Douglas Mawson's tragic Antarctic trek

http://www.theguardian.com/science/antarctica-live/2013/dec/04/douglas-mawson-antarctic-trek

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Death and tragedy are familiar experiences for explorers. Despite Douglas Mawson's copious innovations and achievements in leading the original Australasian Antarctic Expedition in 1911, he is mostly remembered because of one of the most terrible tales in the history of Antarctic exploration. In November 1912, Mawson set out to explore what would later become known as King George V Land with two companions, three sledges and a team of dogs. He came back, three months later, alone and a physical wreck.

By late 1912, as summer returned to the Antarctic, Mawson had split his explorers into several sledging teams with the aim of mapping as much of the unknown continent's surface as he could from his bases at Commonwealth Bay. Mawson's team trekked into the Antarctic interior in an attempt to link up his mapping with the edges of areas explored by Robert Scott.

Over several weeks in December 1912, Mawson and his companions – a British officer called Bellgrave Ninnis and a Swiss ski champion called Xavier Mertz – had worked their way to a distance of 500km from base camp. On 14 December, they were crossing a heavily crevassed field in single file: Mertz at the front, Mawson in the middle and Ninnis at the back. Ninnis was with the sledge that had the strongest dogs and most of the team's provisions.

In his book The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson wrote that he noticed Mertz making a sign up ahead that something unusual had happened. He directed Mawson's gaze to the back of their group, where Ninnis should have been but where, instead, there was nothing. Ninnis and his sledge had fallen into a crevasse. They could see the end of the sledge sticking out of the ground, they heard a dog whining but they couldn't see or hear Ninnis.

They took turns leaning over the crevasse and calling their friend. "For three hours we called unceasingly but no answering sound came back," wrote Mawson. "The dog had ceased to moan and lay without a movement. A chill draught was blowing out of the abyss. We felt that there was little hope."

Ninnis probably fell into the crevasse, while the others had sledged safely over it, because he had a habit of walking alongside his sledge instead of sitting on it, Mawson would later reason. "The whole weight of a man's body bearing on his foot is a formidable load and no doubt was sufficient to smash the arch of the roof."

With Ninnis and his sledge gone, the remaining two realised they only had a week and a half's worth of food left. More than 500km from base, they decided to turn back. In any case, they needed to get back to Commonwealth Bay by mid January 1913, to join the Aurora and sail back to Australia.

It wasn't long before they ran out of food, and had to resort to eating their dogs. "George, the poorest of the dogs, was killed and partly fed to the others, partly kept for ourselves," wrote Mawson. "The meat was roughly fried on the lid of the aluminium cooker, an operation which resulted in little more than scorching the surface. On the whole it was voted good though it had a strong, musty taste and was so stringy that it could not be properly chewed."

Their mugs and eating utensils had been lost with Ninnis's sledge, so Mawson and Mertz used the small tins into which they had packed their supplies and carved makeshift spoons from bits of broken sledge.

What they could not have realised was that they had been slowly poisoning themselves – dogs' livers contain toxic levels of vitamin A. Mawson and Mertz suffered extreme exhaustion and their hair started falling out. By 7 January, Mertz was too ill to eat or drink without help. He suffered violent seizures and bouts of insanity. Soon after, he fell into a fever and died in his sleep.

Mawson continued alone. A hundred miles from Commonwealth Bay, he fell down a crevasse. Fortunately he was tied to a sledge, which became pinned to the wall as he slid several metres down through the ice. After several attempts he managed to crawl out, and ate some chocolate to build up some strength. He made a rope ladder and tied himself to it in case he fell down another crevasse. Which he did, several times.

The extreme cold literally tore strips off Mawson's body. One day he felt his feet getting particularly lumpy and sore and, after a mile of trudging through the snow, he took off his boots. "The sight of my feet gave me quite a shock, for the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer, and abundant watery fluid had escaped into the socks. The new skin underneath was very much abraded and raw."

He did what he thought best in the circumstances – smeared the raw skin with lanoline and re-attached his soles to his feet. Outside the bandages, he wore six pairs of woollen socks, fur boots and a leather over-shoe. For a moment after these repairs, Mawson felt calm. "I removed most of my clothing and bathed in the glorious heat of the sun. A tingling sensation seemed to spread throughout my whole body, and I felt stronger and better."

By the start of February, Mawson had reached an ice cave his team had named "Aladdin's Cave", just 5km from Commonwealth Bay. Inside were pineapples and oranges, signs that his team had been there recently and that the Aurora had returned to Antarctica with supplies. Mawson was overjoyed at the sight of the fruit – partly because it was something that wasn't white.

The joy was short-lived, however, as a blizzard set in and stopped Mawson moving on to his base camp. He was stuck at the cave for five days.

When the winds had abated, he made his way towards the base. As he got to the shore, he saw a whisp of smoke on the horizon, far out to sea. "Even as I gazed about seeking for a clue, a speck on the north-west horizon caught my eye and my hopes went down," he wrote. "It looked like a distant ship; it might well have been the Aurora."

Mawson had arrived too late for the boat that could have taken him home. As a result, he had to stay in Antarctica, along with five colleagues, for an extra year. He wrote about the moment he saw the smoke from the Aurora as it sailed away, at the end of a month of solitary trekking across the frozen continent: "Well, what matter! The long journey was at an end – a terrible chapter of my life was finished!"

Antarctica Live

On Sunday, scientists will begin a month-long expedition to re-trace Mawson's journey and examine how the eastern Antarctic, one of the most pristine, remote and untouched parts of the world's surface, has fared in the 100 years since Mawson's expedition. It will collect climatic, oceanographic and biological data to compare with the data from the original pioneering expedition.

Guardian video producer Laurence Topham and I will join the expedition next week and file regular dispatches from the Southern Ocean and from the ice. You can keep up with the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013, as it happens, on the Guardian's Antarctica Live blog. In the spirit of Mawson's original expedition, in which he was the first to send wireless messages from Antarctica, our website will publish daily updates from every stage of the expedition, sent direct from the field.

Our coverage will include articles, tweets, pictures and videos and we will feature the dozens of scientists as they make their climate and wildlife measurements from the ship, on the islands of the Southern Ocean and, of course, Antarctica itself. We will also follow life (and Christmas) aboard a working research vessel.

Throughout the expedition, which runs until 4 January we will also give Guardian readers opportunities to talk live to people on board the ship as we sail through some of the roughest seas in the world, visit the windiest place on Earth and try (icebergs permitting) to reach Mawson's huts, the heroic explorer's base camp 100 years ago as he drew the first maps of this part of the world.

Website: theguardian.com/science/antarctica-live

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