Scott and Amundsen had viewed the crevasse-ridden path to the South Pole as a road to fame and fortune. Scott wanted to get there first so that he could dispel the dispiriting talk of the English as a declining race. He also wanted wealth to support his widowed mother, and his new wife and son, and he expected the achievement would lead to his promotion to admiral in the Royal Navy. For his part, Amundsen thought that winning the race to the pole would bring glory to the young nation of Norway, produce much-needed finance for his planned drift across the Arctic and convince his Norwegian lover to leave her husband for him.
For both men, the Antarctic was simply a means by which they could achieve dreams and ambitions located elsewhere. They had no more interest in owning the ice-choked continent than in owning the moon. Douglas Mawson was different. He recognised that much greater wealth might lie concealed in the Antarctic and its surrounding waters than was available via newspaper and book deals. He became the first explorer to make the claiming of Antarctica his primary purpose.
Mawson had been born in Yorkshire in 1882 but had migrated with his family just two years later to Australia. His father was a farmer who had sought prosperity working the land outside Sydney, only to see his ventures fail. He began working as an accountant in inner Sydney, while his wife supplemented their income by taking in boarders. The threat of financial insecurity impressed itself upon the young Mawson and would permeate his life. Although he gained a good public education and became a geology lecturer at Adelaide University, he was forever pursuing fortune-making schemes. His father, too, never lost the gleam in his own eye that had brought him to Australia. He would later unsuccessfully seek his fortune developing a rubber plantation in New Guinea.
As a geologist, Mawson was often trying to find a rich deposit of gold or some other precious metal, or patenting new methods of processing minerals. While on Shackleton’s expedition in 1907–09, he realised that the Antarctic might have rich mineral deposits and he became determined to find them. Additional impetus for his fortune-finding came when he fell in love with the Dutch-born daughter of a wealthy mine manager; Mawson felt impelled to somehow match her father’s financial standing.1
When Shackleton abandoned his plans to lead a second Antarctic expedition, Mawson went ahead with his own. In January 1911, he took his plans to a meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in Sydney, appealing to the curiosity and nationalism of his fellow scientists. Leaning over the lectern, the lanky geologist asked them whether they were ‘content to allow distant countries to poach on their inherited preserves’, thereby suggesting that the Antarctic coastline closest to Australia rightfully belonged to Australia. He went on to ask how Australians could ‘remain heedless of this land of great potentialities lying at our doors’. There was little talk by Mawson about selflessly adding to the store of human knowledge, and more about self-interestedly uncovering a new source of human profit. He also mentioned the nation-building potential if Australia’s young men were able to achieve greatness in the Antarctic. As he later declared, the expedition would bring Australia to the attention of the world and wrap the nation in ‘the prestige [that comes from] being strong enough to investigate and claim new territory’. And Australia had to act before ‘foreign nations … step in and secure this most valuable portion of the Antarctic continent for themselves’.2
The scientists acclaimed his plans, voted £1000 to support the expedition and established a committee to oversee the scientific program and seek further funding. Mawson needed much more money – at least £40,000 – if his expedition was to eventuate. He hoped that wealthy Australians would contribute, which would ensure that it was a private expedition controlled by him rather than a government expedition controlled by learned societies or bureaucrats. A cartoon in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph called on its rich readers to ‘be a sportsman and back this young man against the foreigners’. Several wealthy Australians were quick to do so, including the tobacco manufacturer and newspaper proprietor Hugh Denison, who was also a staunch imperialist.
To elicit more private donations, Mawson promised major donors a share in the ownership of any mineral resources. However, private donors were not coming forward in sufficient numbers, or offering sufficient amounts, to fund the expedition. Mawson realised that he would have to look to governments for the bulk of the budget. He went to Melbourne to meet the Australian defence minister, Senator George Pearce, to press his case for federal government funding.3
Pearce later told reporters that Mawson had noted the ‘great scientific importance of the expedition, but had dwelt more strongly on its commercial side’. Mawson told Pearce that ‘the prospects of mineral discoveries were good, and that there were other commercial possibilities in the way of sealing and fishing enterprises’. The proximity of the Antarctic to Australia and the practicability of its permanent settlement were also emphasised, which raised the dangerous implication of what might happen if an enemy nation ever took possession of the place. Pearce was assured that Australia could forestall such a possibility by taking possession first.
Australia had some cause to be concerned. The increasing naval rivalry between Britain and Germany had evoked widespread fears of a war. Japan was seen as an even greater threat to Australia. It had recently defeated Russia’s European fleet and was set on a policy of territorial expansion. With a Japanese expedition already on its way south, and with Filchner’s German expedition soon to depart for the Antarctic, Mawson played up Australian fears about those two nations as he sought official funding for his own expedition. Pearce promised to put the request to Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.4
Before receiving a formal response, Mawson sailed for England on 26 January to seek further funding in London, to order clothing, sledges and other supplies, and to find a suitable ship. He asked the Royal Geographical Society for £1000, telling a meeting of its members that the long stretch of coastline that he wanted to explore had rarely been seen and only once been landed upon – and that was by d’Urville more than seventy years ago, albeit on an offshore islet. Consequently, declared Mawson, his expedition ‘should have no difficulty in achieving great geographical successes’. He was also acutely conscious of the ‘scientific data … waiting to be collected’ and had ‘ardently sought for an opportunity to reap the harvest’.
He would not only explore the coastline and collect specimens and observations, but was also seeking the ‘authority to raise the Union Jack and take possession of this land for the British Empire’. This authority was everything. Anyone could raise a flag, but Mawson saw clearly that the legal effect of taking possession would be all the greater if it was backed by an official imprimatur. That had to come from Britain rather than Australia, which was still very much a dependent dominion within the British Empire. But the British government refused to give Mawson its blessing. Leaving London on 21 June 1911, he decided to go ahead and act on his own authority, in the hope that it would be endorsed after the event. Shackleton certainly thought this was worth doing. He had been in the audience at the Royal Geographical Society and had opined, after Mawson’s talk, that the Australian’s proposal ‘may not have the glamour of the Pole around it, but it is work that will stand for ever if successfully accomplished’.5
The Royal Geographical Society proved sympathetic, although it only granted Mawson £500. Other appeals for money from private British donors proved mostly fruitless, but with Shackleton’s help he convinced a British press baron to appeal for donations from the readers of the Daily Mail. Money and goods to the value of £12,000 flowed in, allowing Mawson to purchase a ship, another ice-proven Dundee whaling ship, the rather elderly Aurora, and to enlist the experienced polar sailor John King Davis as its captain.
Mawson also decided to take an aircraft with him; he would be the first explorer to do so. This was at the suggestion of Scott’s wife, Kathleen, with whom Mawson stayed for a time. She thought an aircraft would stimulate public interest, and might also be used to raise money in Australia by making demonstration flights.
Despite his wish for a private expedition, much of Mawson’s funding came from governments: £2000 from the British government, £18,500 from four Australian state governments and £5000 from the federal government. The latter donation was a quarter of what he had requested. Like so many explorers, Mawson would leave for the Antarctic deeply in debt to those who had made loans rather than donations, and to those suppliers who had provided goods on credit.6
The aircraft never made it to the Antarctic – at least, not as an aircraft. During a demonstration flight in Adelaide, it crashed to the ground and was wrecked beyond repair. Mawson decided to take it without wings, hoping it might serve as a motorised sledge.7 The patched-up wreck was dubbed by Mawson an ‘air-tractor sledge’, so that its use might still excite public interest.8 Although denied the aircraft that might have allowed him to quickly survey large swathes of land, Mawson still had two other innovations to grab newspaper space from the pole-chasing Scott and Amundsen expeditions, whose fate was then unknown.
One was the use of radio, which would allow instant reports of his activities and achievements to be printed in the world’s newspapers within hours – or, at most, a day or so. There would be a radio at his main base and another at a base he would establish on Macquarie Island, which was necessary to relay the messages across the Southern Ocean to Australia. The Aurora would also have a radio, but only to receive messages rather than to send them; that way, Mawson could retain control of all outgoing communications from the Antarctic. As a member of the Aurora crew later noted, Mawson wanted ‘no information whatever as to what we are doing, where we are, or where we are going, to leek [sic] out before we get back again to civilisation’. While Amundsen had to battle the tempestuous seas of the Southern Ocean for more than a month to get news of his triumph to Hobart, Mawson could theoretically do it in an instant. The second innovation was Mawson’s decision to use the newly invented means of taking colour photographs. The young Australian photographer Frank Hurley was given the job of bringing the Antarctic to life for distant audiences.9
There were no misconceptions about the purpose of Mawson’s expedition. While he prepared to leave for the south, the Adelaide Register observed that Mawson had convinced ‘Parliaments, scientific and learned bodies, and the people generally, to see eye to eye with himself regarded the practicability and desirableness of Australia becoming, in a sense, the suzerain of a vast area of the Antarctic continent’.10
The Aurora sailed right into a gale when it left Hobart on 2 December 1911, its deck crowded with assorted crates and chained-up dogs. Several years’ supply of cheese was packed into a cabin, and two tons of butter was lashed to the roof of the deckhouse. So crowded was the small ship that another vessel was chartered to take most of the men and some of the supplies as far as Macquarie Island, where a meteorological and wireless base was to be established. From there, Mawson headed south for the Antarctic, where he intended to establish three bases, strung out across 3200 kilometres of coastline.
He had hoped that the most easterly one would be at the much-visited Cape Adare, where there was already a hut and an ice-free shoreline, and from where another bid might be made to reach the South Magnetic Pole. However, Mawson had made the mistake of telling Scott of his plans. Scott checkmated the Australian by sending part of his group to occupy Cape Adare.11 A very angry Mawson was forced to sail much further west along the unsurveyed coastline to look for a suitable landing place of his own.
It was during this coastal voyage that Mawson cast doubt on Wilkes’ claims to have discovered the Antarctic continent. Where Wilkes claimed to have sailed over open sea, Mawson encountered the ice barrier that indicated the edge of the continent. Percival Gray, the Aurora’s second officer, looked on as Mawson and the ship’s captain, John King Davis, excitedly compared their position with Wilkes’ charts. It was just as Scott had previously suggested, wrote Gray, and Wilkes was now ‘practically proved to be a liar’. Gray noted in his diary how ‘Mawson and Davis are in fine humours, as this is apparently a very important discovery’.12 If Wilkes could be proved wrong, it would weaken the American claim to the continent Wilkes had named and supposedly discovered, while strengthening Mawson’s hand in claiming the coastline for the British Empire. Strangely, though, Mawson acknowledged Wilkes’ voyage by using the name ‘Wilkes Land’ for much of the coastline that he was intent on claiming. The name had been used by American mapmakers in the wake of Wilkes’ voyage, although British officials were now seeking to have it expunged from their maps. Mawson’s use of the name would be a source of some frustration to them.
Making a claim on the extensive coastline would require Mawson to find a landing place for his base somewhere along the seemingly interminable barrier ice. Wilkes and d’Urville had been unable to do this, but Mawson managed it on 8 January 1912, after five days’ sailing. It was a rocky shore on the headland of a natural harbour that he named ‘Commonwealth Bay’, after the recently federated Commonwealth of Australia, while he named the headland ‘Cape Denison’, after his influential donor Hugh Denison. Although calm on the day of their arrival, the place was often beset by hurricane-force winds coming off the icecap. These would complicate Mawson’s planned activities.
Instead of two further bases, the shortage of coal on the Aurora convinced Mawson to establish just one more. While he busied himself at Cape Denison, eight men – led by the now experienced explorer Frank Wild – were taken 2400 kilometres further west on the Aurora, fruitlessly scanning the coast for another landing place. Eventually, they decided to land on an ice shelf that extended out from the continent into the surrounding pack ice. They named it the Shackleton Shelf. It was hardly an ideal situation, but there was no alternative. Moreover, they had reached the eastern edge of Kaiser Wilhelm Land, where Filchner had been based and which provided the western limit of the territory that Mawson wanted to claim for Britain. With Wild and his companions safely ashore in the west, there were now eighteen men under Mawson’s command at Cape Denison.13
With these two bases, Mawson had covered much of the Antarctic coastline that lay to the south of Australia. It was mostly unsurveyed coastline situated between the British-discovered Cape Adare and the German-discovered Gaussberg. On 25 February 1912, once his huts were built and scientific equipment set up, Mawson assembled the men on the adjoining rocky outcrop and thanked them for their work. Then the Union Jack was hoisted atop the main hut as Mawson ‘took possession of the land in the name of the King and the British Empire’.14
Although Wilkes and d’Urville had sailed along part of this coastline during the 1840s, neither the Americans nor the French had actually landed on the continent itself, and their governments had done nothing subsequently to cement the claims of their explorers. Nevertheless, Mawson acknowledged the work of d’Urville by referring to the coastline on which his base was situated as ‘Adélie Land’. That acknowledgement, like that of ‘Wilkes Land’, would later complicate Australia’s claim to the territory.
By his own intensive exploration of the area’s coastline and immediate interior, Mawson now intended to establish a claim for the British Empire, based upon discovery, which would outweigh any claims that France or the United States might make. Mawson planned a sledge journey from Cape Denison all the way east to Oates Land, where he knew he might meet up with a party from Scott’s expedition at Cape Adare. Others of Mawson’s party would strike out west from Cape Denison, while the parties on the Shackleton Shelf would head both west and east so that as much of the long coastline between Cape Adare and Gaussberg would have been surveyed by British explorers.
Mawson was keeping largely to the coastline because that was where he expected to discover any recoverable mineral deposits, and where any whale or seal fishery might be based. The only inland journey that he wanted to make was to the South Magnetic Pole. He acknowledged that the attempt he had made with Shackleton’s expedition had failed to find the shifting pole’s precise location. He would have no greater luck this time, with the sledge journey to the magnetic pole falling short by eighty kilometres due to shortage of food. Other parties explored the ice shelf and the glacier tongues to the east of Cape Denison, finding deposits of coal but little else. At the furthest reach of each party, and at other notable points, the British and Australian flags were raised and three cheers given for the king. Mawson intended to be the one to go furthest east, taking two companions with three sledges and sixteen dogs. While each of the parties would face various hardships and dangers, it was Mawson who would confront the greatest challenge.
Mawson’s trek involved nearly five weeks of hard slogging across 560 kilometres of twisting coastline, which rose and fell several thousand feet at a time as the group crossed each promontory. Disaster came on 14 December 1912, when Mawson and his two companions, the Swiss skier Xavier Mertz and the former English soldier Belgrave Ninnis, encountered an area of snow-covered crevasses. Although forewarned by Mertz and Mawson, the unsuspecting Ninnis was suddenly swallowed by a large crevasse. Also falling into its depths was the strongest team of dogs, which was pulling a sledge carrying the party’s tent, much of their food and all the dog food. The whole lot fell hundreds of feet down the sheer-walled crevasse. Snow shoes or skies might well have prevented Ninnis from collapsing the snow bridge, which opened a hole that the dogs and sledge had no way of avoiding.
Exploration was now at an end. Mertz’s and Mawson’s very survival was at stake. As Mawson wrote in his diary, they had lost their ‘sleeping bags, a week and a half food, the spare tent without poles, & our private bags & cooker & kerosene’. Their only hope was to head back immediately, relying on the dogs for food to cover the 480 kilometres or so. ‘May God help us,’ Mawson wrote. The dogs posed perhaps the greatest danger of all to both men, who would suffer serious complications from eating their livers, which caused them to ingest excess vitamin A.15
At the time, with food running low, they had been close to turning back anyway. Mawson had intended to mark the occasion by raising the Union Jack at the ‘furthest east’. It was not until they had gone back more than thirty kilometres that Mertz reminded him of the ceremony he had failed to conduct. So it was belatedly done where they were, the day after Ninnis’s death.
Mawson chose a shorter return route that would take them further from the coast and its crevasses and difficult topography. The downside was that there would be no penguins or seals to supplement their diet. By 23 December, after eating an evening meal of dog bone stew, Mawson complained that his hunger was preventing him from sleeping. Two days later, it was dog stew for Christmas dinner; on another day, dog brain for breakfast, from the last of their dogs. Even the paws were utilised, although they took much longer to produce a palatable stew. Still it was not sufficient.16
Three hundred and twenty kilometres of travel, often across soft snow, saw their diet-deprived bodies continue to weaken and suffer from frostbite. The end for Mertz came slowly during the first week of January 1913, which was spent mostly in their tiny tent, interspersed with several bouts of fitful progress that failed to take them more than a few kilometres. Mertz was starving and could not go on. His clothing was continually wet from the soft snow and condensation in the tent, his skin was peeling off in sheets because of the excess vitamin A, and he was suffering from dysentery.
On 6 January, after a trek of just three kilometres, Mertz ‘refused to go further’. They needed to cover about sixteen kilometres each day, Mawson wrote, or ‘we are doomed’. He could have pushed on by himself, but he felt unable to leave Mertz. While life beckoned him forward, the spectre of death held him with its grip. ‘If only I could get on,’ wrote Mawson. ‘But I must stop with Xavier, and he does not appear to be improving – both our chances are going now.’ The following day, Mertz was delirious, raving and thrashing about, forcing Mawson to hold him down. Within hours, he was dead.17
With Mertz gone, there was more food for Mawson. In fact, he would have to battle rumours for the rest of his life that Mertz’s body had provided some of the food that would sustain him for the remainder of his trek. In the absence of any more dogs, he may have been tempted to do so, but there really was no need since the remaining rations no longer had to be shared.18 After waiting out a blizzard and burying Mertz in a mausoleum of ice blocks, Mawson pressed on with a renewed determination to get his story out to the world.
And what a story it was, with the remaining 160 kilometres of the trek adding triumph to the tragedy. Ten days after Mertz’s death, Mawson described in his diary how he was sinking up to his thighs in the soft snow of a steep slope. When he tried to seek a firmer surface, he found himself ‘dangling on end of rope in crevasse’, with only the weight of the sledge above keeping him from falling to his certain death. Despite his ‘whole body … rotting from want of proper nourishment – frost-bitten fingertips festering, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off whole body’, Mawson described how he ‘made a great struggle, half getting out, then slipping back again several times, but at last just did it’. Exhausted, Mawson set up his improvised tent for the night.
The following day, he fell into another crevasse that saw him sink only to his knees. Things became relatively easier thereafter, and he made relatively quick progress with a following wind on the mostly downward slope. Salvation came on 29 January. Having just two pounds of food left, Mawson came across a cairn of food and supplies left by a rescue party earlier that same day in the hope that he would find it. A further store of food, little more than forty kilometres away, ensured that he would survive his epic journey.19
It was not until 8 February that Mawson reached the safety of the hut, only to find that the Aurora had come to evacuate the base and had sailed away with most of the men just a few hours before. Although he was able to radio Captain Davis, stormy seas prevented the ship getting close to shore. With the eight men of the western base facing a dire situation if they were not picked up before the winter set in, Davis took the Aurora off to their rescue. Shortage of coal and the spreading pack ice would prevent the ship’s return to pick up Mawson.
Davis left confident in the knowledge that Mawson would survive until the following summer with the six men and ample stores. It was a terrible situation for Mawson, who had been anxious to tell the world of his accomplishments. Instead, he was stranded at Cape Denison, where he learned from his companions that Amundsen had conquered the South Pole. Mawson could only imagine the public reaction to this momentous news, and he worried about how he was going to make a splash of his own. There was no immediate news of Scott’s fate, just that he had not returned in time to leave with his relief ship and was staying another winter in the Antarctic. This was reassuring for Mawson, for it meant that they would be emerging from the ice at about the same time. Meanwhile, Mawson had one important advantage over Scott: he could use his radio throughout the coming year to bring his name and works to the attention of the world.
One of the first things Mawson did was to notify the king of the ‘large area of newly discovered land’ between Victoria Land and Adélie Land, over which the teams from Cape Denison had sledged during the previous summer, and which Mawson now proposed to call ‘King George V Land’. Later, he affixed the name ‘Queen Mary Land’ to the land around Wild’s base, further west. The name would effectively prevent the name of the adjoining Kaiser Wilhelm Land from being extended eastward into the area that Mawson wanted to be the exclusive preserve of the British Empire.
A three-man party from Wild’s base had trekked westward as far as Drygalski’s Gaussberg, the extinct volcano where the Germans had left two stone cairns to mark their presence. On Christmas Day 1912, Wild’s men had done likewise, leaving a cairn of their own with a record of their 480-kilometre journey. Several hundred kilometres to the east, Wild had taken another party on a trek in the other direction. They had celebrated that same Christmas with plum pudding and shots of spirits at a place Wild named ‘Possession Nunataks’ – a nunatak being an exposed rocky outcrop. The pudding and alcohol, recalled Wild, produced ‘quite a festive feeling’. It was in this after-dinner atmosphere that Wild raised the British and Australian flags on the rocks and ‘formally took possession of the land in the name of the Expedition, for King George V, and the Australian Commonwealth’.20
The building of the cairn would reinforce the sense that Gaussberg was the eastern limit of Kaiser Wilhelm Land, while the acts of flag-raising – and the mapping and naming of Queen Mary Land and King George V Land, joining as they did to Victoria Land and King Edward VII Land – would reinforce the British claim to that part of the Antarctic. Bringing back rocks and other scientific specimens, and later writing up the results for international consumption, was also part of this claiming process, demonstrating that the claimant nation knew the region better than its rivals.
It was not sufficient to photograph or film the wildlife; they had to be captured, killed, eviscerated and stuffed. A sailor on the Aurora described how he assisted the taxidermist to capture penguins. Men would stand still on the ice until the curious creatures milled about their legs, whereupon the men would each grab a penguin by the flippers. They would:
… sit on his back and ride him till he got tired, then one holds while the other gets a pithing needle, shoves his beek [sic] in the snow, then puts the needle in from the back of the skull bone and works the point about in his brain, being careful not to prick his eyes, as if you do, the eyes bulge out and stretch the skin, spoiling it.
Eleven were quickly captured and killed, both for scientific study and for the delight of museum visitors.21
Names on maps, photographs and films of claiming ceremonies, and penguin organs in jars of formaldehyde together aided the construction of a multi-layered title of ownership of the quadrant. But it would remain an inchoate claim until the British or Australian government gave legal authority to Mawson’s private claim, and then buttressed it by performing acts of administration over the territory. It would be even better if the territory was actually occupied, although no one could yet envisage how a permanent settlement could be established in the Antarctic. During the dark winter months at Cape Denison, Mawson had other things on his mind as he slowly recovered from his ordeal and considered how best to reap a reward from his expedition.
The radio communication with Macquarie Island was fitful at best. This was not helped by Mawson’s radio operator gradually going insane. But the radio was working sufficiently in mid-February 1913 for Mawson to learn of Scott’s sad fate. There would be no race back between Mawson and Scott to secure the plaudits of the English-speaking world. Instead, Mawson was faced with having to compete with a tale of tragedy and courage that he could not equal.
While the first radio message just gave Mawson the bare details of Scott’s demise, further messages gradually brought all ‘the tragic details’ to their isolated hut. Anxious not to have his own story buried by Scott’s, and needing to earn funds for his prolonged stay in the south, Mawson immediately sent ‘a fuller account of our own calamity’, which brought ‘many kind messages of sympathy and congratulation’ from around the world.22
As his health slowly improved, Mawson set about planning an account of his expedition. This would not only fulfil his pre-existing publishing contract, but would also help with his pressing need for funds and satisfy his desire to establish the pre-eminence of his scientific expedition over the mere ‘adventures’ of his Norwegian and English rivals. Mawson worked hard to heighten the sense of drama of his expedition. For instance, while his diary has him returning to the hut after the deaths of Ninnis and Mertz and seeing no sign of the lately departed Aurora, his book has him dramatically seeing ‘a speck on the north-west horizon’ that ‘looked like a distant ship; it might well have been the Aurora’.23
Similarly, the account in Mawson’s book of his fall into the crevasse differs in some important respects from the account in his diary and from the initial accounts he provided to newspapers. The diary has him falling to the unspecified length of his rope, and making ‘a great struggle, half getting out, then slipping back again several times’.24 His initial comments to journalists on his return to Adelaide in February 1914, however, made no mention of him falling down a crevasse. Mawson told them that he ‘would rather not say too much’ about his ordeal, other than to report that he:
… was 30 days absolutely alone, and I had a most marvellous escape. In the end I was reduced to the last stages of starvation. I was tramping alone through the deep snow when I noticed something black in front of me. It was a bit of food that had been dropped by the search party sent to ascertain my whereabouts. It was by the luckiest accident that I saw it … I reckon I had on that occasion the closest shave I ever want to experience …
He was similarly reticent to provide details of the sledge journey during a reception laid on for him at Adelaide’s Conservatorium of Music, attended by the governor-general, Lord Denman.25 It was only when Mawson reached Melbourne and attended a dinner in his honour at the Oriental Hotel that he was more forthcoming, telling an audience of well-fed worthies that he had not expected to survive on the meagre rations, ‘and every day it was getting less’. He went on to describe how he once ‘fell down a crevasse; and … by some extraordinary slice of good luck that crevasse was not the end of me; I did not go very far down, and I managed to work my way out’.26 The days of starvation were still central to Mawson’s story, rather than his fall, or falls, down a crevasse.
In the exclusive account that Mawson cabled to the London Daily Mail, the newspaper that had helped him raise much-needed funds in Britain, he described how he felt after the death of Mertz, when his
own condition afforded little hope, but I decided to push on … Several times I fell into crevasses to the length of my sledge pole and was scarcely able to crawl out. My skin and nails came off owing to the intense cold. The discovery of a food cache finally enabled me to reach the hut.27
Mawson had certainly made an epic solo journey – it had lasted thirty-two days – but there was still no dramatic climax that would allow him to maximise the returns from his book and lecture deals. Having now seen the public reaction to Scott’s expedition, and having gauged the press and public reaction in Australia to his own expedition, Mawson went by ship to London in April 1914 to provide his publisher with the manuscript of his book and to embark on a lecture tour. He had already sketched out some chapters of the book while detained during that last winter at Cape Denison, being helped with the writing by the New Zealand medico Archibald McLean. He now paid for McLean to accompany him and his new wife on the voyage to London. It was during these months at sea that McLean helped Mawson devise a more satisfying and triumphant climax to the story of the expedition.28
The resulting book described for the first time how Mawson had fallen down a crevasse, claiming that he fell not to the length of his sledge pole but to the length of his knotted sledge rope, which he said was fourteen feet long. His diary had described how he had climbed to the surface, only to slip back down again ‘several times’. It would be incredible – in his starved and weakened condition, with frostbitten fingers, bleeding gums, skin sloughed from the soles of his feet and his clothes weighed down with snow – to have been able to climb up fourteen feet of rope to the surface, only to slip back ‘several times’. Presumably realising this, Mawson described how he climbed the fourteen feet, only to reach the surface and slip back just once to the end of the rope, before successfully climbing out. Still, the feat defies credulity.29
Mawson later embellished the story by telling a lecture audience in Chicago that it had taken ‘a struggle of four and half hours’ for him to emerge from the crevasse.30 When a modern-day adventurer, Tim Jarvis, tried in 2007 to replicate Mawson’s climb out of a crevasse, he was unable to do so. That was despite having a support crew, being in a better physical condition and experiencing a journey that had not emulated Mawson’s in its harshness.31
Whatever the truth of the events that occurred during Mawson’s monumental journey across the ice and snow, the strength of the story that eventually captured the popular imagination in Britain and Australia buttressed the sense of connection between the people of the British Empire and the Antarctic continent. The Daily Mail thought that ‘nothing in the whole story of Antarctic exploration can be compared with [Mawson’s] solitary journey across an unutterably savage waste’.32 Mawson had a financial interest in creating such a connection, which he hoped would relieve his expedition of about £8000 of unpaid bills. But he also hoped that such a connection would strengthen the territorial claim that the British Empire could make to the part of the Antarctic lying to the south of Australia.
Although the British government had denied him official authority to make such a claim, Mawson had performed perfunctory claiming ceremonies at seven locations. He had also flown the British and Australian flags from his hut, sledges and tents, and had named the territory that his teams had ‘opened up’ after the new British king and queen. It was clear that he had tried to make his expedition look as official as possible. And when he had returned to Adelaide in February 1914, he had called on the Australian government to
make some claim upon the Antarctic regions. Just as Canada had issued an edict that all the lands north of Canada to the Pole belonged to Canada, so Australia might say that all lands south of the Commonwealth belonged to it. It would be a grand thing to have one country stretching from the equator to the Pole.
But Australia was still taking its lead from Britain, and London was refusing to agree to Mawson’s suggestion that the territories he had discovered and claimed should now be formally annexed.33
The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 upset many of Mawson’s plans. The publication of his book was delayed indefinitely, as was his British lecture tour and the showing of the expedition film. A European lecture tour was out of the question. Some of Scott’s men had already done the British lecture circuit in 1913, which Mawson realised would limit the attention that he was likely to receive. His hopes of getting the expedition out of debt and of providing money to fund the publication of its scientific reports were now in tatters.
He tried to recoup something from this mess by going to the United States in early 1915, where his book was being published and where a lecture tour was organised. But neither proved to be as lucrative as he had hoped. Indeed, after an exhausting tour across America and Canada, Mawson spent a month in New York lecturing to small audiences that produced no profit at all.
When the British edition of the book appeared later in 1915, it sold slowly and was eventually remaindered. The returns from the film of the expedition also proved disappointing. Although the various projects helped to pay off the expedition’s remaining debts, there was no fortune to be made.34 Despite these disappointments, Mawson remained optimistic about the possible rewards that might be reaped from the Antarctic in other ways, whether through whaling and sealing or through mining the coal and minerals that had been found there.
To Mawson’s chagrin, Scott’s failure had overshadowed his own success at exploring a far greater expanse of the Antarctic than anyone previously. He had also exceeded by far the achievements of the Japanese and German expeditions.
After leaving Germany in May 1911, Filchner’s hopes of crossing the continent by sledge were dashed when his ship, the Deutschland, was caught in the ice of the Weddell Sea in February 1912. An earlier attempt to establish a base on an iceberg connected to the barrier was thwarted when the ice broke away, taking men and animals and huts out to sea; only with some difficulty were they rescued. When Filchner tried to find a more suitable landing place further along the coast, the Deutschland was caught by the pack ice, forcing him to wait out the winter with little more than oceanographic and meteorological research to occupy the time of his scientists. While his Manchurian ponies and Greenland dogs remained cooped up uselessly on deck, penguins and strips of seal blubber were passed down below to be fed into the ship’s auxiliary boiler to save on coal.
It was not a happy ship. Filchner had a bitter falling-out with the captain, Richard Vahsel, who had been second officer on Drygalski’s ill-fated expedition and who undermined Filchner at every turn. Filchner, who suffered severely from haemorrhoids, later implied that Vahsel had placed faeces in his cabin and had made fun of the time he spent in the toilet. The apparently syphilitic Vahsel did not survive the expedition, dying from his disease just prior to the ship’s release from the ice in October 1912. A bay on the eastern side of the Weddell Sea was named after him.35
It was a disappointed Filchner who left for home by way of Buenos Aires, hoping to raise funds for a second year of exploration. However, his achievements during that first year had not been sufficient to give anyone confidence that a second approach from the Weddell Sea would be any more profitable. Anyway, the feat of Amundsen and the fate of Scott had captured the public imagination in a way that Filchner could not.
As with Drygalski’s expedition, there was little from Filchner’s expedition that the German Empire could flaunt to the world. Having landed only briefly on the Antarctic continent, Filchner had had no opportunity to spread German names across the forbidding landscape, or to claim new territories. Anyway, Filchner seems to have been little interested in such matters. He was more interested in scientific cooperation than territorial competition.
But his supporters had to be satisfied. When he reached Buenos Aires, he announced that he had ‘discovered a new country’, which he named ‘Prinzregent Luitpold Land’, while the ice barrier was named in honour of the German emperor, Wilhelm II. Several minor geographic features were also given German names. The Germans had twice made the mistake of allowing themselves to be pushed by the English away from areas that had relatively easy access, only to find themselves frozen in the pack ice far from land. After such discouraging results, there was little appetite in Germany for any further expeditions to the far south. Filchner would never go back, opting instead to concentrate on further work in Tibet, where he had first made his name as an explorer.36
The Japanese expedition of Lieutenant Nobu Shirase had begun well but ended up similarly dogged by ill luck. Like Amundsen, Shirase had focused on the Arctic until Peary’s claim of having reached the North Pole ended his northern ambitions. Turning his sights south, Shirase planned to strike out for the South Pole, pitching himself against Scott and any other European or American explorers who might join the race. It was a time when Japan was emerging from centuries of self-imposed isolation and wanted to emulate the empires of Europe. Its navy had recently defeated the best ships of the Russian Empire, its army had routed the Russians in Manchuria, and the ancient kingdom of Korea had become a Japanese colony. The pursuit of prestige for the burgeoning Japanese Empire was foremost among Shirase’s aims when he petitioned the parliament for funds for an expedition to ‘expand the nation’s territories and become a rich and powerful nation’. Although the parliament approved the funds, the government refused to ratify its decision and release the grant.
Undeterred, Shirase turned to a former prime minister, the one-legged Count Shigenobu Okuma, to act as patron of the expedition. It was an inspired move by the forty-eight-year-old explorer, who soon had an influential committee of supporters and backing from the Asahi newspaper group, which organised a successful campaign of public subscriptions. After some practice in the Arctic, and with a motley assemblage of scientists and two native Ainu men from Hokkaido, Shirase and his companions were farewelled from Yokohama by a crowd of 50,000 at the end of November 1910.
When he went aboard the expedition’s smelly, three-masted fishing boat, the Kainan-maru – or ‘Southern Pioneer’ – Shirase carried a copper casket containing the names of all those who had contributed money; it was to be buried when Shirase reached the South Pole. The expedition had already met with some ridicule in Japan, and the news of Shirase’s departure did not cause much apprehension among his rivals. One report from Tokyo predicted that his poorly prepared expedition was ‘foredoomed to failure’.37
The expedition was already in trouble when it arrived in Wellington on 8 February 1911. Fourteen of its twenty-six dogs had died from disease, which left insufficient dogs for the planned march to the South Pole. Worse was to come. The Kainan-maru did not reach the Ross Sea until 10 March. By then, Scott and Amundsen were already ashore, establishing their camps and laying down supply depots for their attempts on the pole the following summer. At least Shirase had beaten the Germans and the Australians; Filchner was still preparing to leave Germany, while Mawson was in London raising funds. However, his late arrival left him poorly placed to compete with Scott and Amundsen.
Shirase’s position only got worse, as the spreading winter ice blocked access to the southern reaches of the Ross Sea and his dogs continued to die. Conceding defeat, he turned his ship about and sailed across the stormy Southern Ocean to Sydney. After passing through the heads of Sydney Harbour on 1 May, the Japanese initially received a chilly reception from customs officers, who were charged with enforcing the racially exclusive provisions of the ‘white Australia policy’. Ever since the Japanese defeat of Russia, there had been widespread fears in Australia of a Japanese invasion. Some thought that Shirase might be more intent on exploring Sydney’s defences than the distant Antarctic. The Cairns Post noted that the ‘most careful provision was made to prevent [the Japanese] learning anything about the forts at Sydney Heads, should childish curiosity lead them that way’. But the suspicions gradually abated and the Japanese were permitted to establish themselves in bushland on the shore of the harbour.38
The Japanese took advantage of their stay in Sydney to consult with the Antarctic explorer and geology professor Edgeworth David. Shirase and his companions later attended a public meeting to raise money for the Mawson expedition as the professor’s honoured guests. With their own money fast depleting, the Kainanmaru’s captain went to Tokyo to raise funds and seek further instructions. Count Okuma and the committee decided that they could not ‘permit failure to sully the honour of Japanese men’, so more funds were raised, dogs purchased and extra men sent to join the expedition. Okuma cabled Shirase: ‘Go forth. Set sail anew. Though you perish in the attempt, do not return until you have achieved your aims.’
The captain returned to the Antarctic in mid-November with another scientist, Masakichi Ikeda, a cinematographer and a pack of twenty-nine dogs. Whatever else he managed to achieve, Shirase could be confident that the cinematographer would show Japanese audiences, and perhaps the wider world, the stirring sight of the Rising Sun Flag fluttering above the ice. It would not be fluttering at the South Pole; there was little hope of that now. Although Australian newspaper reports claimed that Shirase and his men had taken an oath to reach the South Pole or take their own lives, Shirase told a curious reporter in Sydney that he had no intention of ‘making for the South Pole.’ He claimed that the expedition was purely scientific. As Ikeda explained, by the time they reached the Antarctic, the glory of conquering the pole would likely have been taken by Amundsen or Scott and there ‘would be no use’ in the Japanese ‘going further south than the near Antarctic regions’. In the event, that was precisely what they did.39
The Kainan-maru raised anchor on 18 November 1911, with boatloads of well-wishers gathered to wave them farewell. Professor David was on board with Shirase as the ship sailed down the harbour. Before he left in a launch, he was given a Samurai sword in appreciation for his ‘many kindnesses and courtesies’. Meanwhile, Scott and Amundsen were heading on their separate tracks towards the pole, and Mawson was preparing to leave Hobart on the Aurora.
Shirase’s timely departure ensured that, this time, his ship was less troubled by ice when it reached the Ross Sea. He was able to land the base party on the Ross Ice Barrier in January 1912, next to Amundsen’s base at the Bay of Whales. By then, Amundsen was returning from his successful trek to the pole. Shirase had the Kainan-maru sail further east to explore King Edward VII Land, while the base party remained at the Bay of Whales taking meteorological observations. Shirase himself, along with four companions, including the two Ainu dog drivers, took the dog sledges on a dash southwards to establish a Japanese base ‘furthest south’.40
Not having laid down any food depots, Shirase’s so-called ‘Dash Patrol’ could only go as far as the food on his lightweight sledges allowed. On 28 January 1912, after eight days, he finally called a halt. He had traversed about 275 kilometres and reached 80° 5’ S. Although only about a quarter of the way to the pole, and still not off the Ross Ice Barrier, it was one of the fastest recorded sledge journeys by an Antarctic expedition, which was mostly due to the experience of the Ainu dog-drivers.
Although Shirase would later tell reporters that they had ‘confined [their] attention to scientific exploration’, they were much more interested than Filchner in territorial acquisition. When they reached their ‘furthest south’, Shirase buried his copper casket and ‘raised a bamboo pole from the top of which the national Sun flag was flown, revolved by a red-painted triangular weather vane of tin. The men then paraded before the Sun flag and raised a threefold Banzai for the Emperor.’ Photographs were taken and ownership of the surrounding region was claimed for Japan, under the name ‘Yamato Setsugen’. This combined a poetical name for Japan with the word for ‘snowplain’, even though the area was a floating ice shelf, over which a troupe of other explorers had already tramped. According to the expedition report, ‘for as long as the Earth may last’ the Yamato Setsugen was now ‘the territory of Japan’. Although the continent was presently uninhabited, the report envisaged a time when ‘the smoke of home fires will surely rise into the air, and there will be a whole town built here with carriages plying to and fro’.41
The two-man Japanese party that had landed on the coast of King Edward VII Land also made an implicit claim on that place, by heading sixteen kilometres inland towards the Alexandra Range and erecting ‘a memorial board recording the visit’, not realising that men from Amundsen’s expedition had done likewise just six weeks previously. The Japanese had Scott in mind. They were conscious that the English explorer had seen and named King Edward VII Land although he had not been able to land upon it. Ignorant of the Norwegian party’s presence in King Edward VII Land, the Japanese believed that they were the first to ‘explore an area in which no man had been able to land since the very dawn of time’.
Returning to the Bay of Whales, the Kainan-maru retrieved Shirase and the base party, leaving behind their tent as a memorial of their stay. They also had to abandon twenty dogs when bad weather forced the ship to make a hasty departure. Although they had not achieved their original aim of being first to reach the South Pole, Shirase and his companions could return to Japan content that they had successfully completed Japan’s first exploratory expedition; they had ‘created an opportunity for Japan to take its place as a nation on the stage of world affairs’.
As a public mark of their success, Shirase and several of his companions were invited to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, where they showed the expedition’s fifteen-minute film to the Imperial Family. Afterwards, it was exhibited to the public at a sumo wrestling arena. The emperor made a belated, token contribution to the expedition’s funds, but still Shirase had to spend the next five years lecturing to pay off the expedition’s debts. He even had to sell his house to pay the crew’s wages.42 The British Foreign Office would later concede that the symbolic actions and activities of the Shirase expedition had laid the basis for a ‘possible Japanese claim to territory’. Not that the Foreign Office thought it would have any trouble rebutting such a claim.43
The Japanese realised that it was not sufficient only to have their feat recognised in Japan; the prestige of their empire and the preservation of their territorial claim required that it be acknowledged by other nations. After his return to Japan, Ikeda wrote to the Royal Geographical Society on 18 August 1912 with details of an inlet in the ice barrier and two peaks in the Alexander Mountains, none of which had been named by Scott. Accordingly, Ikeda had given them Japanese names. He asked the society to use the names on any future maps so they would be ‘universal’. Two days later, Ikeda had second thoughts and dashed off a postcard asking the society to await a fuller report before publicising the expedition’s achievements. A month later he wrote again, confirming that the ‘opinions[sic] of our scientific party is now settled’ and the three names should be used, along with the name ‘Waseda Sea’ for the waters beyond 160° W.
Even those modest requests were too much for the elderly Markham, who urged that the society do no more than publish ‘a short paragraph saying that the Japs report they have sighted King Edward VII land and reached 150°W in Captain Scott’s track’. He was concerned that the Japanese were detracting from Scott’s expedition and undermining British pre-eminence in the Antarctic. ‘These cursed gad flies,’ wrote Markham, ‘are lowering the whole plane of polar exploration into a scramble for self advertising, and plastering names about where they are not wanted.’ He warned the society against giving them any encouragement, which he said would be ‘most unwise and improper’.
As a result of Markham’s intervention, the Japanese names never appeared on any British maps and the expedition received no more than the briefest mention in the society’s journal. When Ikeda later sent a manuscript for publication in England, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society helped to ensure that London publishers rejected it. Although the expedition’s official report was published in Japanese in 1913, it would be a century before it was translated and published in English. Shirase’s personal account still awaits an English publication.44
While these rival expeditions competed to be first to reach the South Pole, or to lay claim to other parts of the Antarctic, most Americans remained aloof, ignoring Frederick Cook’s repeated calls in the early 1900s for the United States to stake its own claim on the continent. Ironically, it was Scott who inspired calls for an official American expedition, when he reported in 1902 that he had sailed over areas that the American Wilkes expedition had reported as land. This provocative claim caused some influential Americans to demand that the US Navy rebut Scott’s insult to their reputation by sending a ship to retrace Wilkes’ voyage.
Prominent among these was the sometime lawyer, keen mountain climber and amateur painter Edwin Swift Balch. His call in 1903 for the United States to re-explore the coast of Wilkes Land received support from both Wilkes’ daughter and the Arctic explorer Robert Peary. The American Geographical Society joined the campaign in 1906, only to be told by the navy that no suitable vessel was available. The American Philosophical Society tried to broaden the campaign in April 1909 by calling on all scientific and geographical societies to pressure the government into sending a vessel ‘to thoroughly explore and survey the coast of Wilkes Land, and other parts of Antarctica’. That same month, the society published a paper by Balch, who had researched the early history of American sealers in the Antarctic. He concluded that ‘America’s record in the Antarctic’ was ‘the most brilliant of any nation’. Despite that record, Balch complained, Americans were now allowing other nations to dominate Antarctic exploration and reap the resulting glory, with Markham and Scott ‘eager to wipe out all American discoveries from the map’.45
It was apparently due to pressure from Balch that Peary announced in 1908 that he would ‘promote and organize a National American Antarctic Expedition, to secure for this country its share of the honors and valuable scientific information still awaiting the explorer in that region’.46 As the campaign for the United States to re-explore Wilkes Land gathered support, council members of the American Geographical Society agreed to contribute $10 each to assemble and release some of the unpublished scientific results of the Wilkes expedition.47 It was a way of bringing the largely forgotten Wilkes back into the public spotlight. But the society met with a negative reaction when it told the secretary of the navy that it was ‘incumbent on the Navy to do something to sustain the reputation of its officer’.48 There were still ‘no suitable vessels and no officers experienced in ice work’; besides, the possibility of Peary leading a private expedition to the Antarctic effectively meant that the navy did not have to take any action of its own.49
Despite all the activity of Scott’s second expedition and Mawson’s opening up of a massive new area, there was still no push by the US government to counter the territorial claims that the British Empire was starting to make across the Antarctic. Even if the United States did not send an expedition of its own, Balch was anxious that the American Geographical Society should at least defend American names on Antarctic maps against the push by the English to remove them and thereby ‘obliterate … all American discoveries.’ In an article for the society’s Bulletin, Balch argued that the naming of geographic features should reflect ‘loyalty to humanity and to science, and not spring from servile obedience to national prejudices and national greed’. In Balch’s view, precedence in naming should be given to the actual discoverers, which meant that the names scattered by Wilkes on the Antarctic coastline ‘must stand for all time’, while Markham’s English names for the Antarctic quadrants – Weddell, Ross, Victoria and Enderby – should be replaced by his own politically neutral suggestion: East and West Antarctica.50
Americans could take some comfort from a legal argument by Balch’s young brother, the jurist Thomas Willing Balch, who poured scorn on Britain’s use of letters patent in 1908 to create the so-called ‘Falkland Islands Dependencies’, which encompassed the South Shetland, South Orkney and South Sandwich Islands and Graham Land. Buttressing the calls by his older brother, Balch argued that such a move could not be made legally valid by Britain ‘simply saying that they are hers’. Neither could the activities of Shackleton’s private expedition give rise to a territorial claim in the absence of territorial occupation. A claim could only be sustained, wrote Balch, if someone authorised by the British government took ‘formal possession … and something were promptly done to follow it up by making as much use of the place as circumstances would permit’.51 This legal argument would come to underlie the official American attitude to other nations’ Antarctic claims: that they could be ignored unless they were followed by effective occupation.
The general American disinterest in the Antarctic did not prevent proposals being made for American expeditions. Although Peary had abandoned the idea of organising his own expedition, two of his companions on the North Pole voyage – the wealthy big-game hunter Harry Whitney and the captain of Peary’s ship, Robert Bartlett – proposed a voyage to the Weddell Sea. However, this also failed to eventuate.52 Scott and Amundsen seemed to have sewn up the South Pole, the feat that would most capture public interest, which made it more difficult to raise funds for other Antarctic ventures. Moreover, Mawson had explored much of the so-called ‘Wilkes Land’, casting doubt on the reported discoveries of Wilkes but also leaving little for a new American expedition to explore.
While no American expeditions were forthcoming, Shackleton began preparing in early 1913 to mount yet another British expedition. It had to be a feat that would capture public attention and provide him with his long-sought fortune. The only such feat that was left, Shackleton confided to his wife, was a crossing of the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea. Filchner and Scott had failed to make the crossing, and Shackleton resolved that he would achieve it.53
Scott had met with opposition from scientists and geographers over his dash to the pole. Some hoped that such stunts had now come to an end. In his 1912 survey of Antarctic exploration, the Scottish geographer Hugh Robert Mill welcomed the reaching of the South Pole, expecting that it would mean that there was ‘no further occasion for sensational “dashes” and acrimonious discussions between rival claimants’. In place of these adventurers, wrote Mill, would go ‘explorers of a more scientific … disposition’.54
The sort of explorer Mill had in mind was his Scottish colleague William Bruce, who had written his own survey of polar exploration in 1911. He too had dismissed those who pursued the ‘boyish Pole hunt’ as explorers who were not serious, although he conceded that a crossing of the continent could provide important scientific results. While scientific objectives were now a requirement for government funding, Bruce could only bemoan the fact that the public still wanted ‘pure sensationalism’ rather than science.55
Shackleton had a keen appreciation of what the public wanted and was eager to provide it. Having secured a promise of £10,000 from the British government, Shackleton went public with his plans in late December 1913, announcing that the ‘Imperial Transantarctic Expedition’ would cross the continent, ‘carrying out, for the British Flag, the greatest Polar journey ever attempted’. After Amundsen’s defeat of Scott, he hoped, this would re-establish Britain as the pre-eminent Antarctic power – and Shackleton as the pre-eminent polar explorer. 56
In his fundraising appeal, Shackleton held out the prospect of making both geographic and scientific discoveries, thereby carefully combining the English public’s demand for spectacle with a more serious-minded scientific purpose that would satisfy those who demanded a practical return for their contributions. But crossing the continent was foremost in his scheme. As he told the Royal Geographical Society, he had ‘put the crossing of the continent as the great object of this expedition, and there is not one individual … who does not wish the British flag to be the first national flag ever carried across the frozen waste’. They were going not as disinterested scientists but as ‘agents of the British nation’.57
Shackleton reminded potential donors that the flying of the flag would cement the British claim to the large swathe of Antarctic territory that had been brought within the empire by the creation of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, which included the western coastline of the Weddell Sea. With Filchner’s German expedition having failed to get ashore there, Shackleton conjured up the prospect of his own Weddell Sea party opening up ‘vast stretches of unknown land’, with the ‘whole of the area southward to the Pole [being] British territory’.58
With a dreadful European war just months away, flag-waving patriotism was rampant, and there was nothing better than beating the drum of empire to get governments and private donors onside. Just as British battleships had become bigger than ever, so Shackle-ton’s venture would be on a grandiose scale. There would be two ships: the newly constructed Endurance, built by the Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen for tourist trips to the Arctic that had never eventuated, and Mawson’s old ship, the Aurora.
Shackleton planned to have the Endurance put fourteen members of the expedition ashore at Vahsel Bay in the Weddell Sea, where Filchner had been thwarted. Shackleton planned to set out from here with five companions on the 2400-kilometre transcontinental sledge journey, while the other eight set out in different directions to explore the immediate region.59 On the other side of the continent, the Aurora would land six men on the shores of the Ross Sea, who would lay down food depots along the final part of Shackleton’s planned route. Shackleton envisaged his own triumphant return to England in April 1915, with the majority of the expedition returning a year later.60
England was sufficiently excited by the vision to provide him with the wherewithal to set off. On 5 August 1914 the King presented him with the traditional Union Jack to be raised over any new territory he might cross. But some had serious doubts about the wisdom of the immensely ambitious enterprise. One astute observer claimed that ‘nine Polar men out of every ten look upon it as the most costly, useless (from a scientific point of view) and trust-to-Providence journey yet undertaken’. The elderly Markham dismissed the expedition out of hand, privately suggesting that it was ‘designed solely for self-advertisement’.61
The mad adventure almost never began, after war with Germany broke out on the same day that the king presented Shackleton with the British flag. On hearing the news, Shackleton offered to turn the ships and their crews over to the Admiralty but was ordered by the up-and-coming First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who had earlier described the expedition as ‘a sterile quest’, to proceed regardless. There was no place for Shackleton in his navy.62
It turned out that there was no place for Shackleton in the Antarctic either. Having sailed off for what he called his ‘white warfare’, he found that the unpredictable ice conditions of the Weddell Sea had ruined his plans, just as they had for Filchner and others.63 Although Shackleton had been informed when he reached the whaling port of Grytviken, on the northern coast of South Georgia, that the ice in the Weddell Sea was particularly bad that year, he had pressed on regardless. Pushing the ship through hundreds of kilometres of pack ice, he finally came within sight of Vahsel Bay in late January 1915, only to have the ice tighten its grip around the ship and force it on a slow drift northwards. Each day took them further away from their intended destination.
By October 1915, the pressure on the hull of the Endurance was so great that the ship was pushed over at an angle, its timbers cracked and leaks developed. Shackleton and his men abandoned the ship to live in tents on the northward-floating ice, and then, after the ship sank and the ice began to break up in April 1916, took to three small boats to sail to desolate and isolated Elephant Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Leaving most of his men huddled beneath two of the upturned boats on the island’s rocky shore, Shackleton and five companions went on a desperate 1300-kilometre voyage to get help from the whalers of South Georgia. They landed on the southern shore of the island and made their way across the snow-covered mountains that lay between them and the whaling ports on the northern coast. Help for the men on Elephant Island had to wait until the winter ice receded; they finally were rescued on 30 August 1916.
The men of the Ross Sea party, who knew nothing of Shackleton’s plight, had faced great hardships of their own. After laying down food depots for Shackleton, one man died from scurvy and two others died in a blizzard while trying to cross thin sea ice. Shackleton finally managed to organise a relief expedition for the survivors.
Shackleton’s epic journey and the saving of his men, while doing much to rescue his reputation, could not save the expedition. He had not carried the Union Jack across the continent, and his plan to buttress the British claim to the unknown lands of the Falkland Islands Dependencies had gone unfulfilled. Nevertheless, his voyage to South Georgia and the weeks he spent with the whalers had confirmed for Shackleton that Britain was sitting on a virtual goldmine. Whales abounded in Antarctic waters and there were great profits to be made. Shackleton calculated that a whaling company could count on a return of ten to twenty per cent a year.64
The war made these profits even greater, as the world’s increasing hunger for fats went unsatisfied. The development of hydrogenated whale oil allowed it to be used to make margarine that did not have a tainted taste. More importantly, the glycerine from whale oil was used in the manufacture of explosives. This gave the Antarctic a new economic and strategic significance that the British government could not ignore. By the end of the war, Britain was determined to bring the entire continent within its burgeoning empire.