Excerpt
The tents were a thousand miles apart. Between them was an awesome waste of ice-clad mountain ranges, huge gla-cial valleys, wide upland snow plains swept by polar wind;
yet—separated as they were—they were tightly linked in the saga of the Antarctic.
Three men lay in each tent. Both tents were cut from green canvas, but the one in the southeast, pitched on the vast float-ing wasteland of the Ross Ice Shelf, could not be seen. It was completely covered by the compacted snow of a long winter. It was quiet and still inside that tent. Not so in the shelter on a high ice plateau in the northwest. There, three men stretched out in reindeer-skin sleeping bags and listened to the howl of a ferocious blizzard, which slapped and banged the canvas cover against the bamboo poles. It was so noisy they could communi-cate only by shouting—but by now there was little left to say.
For two days they had huddled down trying to keep warm, trapped on the exposed plain while the winds from the polar plateau rushed unimpeded across the bottom of the world and filled the air with racing drift and stinging ice crystals. In that dense gloom, they had neither night nor day, and the hours were a long painful crawl. The winds were so strong that they
could not ignite their kerosene-fed primus stove, and, unable to melt snow for drinking water or to heat food, they waited in their bags and endured thirst and eased hunger by nibbling hardtack and small sticks ofplain chocolate, listening always for some sign of a lessening in the gale.
Each one of these three men might easily have been in the other tent. Most certainly the leader of this trio and leader of the whole expedition, Dr. Douglas Mawson, would have been had he not resisted strong pressure to abandon his own plans. But for his two companions, he knew, it was a second choice. Both of them had originally sought to join the other party and—missing selection narrowly—had been warmly recommended to Mawson. He had found them first-class men, ideally suited to their allotted tasks, and so had been glad to appoint them.
Mawson was already an Antarctic veteran at the age ofthirty, tall and powerful, a commanding leader and experienced geol-ogist. He was encamped with two men from different countries and with different backgrounds. Lieutenant Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis of the British Royal Fusiliers, scion of an old Cor-nish tin-mining family, son of a London doctor, was unassum-ing, patient and loyal, and “good with animals.” Dr. Xavier Guillaume Mertz, a German-speaking law graduate from the Swiss city of Basel, was at twenty-eight years of age a ski cham-pion and fine mountaineer.
Ninnis and Mertz had become firm friends since they joined this expedition in London as joint handlers of the thirty Green-land husky dogs and crossed the world together on a long, slow voyage, tending and nursing the animals on the open deck. Now the dogs were snuggled down in the snow with only their muz-zles showing. Both dogs and men waited for the wind to die and the air to clear so that they could set their faces eastward and move into the unknown wilderness. All three men were strong, determined, conditioned by hard work in the long dark months ofwinter, impatient to open their journey of discovery.
Into the afternoon of that second day the gale blasted from the hinterland, and the rivers of snow filled their world with white, frenzied chaos while they lay waiting under the rocking tent, cold, thirsty, hungry.
Over the tent in the southeast, the afternoon was clear, calm, and still, and a low sun bounced its vicious glare across the 250,000 square miles of the white wastes ofthe Ross Ice Shelf. It was a day to be engraved in polar history, a day of sad discovery. Ten men, with two ponies and two dog teams, had plodded into the glare since early that morning; for almost twelve hours they had trudged southward.
The searching ended when they found the cone of snow and beneath it the tent that had gone to the South Pole. Now it was a frozen sarcophagus. Under the snow’s weight, the tent walls sagged over the bodies of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr. E. A. Wilson, and Lieutenant Henry Bowers. Diaries with the bodies told the now classic tale of the crushing blow of finding Amundsen had reached the pole weeks before them, of the struggle back in which two of the party of five had perished. Now here were the three of them dead only eleven miles from food and fuel at One Ton Depot.
The bamboo poles of the tent were pulled away; the green canvas became a shroud, and a cairn of snow was built over them. There was a short burial service, and the dead were left to become integral with the ice. The historian of the Scott expe-dition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, described it as a tomb that kings might envy—and a fitting mausoleum for the last of the great geographical explorers. (Author’s italics.)
He could not know that another giant of Antarctic explo-ration was to his northwest at that moment, waiting with two companions to commence his share of geographical and scien-tific exploration, more extensive than was done by Scott’s larger and better-funded mission—that this man, Douglas Mawson, would add more territory to the maps of the worlds sixth conti-nent than any other man of his time.
But no man on the southern ice that November day, 1912, could foresee how the journey into the eastern wilderness would become another bitter chapter in the Antarctic saga; for this terrible march was to be the second epic in that year to inflict great suffering, bring death to brave men, impose an ordeal grimmer than that which took the lives of Scott and his polar party, and end in an incomparable struggle for survival in one of the most savage environments on the earth.
