913
Via Rfc. Sydney
We boys and girls and teachers of Fort Street Public high school assembled on Empire Day and send greetings to old Fort Street Boys, Douglas Mawson, Archie Maclean … and all their comrades who are doing their duties by our Empire in Antarctica –
Professor David University
24.5.1913
To Professor David University
Sydney University via Rfc
Dr Mawson and colleagues heartily thank the girls and boys of Fort Street Public High school for their kind and sympathetic message.60
That afternoon, to celebrate Empire Day, the isolated seven raise the Union Jack and give three resounding cheers for the King.
It is good to have something to celebrate in a hut that used to crackle with so many of them … though for the most part they are all getting on well. Mawson does, however, have some worry about the strain that is starting to show on their new chum, Jeffryes.
A couple of nights after Empire Day, Mawson awakes near midnight and comes out to find the notably scruffy and hirsute 27-year-old asleep at his post. What’s more, to judge from the lack of messages sent or received, he has clearly been that way for most of the evening. This, despite the fact that the conditions for transmitting are very good. And even when Mawson, highly irritated, wakes him, the Queenslander can only get a very little done before, on Macquarie Island, Sawyer goes to bed.
Part of the problem, Mawson confides to his diary, is that ‘Jeffryes stops up all day – goes for tiring walks, etc, and then is not fit to keep an alert watch during the 8 to 12 hours. This is bad management.’61 All this, and the fact that Jeffryes ‘appears to have no conception of scientific analysis’, makes Mawson wonder more than ever if they have the man they need for the job at hand. He suspects not. The one thing Jeffryes does appear to have passion for is constantly checking the stays on the antenna – he is always tightening them – and while that is admirable, it is not enough.
However tight the stays, it is Jeffryes himself who becomes increasingly slack and loosened as the days go by, and he is ever less frequently at his radio post at his designated time of 8 pm. Usually, in Mawson’s experience, when he reprimands any of his men for breaches of discipline or this very kind of slack behaviour, the problem is solved, because they get the message and amend their ways. But this proves not to be the case with Jeffryes. For there is more, much more. Mawson discovers that not only has Jeffryes not been sending the nightly weather reports from Antarctica, which is a key part of his duties, he has also not been sending other cables given to him.
Something has to give, and alas, in the first instance at least – despite Jeffryes’ sterling efforts in the matter of keeping the stays for the antenna tight – true winter is no sooner upon them than the wind becomes so strong on the morning of 7 June that several vicious gusts take out the top and part of the middle section of the main wireless mast. From that moment on, their ‘morning newspaper’ of fresh messages to wake up to has ceased, along with their capacity to get messages through to Australia.
On first inspection, there seems to be no chance of ever repairing it. However, as is the way of such things in Antarctica, where ‘needs must’ always takes precedence over ‘can’t be done’, it is not long before the men begin discussing the ways it just might be repaired. In the meantime, the already slack Jeffryes becomes slacker still, as it is no longer possible for him to engage in the one activity that he has been brought there for, and his mind becomes ever more idle and troubled.
Mid-June 1913 and the rest of the month thereafter, Penarth Harbour, the people quietly gather
And so … the end.
In the early hours of 14 June, Terra Nova comes to anchor off the island of Flat Holm, the Welsh Dragon fluttering from her mainmast just as it did that day she departed. For Terra Nova is now returned to Cardiff, whence she had set out with such hope, three long years ago. With this return, the pledge that Scott made in response to the warmth and generosity of their Cardiff farewell is honoured.
At 11 am, Kathleen Scott and her son, Peter, Oriana Wilson and other family members of those on the expedition are transported out by tug to Terra Nova, while a vast crowd of loyal well-wishers line the docks and lock bridges to welcome the men home.
Little Peter Scott, with a burly officer in tow, wanders the ship in the very footsteps of that great man, his father, Captain Scott, stopping on the upper deck to pat the dogs. Here, Commander Teddy Evans presents him with his own white cap and lifts him up to the rail, from where the boy playfully acknowledges the cheers of the crowd.
Together with Mrs Scott and Mrs Wilson, however, Terra Nova’s crew do not respond to the cheers, choosing to remain respectfully silent. Commander Evans is bravest of all in the face of tragedy. Returning home to London back in April on Otranto, his wife, the ‘wildly beautiful’ Hilda, suffering from peritonitis, tragically died while the ship was off the coast of Naples. Evans rejoined Terra Nova in the Scilly Isles, off the south-west coast of England.
As Terra Nova now slowly steams to her berthing place, the guns are fired and the huge crowd cheer and press forward to catch a glimpse of her passing by.
By the end of June, Terra Nova has been sold to Bowring Brothers, a well-known Newfoundland sealing operation, and the days of her Antarctic exploration draw to an end. By that time, however, at least all of the letters that Scott’s party wrote in the tent before their deaths have found their way to their loved ones.
For all of those recipients, it is extraordinary to be reading the words of men who have been dead for more than a year, speaking to them, effectively, from the grave. Perhaps the most moving part of the letter from Scott to his wife, Kathleen – which she in fact received earlier, when handed to her by her brother, Wilfrid Bruce – begins where he writes of his greatest regret:
You must know that quite the worst aspect of this situation is the thought that I shall not see you again … How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home – but oh, what a price to pay – to forfeit the sight of your dear, dear face … Oh, but you’ll put a strong bold face to the world.62
He also writes of their son, Peter:
I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up, but it is a satisfaction to know that he will be safe with you … Make the boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. They encourage it in some schools. I know you will keep him in the open air. Try to make him believe in a God, it is comforting … and guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know – had always an inclination to be idle. I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly, as I am sure you will … You know I cherish no sentimental rubbish about remarriage. When the right man comes to help you in life you ought to be your happy self again – I wasn’t a very good husband but I hope I shall be a good memory …63
The indefatigable Bowers has written to his mother, in pencil, on leaves torn from his diary:
22 March 1912
My own Dearest Mother,
As this very possibly will be my last letter to you I am sorry it is such a short scribble. I have written little since we left the Pole but it has not been for want of thinking of you and the dear girls. We have had a terrible journey back. Seaman Evans died on the glacier and Captain Oates left us the other day. We have had terribly low temperatures on the barrier and … our sick companions have delayed us till too late in the season which has made us very short of fuel and we are now out of food as well. Each depot has been a harder struggle to reach, but I am still strong and hope to reach this one with Dr Wilson and get the food and fuel necessary for our lives.
God knows what will be the outcome of the 23 miles64 march we have to make, but my trust is still in Him and the abounding grace of my Lord and Saviour whom you brought me up to trust in …
When man’s extremity is reached God’s help may make things light and thus the end will be painless enough for myself. I should so like to come through for your dear sake. It is splendid however to pass with such companions as I have and as all of us have mothers and 3 wives you will not be alone … no shame however and you will know that I struggled to the end …
But take comfort that I died at peace with the world and myself – not afraid …
Your ever loving son to the end of this life and the next when we will meet and where God shall wipe away the tears from our eyes.65
22 June 1913, Cape Denison, Bage and Bickerton dress up
Under the circumstances, it is hard not to compare this midwinter’s day celebration with the one the previous year. Then, it had been a riotous affair involving 18 men untroubled by tragedy, extending into the next day as they had gone past midnight to encompass birthday celebrations for Belgrave Ninnis, who was officially in his 25th year on the stroke of twelve o’clock that night.
Now, it is a rather more subdued gathering, of just seven men, six of whom have been here the previous year and remember all too well the whole night and its aftermath. Yes, this night’s cook, McLean, does make an extra effort and the menu does bear the foreword: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer …’66
And, as Mawson notes in his diary, ‘Bage and Bickerton dress up in coloured togs.’67
But it is just not the same …
July 1913, Cape Denison, the strain begins to show
And then, as is always the way in the middle of the penetrating darkness of polar winter, madness begins to stalk wherever it finds mental weakness of any kind. In this instance, it descends upon … Sidney Jeffryes, their radio operator.
Though in the early days of arriving at the camp, he had been agreeable and hard-working, over time he has changed, slipping into an odd, nervy kind of moroseness where it is clear that he is struggling more than the old hands are to get through the winter months.
After that first time of Mawson discovering him asleep at his post, it has become worse, as his behaviour has grown progressively more slovenly: caring less and less how he dresses and behaves; no longer participating in conversations; and appearing quite ambivalent about whether he will or won’t attend to his cooking and cleaning duties.
Though Mawson tries to relieve the workload on the radio man by allowing him to cook only one meal every six days, even then the results are those of a man who simply doesn’t care any more, to the point that it becomes dangerous. The reason the oven explodes on one occasion is directly due to Jeffryes’ carelessness. Even making tea is beyond him, as he is known to serve it up when the water has not fully boiled! The fact that the antenna has gone down, sparing him his nightly duties, does not help, as Jeffryes seems to get only worse.
One night at dinner in early July, Madigan is talking about something he has been reading in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Jeffryes, thinking he is being referred to, suddenly asks Madigan into the next room so they can have a fight about it. Mawson is able to assert his authority and quell what may well have been a violent fight. After pondering it overnight, however, Jeffryes is even more outraged than before, and while Madigan is in the gangway filling his lamp with kerosene the radio man pushes him, ‘asked him to fight again, and danced around in a towering rage’.68
‘McLean,’ Mawson records soberly on 7 July, ‘thinks [Jeffryes] is a bit off his head. I think that his touchy temperament is being very hard tested with bad weather and indoor life. A case of polar depression. I trust it will go now.’69
It doesn’t. A few days later, Jeffryes comes to Mawson to advise him that if he has been a bit out of sorts lately, it is because, as a younger man, he ran a little wild with women and it has left him with venereal trouble, causing nightly emissions. He thinks the solution is for McLean to give him some poison. Mawson is not sure that is the answer and is more convinced than ever that Jeffryes is ‘off his base’.70
And he is not getting back to it any time soon. He sleeps badly during the day, arises for dinner looking terrible and goes to bed again, muttering darkly in the dark. The whole hut is on edge, not knowing what is going to happen.
Well, Jeffryes is going to tell them what is going to happen. He is going to get answers, that is what is going to happen. He comes to see Mawson again and wishes him to state clearly ‘all the accusations imputed against me’.71
He is not impressed with Mawson’s response that there are no accusations against him and that everyone wishes him well. If that is true, Jeffryes asks, why are the others always ‘referring to the Aurora’s Log?’ And, for the life of him, he ‘cannot see what Captain Davis has to do with the wireless’.72
Such nonsense questions demonstrate to Mawson that it is all now more than getting out of hand, and he is certain they are sharing the hut in the long, dark night with a lunatic. So is McLean, writing in his diary on 11 July:
I’m sorry to record that Jeffryes has shown undoubted signs of delusive insanity, but I’m hoping that his delusional state will pass off as we may be able to remove the cause. It has come as a bit of a shock to us, but for some time (a few weeks) suspicious symptoms have been apparent.73
Mawson is concerned enough that he writes a formal report about Jeffryes’ behaviour, for possible use later should there be an issue: ‘I don’t judge him on wireless results at all – I judge him on his general behaviour and appearances. Absolute selfishness in every way – no esprit de corps.’74
Well, Jeffryes is on to their game all right. He knows what all six of them are about, not just Mawson. Obviously – jealous of the success he has had in keeping the wireless mast in order as long as he did before it broke – they all want to murder him. Well, maybe not Mawson himself, but certainly the others. And while they are planning their murder, they are deliberately trying to both hypnotise him and keep him awake at night to unsettle him!75 And none of this would have happened if McLean had not started analysing his urine to deduce things from his past.76
Jeffryes is both stunned and saddened by what has occurred. ‘Having no experience in these matters,’ he would later record of his feelings, ‘I never for a moment dreamt that it would lead to insanity and although I noticed it, I never stopped my efforts. Evidence of something wrong first appeared in Madigan and McLean who continually gave vent to cowardly insinuations.’77
But when Jeffryes warns Mawson about this, the leader does nothing! Worse still, Mawson tries to put him under a ‘magnetic spell’, which puts him in a ‘permanent state of mental thought transference’.78
Desperate, he writes a letter to his sister, Norma, in Queensland, that he hopes will record what has happened to him:
Antarctic Winter Qtrs
July 13th 1913
To Miss N Jeffryes
Bougunda
The Range Toowoomba
My Dear Norm.
I am to be done to death by a jury of six murderers who are trying to prove me insane originating possibly from the jealousy of six of them … my services to this expedition have found their reward in death. I commend you to God’s care and if they will only give me the chance I can show them that I am quite prepared to die like a man … Farewell to all. I am unable to prevent their folly and so must die a martyr to their bloody mindedness.
Affectionately yours,
Sid79
On the same day, another letter from Jeffryes is written to a friend, Mrs Fox, in Sydney:
Little did I dream when the Dr and yourself saw me off at Sydney that I should ever have to write you. You remember how eager I was to make good well it has brought against me the charge of insanity and I am being hounded to death by Dr Mclean and other members of the expedition.80
Still not content with that, he also decides to write to Dr Mawson, to formally set down his fears:
Antarctic Winter Qtrs
July 13th 1913
Dr Mawson
Leader Australasian Antarctic Expedition You have been previously warned that you were almost on the eve of a dastardly murder. I have found it impossible to make you believe that I am in a perfectly normal state of mind owing to McLean’s endeavouring to weave a chain of evidence around myself, which evidence you are determined to act upon …
Sidney A. Jeffryes81
In anguished harangues at other members of the hut, Jeffryes lets them all know that once he gets back to Australia, he will report their actions to the authorities. And yet, fiends that they are, still they won’t stop plotting against him!
In the face of it all, Mawson feels like his own brain is ‘on the point of bursting’.82 Having only recently worried about his personal grip on sanity, he has some sympathy for Jeffryes but must do everything he can to ensure the madness doesn’t spread.
One thing that helps Mawson calm himself is to continue to write letters to Paquita, as it reminds him of the life beyond this tight little hut enshrouded in the darkness:
Winter Quarters
15 July 1913, 3 am
My Darling Paquita,
I simply love these hours that are devoted to writing to you. You are divinely sent to me to make life happy, and your influence is a power even here: Can you guess how much more potent when I am at your side? When I feel your breath? When lip touches lip? How great a thing love is.
Your fresh and healthy girlhood – your trust – your love – your tenderness. All these things are ever before me, and in this frozen, austere solitude loom up as giant angels …
Dearie my mind has been hurt again this last week. Shall I tell you what happened? Well, it is said in a few words but so sad and has had its depressing influence upon us. It is this – Jeffryes the wireless operator left here by Capt. Davis has lost his reason – I trust it will not be permanent, but it looks bad for he is not strong brained and should never have come down here. Capt. Davis should not have brought him but only good was meant. He has had very much less strain on his mind than anyone else and so we conclude must have had a weak brain originally. He has to be watched the whole time.
Do you know where I would like to be just now? In your arms, my head on your breast, all care forgotten. Oh, Dearie, is it too much to ask that Providence will some day grant this? At times it looks so far away.
Think how gloriously near each other we might be had Capt. Davis waited another 10 hours before leaving, as it was then calm and we could have gone off …
I am just feeling a little bit serious tonight you see. However the time is passing and in 5 months we should be away from here – and then!
Darling kiss me as I you in token of our deep wove bond.
Douglas83
Alas, alas, despite the warmth of such communications, Mawson’s refusal to use the wireless – when it was working – for little else other than matters of science and business means that Paquita is not privy to them, something that inspires her own writing to him a few weeks later:
Are you frozen? In heart I mean. Am I pouring out a little of what was in my heart to an iceberg? Oh, for a few private dear words. Why haven’t you sent me a few coded words and trusted to my finding it out! Can a person remain in such cold and lonely regions however beautiful and still love warmly? You were not in love when with Shackleton.
How I long to hear about all this. That you love me just as much. Lean over the Aurora’s side and say it to the breeze – perhaps I shall hear it. Don’t laugh it isn’t a laughing matter. I love you to distraction and if when you return you find I am too warm! Well I can’t help it. I own now I was rather cold before you left through ignorance of everything. Oh dear let’s get to business! 84
Finally, on 27 July, back at Winter Quarters, matters come to a head when Jeffryes formally tenders his ‘resignation’. He is no longer one of them, no longer a part of the expedition, and will not cooperate from this point on. Mawson is confronted, not just with a madman in the hut but also with the danger of the madness spreading. In an effort to excise it, he gathers all of his men around the table, including Jeffryes, and places Jeffryes in a kind of public isolation. Reading his words carefully from the notes he has taken, he points out that for those who would resign from the expedition, ‘the accommodation houses are few and far between in the Antarctic’.85
However, all are to remember that it is not Jeffryes’ fault that he is mentally ill, and he must understand that none of them bear him any ill will because of it. At this point, the wireless man stands up and, in a remarkably lucid speech, apologises for his actions and only wishes that everything he has done and said could be forgotten, so that he can get back to work. Mawson thanks him and assures him that it is all forgotten … but the following day Jeffryes is just as he was and refuses to work.86
For the moment, the situation remains in an extremely uncomfortable stalemate. After all, Jeffryes could hardly be confined to quarters. All of them are effectively already confined to quarters. Even with the odd quick forays outside, they all have to beat a quick retreat back inside the hut or be frozen to death. And Jeffryes can hardly be tied up, no matter what kind of a danger they think he might represent to either themselves or himself. In the confined space of the hut, it is simply unimaginable to hold a man prisoner for months on end until Davis is due to relieve them in December.
Fortunately, Jeffryes really does settle down a little, seeming to concentrate on not letting the others try to hypnotise him or letting Dr Mawson put him under one of his ‘magnetic spells’. Which is fine with the others. All they can do is to monitor him closely and hope that the coming of the spring will remedy things. It is, in fact, the advice of McLean that when spring returns, so too will the better part of Jeffryes’ mind, and his ‘nervous exhaustion’ might pass.87 That would be wonderful, because, apart from everything else, Jeffryes is now refusing to wash and has started to smell terribly.
In the meantime, the worthy Bickerton, a very capable can-do kind of man, has been prevailed upon to learn how to understand and send messages in Morse code, against the time when the men hope to have the wireless back up and running. All they need, they hope, is for some calm weather to return, so they can do the work necessary.
August and September 1913, Cape Denison, spring comes around
Mercifully, spring comes early this year, with the first of the Weddell seals appearing from out of the ocean to flop upon the icy shore in late August, some six weeks earlier than they appeared the year before.88 Flocks of petrels also soon appear, and shortly thereafter the penguins.
By then, they do indeed have the mast for the antenna repaired, which is a blessing. As it turns out, though, the aurora australis throughout September is so brilliant and constant that it proves difficult to send or receive messages, no matter who has the headphones on. Bickerton does his best, but the process remains slow. Alas, when they give Jeffryes another go, thinking he has come around, he is caught ‘transmitting a false message in Mawson’s name’.89 And, as before, that is just the start of it. For the madness soon returns. Personally, though, Jeffryes is firmly convinced, as he gravely informs Mawson, that the only two who are not mad are himself and Dux Ipse. (And, just quietly, he is not so sure about Dux Ipse.) Worse still, he is constantly transmitting these views to the outside world.
The best Mawson can, he tries to hide his extreme frustration, but no such restraint is required in his diary. He writes on 9 September, ‘It is madness to let a lunatic humbug us like this. He is not rational in ordinary talking, how can he be with the wireless?’90
Three days later, Mawson can bear it no more and writes Jeffryes an official warning:
Winter Quarters
Commonwealth Bay
Sept. 12, 1913
To Sidney Jeffryes,
Sir,
On account of your eccentric behaviour in the past, and the supreme importance of the duties involving trust and confidence placed in you in connection with the sending of the wireless messages, I wish to remind you that, should any further breach of faith on your part be discovered you will be held responsible on arrival in Australia …
D. Mawson
Leader A.A.E.91
Nothing changes. The Jeffryes problem goes on and on and on, and it is with some feeling that Mawson would later record for Paquita his thoughts that, ‘Most of my time during this winter was occupied in keeping myself and others sane …’92
21 September 1913, Toorak, Paquita gets it off her
chest
The traffic outside has fallen away to nothing, the family have all gone to bed in their new home here in Melbourne and all is as silent as the creeping frost as Paquita, in her dressing gown, takes up her pen at midnight and begins to write a very important letter to her absent fiancé. The window is open, and it is so cold her teeth are chattering, but it helps in a strange sort of way to relate to Douglas and to crystallise her thoughts. She feels sad but determined.
To this point, all such letters have been more an exercise in talking to herself than anything else, but not this one. This one will get to him in a matter of mere weeks as Aurora – which she has seen just this afternoon in a Port Melbourne dry dock – will soon be on her way to pick them up and she will be carrying this letter with her. It gives Paquita’s writing more of an immediacy, an urgency to tell him how she is truly feeling and what he may expect when they soon meet. After beginning sweetly, ‘My very dear Douglas,’ she is not long in getting to the nub of it:
Douglas, do you want to go again? You don’t know what it is meaning to me not to be able to hear anything from you. My pen has not its usual fluency in writing to you. It seems like writing to a wall. I want to know the trend of your thoughts and whether – oh I suppose you do though. There is no reason why you shouldn’t like me as much as before. But this everlasting silence is almost unbearable. I don’t want to doubt you dear but I’m afraid of the fascination of the South … Will a calm life ever satisfy you? I have seen unhappiness where I thought all was well. Calm homes also have skeletons in a cupboard it seems. I want you to reassure me that all will go well with us and our love.
I long for our meeting but in a faint way dread it …
There is more, much more, but one thing in particular she feels he should know before returning: ‘I am not a child any longer as before you left.’
And she finishes:
It’s time I went to bed. It looks so cold and uninviting. My knees and arms are frozen. But I’m too cold to shut the window.
Oh Douglas don’t don’t let Antarctica freeze you. If I only had some words to go on with. Just another caress to think of. I need it so much. It would be selfish if I wished you missed me as I do you. But men don’t love as women.
Not as this one, anyway.
Your Paquita93
22 September 1913, Cape Denison, Jeffryes takes action
Wonderful. Things seem to be going a little better for Jeffryes. After dinner on this night, he is even lucid enough to put a record on the gramophone. Alas, when McLean ventures a tepid remark to the effect that he never could understand that particular piece of music, Jeffryes is appalled. He not only announces he is moving out but also follows through, to the point of beginning to pack his bags. After two hours of standing at the veranda door, he returns inside. Dux Ipse has been proved right: accommodation houses really are few and far between in the Antarctic.
Mid-November 1913, Cape Denison, in everlasting memory of …
As their time at Cape Denison draws to a close, there remains one particularly important task for the men, and now Mawson pushes it through. It is the construction of a wooden memorial cross to the perpetual memory of their lost comrades, Ninnis ’n’ Mertz.
On a wonderfully calm evening, that cross is erected on the highest point of Azimuth Hill, overlooking the sea, just a few hundred yards to the west of the hut. With the time for leaving Antarctica rapidly approaching, Mawson takes pause at this poignant moment – when, as if to mark the occasion, the harsh conditions have given way to a scene of unparalleled beauty – to take it all in.
It is just two hours before midnight, a time when in most parts of the world all is dark. But not here. Here, the most exquisite natural colours are lit upon:
the canvas of sea and sky. The northern dome is a blush of rose deepening to a warm terra-cotta along the horizon, and the water reflects it upward to the gaze. Tiny Wilson petrels flit by like swallows; from their nests in the crannies of the grey rock hills come the love carols of the snow petrels; seals raise their dark forms above the placid surface; the shore is lined with penguins squatting in grotesque repose. The south is pallid with light – the circling sun. Adélie Land is at peace!94
13 December 1913, Cape Denison, there is a reunion
And now is the hour. For the third time in the last three years, Captain Davis guides Aurora into the now familiar embrace of Commonwealth Bay. This has been the easiest passage so far, not simply because he knows precisely where he is going but also because the weather for once – for once! – has been, if not quite benign, at least not vicious.95
And, as the perfect punctuation point for the trip thus far, instead of Cape Denison being beset by a coastal blizzard, it is relatively calm. Captain Davis, Frank Hurley, Jack Hunter and two of the Macquarie Islanders that they have picked up on the way through climb down a rope ladder from Aurora into the small whaleboat that has been put over the side, and they set off together.
‘Give way together!’96 Davis gives the order, and from that moment all are as unaccustomedly quiet as the whispering wind, heightening the sense that they are right at the point of a momentous occasion. As they approach the shore, everything seems just as it was, bar a large memorial cross they can see at the top of Azimuth Hill, which they know from their previous communications was erected several weeks earlier, as a memorial to their lost comrades. And still the whispering wind urges them forward, and still the sense of momentousness heightens.
And, sure enough …
Just as they enter the tiny harbour, they hear a familiar voice ring out. ‘Turn out, you chaps! The BOAT is here!’97 It is Mawson’s voice, and here he is, coming down to the water to greet them as they spring ashore.
As Davis warmly pumps his hand, the sea captain is overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of intense relief: ‘Relief that [Mawson] was manifestly alive and well, relief that I had been able to do my duty. My life has given me few moments that have been more rewarding.’98
In short order, Davis invites Mawson and his men back on Aurora, where a hearty breakfast has been prepared for them, and – amid the eggs, bacon, toast, orange juice and coffee – Mawson tells the story of his expedition, in a low, quiet voice, to his rapt audience.
For the first time, many of the crew get a close look at this now legendary figure, and one of them, Herbert Goddard, records his impression in his diary:
Noticing Dr. Mawson closely one can read leader on his face. He looks in general very tall, fairly broad shoulders for a young man. Speaks firm but nice. A substantial man, eats what given him, not a little bit of this etc. One cannot help but like him. He’s very active, always up and doing.99
Quickly packed up, they are soon aboard Aurora and on their way, with great mirth arising from the fact that practically the last thing they see as they leave the hut is the petrifaction of that same loaf of bread cooked nearly two years earlier, now ‘an icy pedestal near the Boat Harbour.’100 Still, it goes on!
And yet, in the end, Mawson’s next actions bespeak the man he is. For surely any other expedition leader, away from home for over two years, miraculously saved and at last on a ship that could take him back to be with his fiancée and a hero’s welcome, would have given the orders for full steam ahead for home! But not Douglas Mawson. He is, first, last and always, a scientist eager to expand the field of human knowledge. His strong view, and he will countenance no other, is that they owe a duty to those many people who ‘had subscribed money to send the ship to the Antarctic for the third time and he is determined that it should not all be spent for the sole purpose of his own and his companions’ rescue’.101
True, he still makes some time for Paquita, as his thoughts turn increasingly towards their forthcoming reunion, and he writes some very warm catch-up letters to her: ‘My love for you and duty to you was the real insentive [sic] which finally availed in my reaching the hut [and] I shall never regret the struggle through which it dragged me.’102
Not enough? Still probably not enough. Now in receipt for the first time of the letters she has written to him, where she has poured out her anguish at his seeming distant coldness, his letters get warmer as they go on, meaning he will have a tidy pile to hand her when they meet. ‘Believe me Paquita, I have never at any time loved anybody as I love you. Never had it entered my head before I met you to wed anybody. This is perhaps one reason why I love you so much.’103
And yet, there is no question of that love getting in the way of their very important research. For the next six weeks, thus, Aurora conducts scientific investigations all around the Mackellar Islets and the glacier tongue nearest the hut before exploring the coast of Queen Mary Land and the current contours of the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Then, and only then, do they turn for home.
26 February 1914, Gulf St Vincent, Aurora takes the men back to Adelaide
It is not so much that the men arrive at the Australian coast as the Australian coast comes out to them, the folds of land reaching forward to embrace them in its loving grasp as the ship blow-bobs her way forward. As one, those of the ship’s company allowed to be on the upper decks gaze with longing at the land they are approaching, eager to be back upon it.
It is the most perfect late summer’s day imaginable, with nary a cloud in the sky, nor a wavelet that doesn’t sparkle in the bright sunshine or a bird that doesn’t sing. As Aurora arrives at the entrance to the Port River, the sailors are soon joined by Professors Edgeworth David, Orme Masson and George Cockburn Henderson, alighting from the Harbour Authority’s launch, all to be hail-fellow-well-met by Mawson and the other members of the expedition. From the bridge, Captain Davis gazes down upon the scene with a great deal of pleasure: ‘When one thought of what this small group of explorers had endured, the loneliness of more than two years of exile, one understood a little of what this moment must have meant to them.’104
And what a scene awaits them as Aurora draws close to her berth off the semaphore signal station. The wharf at Port Adelaide is simply white with people, all in a festive, welcoming mood. The women – ah, the women! – are in lovely light skirts and blouses, with broad-brimmed hats, holding ‘gaily-coloured parasols’,105 while the menfolk stand in their shirt-sleeves.
And how they clap! How they cheer! Louder and louder and louder. So loud that Davis can only just hear the river pilot say to him, ‘Tell the mate to make her well fast. That’ll do the engines.’
Davis does exactly that, though he is obliged to use a megaphone to make his order to the mate heard: ‘Vast heaving! And make fast!’106
As Douglas Mawson makes his way down the gangplank, he is instantly swamped by people. There, right in the middle of the throng, the man whom everyone wants to get to, to shake hands with, to clap on the back, to offer words of congratulation to, is the man who used to be merely a well-known university lecturer in these parts. He is now nothing less than a national hero.
‘The welcome home, the voices of innumerable strangers – the hand-grips of many friends – it chokes me – it cannot be uttered!’107
Mawson is finally home.
Earlier that day, another ship has sailed up the Port River, one coming from Melbourne, where the Delprat family have so recently moved. On board are Paquita and her mother, and no sooner has Paquita come ashore than she has seen in the ‘Stop Press’ column of the Adelaide Advertiser that the ship bearing Douglas is then and there on the approaches to Port Adelaide.
Quickly now, Mother!
The two ladies race to disembark, and they catch a train to their hotel, where they find a message that they are to ‘wait for Douglas there’.108
And so they have … and now … here he is!
As he enters the room, Paquita has a momentary start as she compares the image of him she has carried in her head for the past two years with the man who now stands before her. She just has time to think, ‘Yes, of course, that’s what he is like!’ before Douglas says, ‘You have had a long time to wait …’109
That she has. And there have been times when she has wavered, wondering if it could work after their being so long apart, but, as soon as they embrace, she knows everything is going to be all right. So does he.
It has all been worth it. It was the thought of this moment that helped him find the strength to pull himself out of the crevasse over a year earlier; it is the reality of it now that gives him confidence that he has the prospect of a full life ahead with his beloved Paquita.
And he looks forward to it more than ever.