‘We had discovered an accursed country. We had found the Home of the Blizzard.’
DOUGLAS MAWSON
These are names that history will remember as long as tales of Antarctic exploration are told. But the name of one man has been largely forgotten. That man is Douglas Mawson.
It’s a shame, because Mawson was as tough as any of the great Antarctic explorers.
Maybe even tougher.
On the 1908 Nimrod expedition Ernest Shackleton sent a party of some of his toughest guys to climb the summit of Mount Erebus. Douglas Mawson was one of those men.
Mount Erebus was the only active volcano in the Antarctic. To an accomplished mountaineer its steep, ice-covered slopes, leading up to a height of 12,448 feet, would have been a significant challenge. But Mawson and his companions were not accomplished mountaineers.
Nor did they have much in the way of equipment – just ice axes and a little mountaineering rope. In place of crampons they poked nails through the strips of leather that they attached to their boots. In place of backpacks they tied their sleeping bags to their backs. They pulled their food on a sledge, ignoring the cold that was so bitter it stuck their socks to their shoes.
Plus, they were in the Antarctic, and if you’ve read this far you’ll know what a punishing place that is.
So you get the picture – hardy, tough men, unwilling to be bowed by a lack of experience, and ready to improvise with what they have. Douglas Mawson was that kind of guy.
While Shackleton made his failed attempt to become the first person to reach the South Pole, Mawson had another objective in mind: to be the first to reach the magnetic South Pole. Along with his companion, Alistair Mackay, he succeeded.
That, in itself, was an incredible achievement on an incredibly dangerous route. The area through which they had to travel was an endless maze of deep and often hidden crevasses. Their team regularly fell into them, but somehow always managed to save themselves – often by throwing out their arms across the narrow spans of those scars in the ice.
They lived off seal meat and penguin, and their lips bled from the cold – Mawson noted that every biscuit he ate became smeared in his own blood.
Frostbite, snow blindness, nausea and fatigue were their constant companions.
But throughout it all Mawson kept his head and, despite the conditions, he made careful notes about his progress. It tells us a lot about him. He was more scientifically minded than his contemporaries Scott and Shackleton. The magnetic South Pole was of more scientific interest than the geographical Pole. It was this that captivated him – not the promise of fame and fortune. He was willing to put his body through month after month of unimaginable hardship – all in the name of science.
And perhaps this is why he turned down the invitation to join Captain Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition, preferring instead to lead a more scientific expedition of his own, known as the Australasian Antarctic expedition.
It would lead to one of the most brutal stories of survival you’ll ever hear.
*
The Australasian Antarctic expedition lasted from 1911 to 1914. It comprised various teams of explorers, spread out over three different permanent bases across the Antarctic. The idea was that the teams would sit out the unbearably harsh, dark Antarctic winters in these bases. Then, when the warmer weather arrived, they could set out to explore and gather the scientific data that was their aim.
On 12 November 1912 Mawson set out from the camp based at Commonwealth Bay to recce an area of the Antarctic called King George V Land. He took with him two companions: Xavier Mertz and Lieutenant Ninnis. They also had a pack of twelve dogs and two sledges, which carried all the supplies they would need for their journey.
At first, things went well. They had covered more than 300 miles over the polar plateau in the five weeks since they had set out. But then, on 14 December, disaster struck.
Lieutenant Ninnis was driving one of the sledges. It carried the lion’s share of the team’s supplies, and was being pulled by their six best dogs. Suddenly, and without any warning, Ninnis, the sledge and the dogs fell into an unseen crevasse.
Mawson and Mertz ran to where their teammate had disappeared. For hours they screamed into the dreadful crack in the ice, trying to locate Ninnis. No scream came back.
Just an ominous silence.
They tried to fix a rope to lower themselves into the crevasse and catch sight of their friend. Without success.
As they peered into the void, all they could see were the smashed-up bodies of two dogs 150 feet below them. And a smattering of their gear, lost for ever.
If Ninnis was still alive – and that seemed unlikely – there was no way they could get to him.
They had no choice but to leave his body there, and try to make it back to base in safety. Minus all of their lost equipment and food.
They took stock of their supplies. Ten days’ rations. No dog food. No tent. No ice axe. Vitally important articles of waterproof clothing had also disappeared into the crevasse with Ninnis.
This loss of gear was bad. Very bad.
The guys improvised a very basic tent out of Mertz’s skis and a sheet of cotton. There was room inside for two one-man sleeping bags. Just.
But it was minimal protection against the elements, especially the Antarctic elements.
Only six dogs now remained. Mawson and Mertz knew that, for the return journey, they would have to slaughter the animals one by one, to provide food for themselves and for the other dogs.
The dog they’d called ‘George’ was the first to go. They shot him with their rifle, cooked his tough, stringy meat and devoured it to give them strength. It was, the men decided, ‘permeated with a unique and unusually disagreeable flavour’.
The other dogs ate it ravenously.
And so they started their retreat. The 300 miles they had to travel back to base must have seemed impossible. It’s thought that they had cyanide tablets in their packs to give them an easy way out if the worst came to the worst.
If they’d known what was to come, they might well have been tempted to take them …
*
Mawson was the first to suffer physical symptoms. Two days after Ninnis’s death he complained of dreadful pain in the eyes. He diagnosed himself with conjunctivitis, but decided to deal with it the same way they dealt with snow blindness: take some tablets of zinc and cocaine and get your buddy to insert them into the tender jelly under your eyelids. Painful, but necessary.
Suddenly starved, the dogs grew instantly weak. Now the men had to pull their own sledges. When a couple of dogs became too feeble to walk, they killed and skinned them. ‘A wretched game,’ Mawson wrote in his journal. It can never be fun eating animals that you love and have depended upon so much.
The dogs that remained grew so thin they slipped out of their harnesses. When the men threw them the carcass of one of their pack-mates they devoured the bones and skin till there was nothing left.
Nine days after Ninnis’s death Mawson and Mertz decided to reduce the weight of the supplies that remained. This meant discarding, among other things, their rifle. From now on, when they killed a dog, it would have to be with a knife, spilling the howling animal’s blood all over the ice. ‘A revolting and depressing operation,’ Mawson further observed.
It then started snowing. Hard. Zero visibility.
Even worse, the wind started howling. Gales of 50 mph meant the men had to cook in their tiny, cramped, improvised tent. This was a big problem. The heat from the stove melted the snow settling on the cotton sheet, which dripped through on to them.
Their clothes became soaked through, and there was no way to dry them. Being cold and constantly wet is a brutal and morale-sapping situation to deal with. You just get drained of all your strength, and sleep is impossible. There was no respite. Worse still, the small amount of heat the stove gave off also melted the ice underneath their sleeping bags, which duly absorbed the water and became heavy and sodden. Then, when they extinguished the stove, all the soaked-up water immediately froze. Sleeping bags of ice.
They carried on by day, painfully slowly. Mawson watched his partner’s physical state get worse.
Mertz couldn’t stomach the dog meat. While Mawson nibbled at nutritious lumps of dog liver, Mertz ate nothing but fragments of dry biscuit. It started to show. Mawson could see the skin peeling off his companion’s legs – a symptom of malnutrition. It left glistening raw flesh below.
Mertz’s fingers became frostbitten. In shock, he bit a chunk off one end of his finger. He felt nothing. His body was dying.
After three weeks, Mertz could barely get out of his icy sleeping bag. He could only manage to eat small amounts of the powdered baby food they had among their scant rations.
Mawson persuaded his friend to sit on one of the sledges while he pulled. It was that or leave him. Mertz reluctantly agreed, and Mawson hauled. But then Mertz’s condition grew worse. He contracted dysentery and would soil his own pants. Mawson was forced to scoop out by hand the foul, watery faeces from his companion’s sodden clothes.
Mawson himself was also deteriorating. The damp conditions in their tent, combined with the relentless marching and malnutrition, meant that his skin also started to peel away, especially between the legs where there was much chafing. Agony. And because he was so undernourished, the skin that grew in its place was, as he put it, ‘a very poor, undernourished substitute’.
His hair and skin would readily peel away and collect at the bottom of his trousers and in his socks. He had to scrape it out in great, stinking clumps.
By 7 January Mertz was continually soiling his pants with his own malodorous, malnourished watery waste.
He was suffering from fits, and shrieking with delirium.
The end was clearly near.
He died at two in the morning on 8 January.
Mawson buried his body in the snow, read out loud from his Book of Common Prayer, and left his friend’s body to the harsh Antarctic elements.
Then he turned his attention to himself.
Ten days’ rations had lasted twenty-six days. He was now desperately weak. His body was giving out on him. And he still had 100 miles to go.
He knew he was probably going to die. But he wrote this note in his journal: ‘I shall do my upmost to the last.’
*
For two days Mawson couldn’t move. The wind was too bad, the snow drifting.
Whenever his skin now broke, it didn’t heal. He had sores and cuts all over his nose and lips. The skin on his scrotum had totally peeled away because of the chafing from trudging in wet clothes.
When he finally got moving, he was forced to stop after only a mile because his feet were in agony. He removed his socks to find that the entire soles of his feet had completely peeled away. The socks themselves had become soaked with blood and a watery discharge.
Mawson didn’t know what to do. Surely he couldn’t walk on suppurating raw flesh. He had to treat his feet somehow. He smeared the raw, bleeding tissue with fatty lanoline – a waxy substance you strip from sheep’s wool – then lay the peeled-off skin back against the soles to protect them. He bound them with bandages, and put his socks back on. And then, gritting his teeth against the dreadful pain on the gruesome sandwiches of skin, blood and fat that his feet had become, he continued to walk.
The next night, Mawson found he had forgotten to wind his watch. He needed to know the exact time to calculate his longitude. Now he couldn’t even do that.
Not only was his body breaking down but now, to heap fire on burning coals, he was also lost.
Still he carried on.
After one gruelling day’s march he boiled up some dog sinews to make an ‘extra supper of jelly soup’. That he found this such a great treat tells us something about his condition. Each day he had to dress his fetid, weeping feet. It was true agony – like torturing yourself, for hours at a time.
Then a few hours later he would have to start moving again.
The Antarctic was throwing everything it had at him – but it hadn’t yet delivered its final sucker punch.
It happened just before noon on 17 January. Mawson was dragging the sledge behind him, using a rope harnessed to his body, when he felt the ice collapse beneath his feet. He had stepped on a thin ice bridge over a crevasse.
The opening was six feet wide – which meant there was nothing to hang on to.
He plunged downwards.
Sometimes, in a survival situation, the only thing that will save you is a little bit of luck. On this occasion Mawson’s luck held.
He fully expected the sledge to follow him down into the crevasse, sending them both into freefall. But it didn’t. It miraculously became lodged in the snow above him.
But Mawson was now hanging there, dangling in the void. Helpless. Above him, 14 feet of rope. Below him, a bottomless expanse of black.
His only way out was to haul his exhausted body up the rope.
Have you ever tried to climb up a thin rope unaided? It’s hard, almost impossible work. But imagine what it’s like in sub-zero temperatures, suffering from acute malnutrition, with the skin peeling away from your body and hands, with barely any strength left in your muscles. Plus, of course, being weighed down by heavy, wet clothing.
Shaking from fear, cold and loneliness, Mawson then embarked on the impossible. And he resolutely refused to die.
Mawson started hauling himself bit by bit up the rope, inching himself up towards the lip of the crevasse.
He was only one foot from the opening when there was a sickening crack. Then the lip of the crevasse broke away.
Mawson fell down back into the blackness once again. Once more he was dangling – at the mercy of the rope and the sledge.
He described this as his lowest moment – and his hardest battle. He considered ending it there. He could just loosen himself from the harness and fall to his death into the void. And end this suffering. Finally.
He found his fingers drifting towards the harness. He was almost looking forward to the peace that death would bring.
He wasn’t just fighting a battle with his body. He was fighting it with his mind too.
But Mawson had more grit than most normal human beings, and he refused to give in to his despair. With a superhuman effort he struggled, again, inch by agonizing inch, up the rope.
This time he made it.
He fell unconscious on the side of the crevasse, spent. Finally he awoke, numb with cold.
‘Never has anyone more miraculously escaped,’ he later wrote.
*
Mawson had cheated death, but death was still on his tail.
His body continued to deteriorate. Festering sores broke out everywhere. Boils erupted across his face. His nails then started to fall out, and so did his hair. His beard now came away in great clumps from his face. The detached skin he had sandwiched on to the soles of his feet had shrivelled up and was rotting. He discarded the useless flaps of flesh, but now had to walk on the raw, oozing pads that were once his feet.
He then contracted scurvy. His joints ached as if on fire. Watery blood dribbled from his nose and wept from the ends of his fingers.
The ice was so bullet-hard and marble-smooth that he was forced to try to improvise some form of makeshift crampons from the meagre supplies he had on the sledge. When these failed, he simply crawled on his bleeding hands and knees, hauling the sledge behind him.
The weather didn’t relent. Gale-force winds. Driving snow. And the dreaded cold. He was stuck in the heart of the blizzard. But still he kept going.
Finally, on 8 February, two months after Ninnis had fallen into the crevasse, he reached the expedition base camp.
The men back at base had long ago given Mawson and his men up for dead. When they saw a figure emerging from the snow, they ran towards him.
Three men had set out the previous November. But now, because of the state of Mawson’s disintegrating body, they had no idea which one of the three was staggering towards them.
*
Mawson then had to stick out another long, dark winter in the Antarctic. He’d arrived back at base only hours after the ship Aurora, which could have taken him back to civilization, had set sail. Killer timing.
He was, however, able to send a message back to his fiancée in Australia. A short message, but one so understated it could only have been written by one of those epic heroes of the age of Antarctic exploration.
There was no complaint or self-pity. No mention of the horrors he’d just been through.
‘Deeply regret delay,’ it read. ‘Only just managed to reach hut.’