Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival (27 page)

He planned the remaining journey with painstaking detail, and broke it down into palatable increments. This was another brilliant tactic: it’s easier to think in small steps than the big picture when it comes to survival. He also dwelled over his food rations for the remainder of the trip. He calculated that he had enough food for twenty days. But he did not stop there. Mawson also considered that some of the food he carried required cooking, and would therefore be useless to him if the Primus stove broke. So he decided to eat all of that food during the first ten days, saving the remainder for the final half of the journey.

Mawson bade farewell to Mertz, slung the sledge harness over his skeletal shoulders, and continued his westward trudge. He was stabbed by pain with each step he took, yet he continued on. Later that first day, he stopped to examine his feet and was horrified by the raw, weeping meat he found inside his socks. The entire bottom of one foot had come off, and he needed to wrap it back on to continue.

He spent some time doctoring his wounds and actually lay down to enjoy the feeling of the sunshine on his naked body, a brilliant move that not only bolstered his spirits, but probably did his body some good as well. There is an Indian guru, Hira Ratan Manek, who claims he can live for years at a time without eating, deriving all his energy from the sun. Mawson should have started his sunbathing weeks earlier; in the frigid polar world, sun on exposed skin is like manna from heaven. He would continue the practice in the weeks to come.

Such opportunities were few, however, as blizzard-like conditions ensued and slowed Mawson’s progress to a crawl. He was stuck in his tent for days at a time as the wind tore across the land. Mawson was frantic, and vowed to continue on despite the weather. Yet he had the wherewithal to harness himself firmly to the sledge he pulled behind him, a safety precaution as he entered the deadly maze of the Mertz Glacier. Mawson hoped that if he fell into a crevasse, the weight of the sledge would be enough to prevent him from plummeting to his death.

On January 17, he was still picking his way across the glacier when he twice stopped just short of yawning crevasses. Soon thereafter, he fell into a crevasse to his knees. He clambered out and walked north to where he believed the crevasse stopped, where he again turned to the west.

In an instant, the ground collapsed beneath his feet and Mawson was flung downward. A second later, the harness yanked violently at his midsection and he came to a painfully sharp stop. He was now dangling inside a bottomless chasm, with the rope around his waist as the only thing holding him back from certain death. Yet as he hung there, he could feel himself dropping slowly as the sledge above was pulled across the snow toward the crevasse that now held him captive. He knew what was to come: the sledge would break through the snow and tumble into the crevasse, and his life would end. Miraculously, though, the movement stopped. The sledge had become stuck on a pressure ridge. Mawson hung there, fourteen feet from the surface, sheer walls of ice three feet on either side of him, pondering his fate.

Steeling himself against the pain, Mawson pulled his skeletal frame up the rope, hand over hand, until he reached the edge of the snow bridge. He was crawling to safety—mere feet from solid ice—when the bridge collapsed again, and he again plummeted the full length of the rope toward his death. Once more, the sledge above held. Mawson considered suicide as he dangled there. A swipe of his knife on the rope and all his suffering would come to a swift end. His hands were raw and bloodied, his energy was draining fast, and he was deathly cold in the icy tomb. Yet Douglas Mawson was not one to give up, no matter how grim the circumstances.

With superhuman effort, he resolved to try one more time while he still had the energy to do so. Although he was never able to recall how he mustered the strength, Mawson pulled himself hand over hand up the rope and to the Antarctic daylight, and flung himself in one desperate move to the safety of the ice, where he collapsed, exhausted but alive.

By this point, Mawson had come to fervently believe that a spiritual presence was with him, guiding him through the trials of the Antarctic spring. As he fumbled to set up his camp for the night, he thanked providence for sparing him. From that day forward, Mawson believed the spirit was always there, moving with him across the snow and ice back to main base.

The timing could not have been better, for Mawson hit a new low in the hours after the fall into the Black Crevasse. He was trapped in a maze of crevasses, the light was gray and flat, making visibility poor even just a few feet in front of him, and the incessant wind had wiped out all evidence of where one opening stopped and another began.

Undaunted, Mawson made another modification that would save his life several times over. He realized that one wrong stride in any direction could send him to his death, especially given the deplorable condition his hands were now in: he was physically unable to pull himself up along the rope again. So he spent the better part of a day fashioning a rope ladder and using it to connect himself to the sledge he was pulling. It was yet another in a litany of brilliant moves Mawson pulled off during the journey, and illustrates his near-obsessive focus on survival, which would ultimately save his life.

Mawson tied one end of the rope ladder to the front of the sledge, draped the other over his shoulder and set out the next morning. It was not long before his handiwork paid off: he broke through a snow bridge and fell into another crevasse. Luckily, the sledge once again held firm on the surface, and Mawson was able to climb up his handmade ladder to safety. A few steps later, he fell into another one, but climbed his lifeline to safety yet again.

He picked his way across the glacier, partly emboldened by the success of the rope ladder. He walked across snow bridges and maneuvered around yawning crevasses, always drawing nearer to safety. Days later, he finally made it across.

Still, the fickle Antarctic weather worked against him. The wind blew incessantly, slowing Mawson’s progress to a crawl. He was stopped for days at a time as blizzards pounded his meager shelter. He also had to battle the icy slopes of the hills that formed the headland between the Mertz Glacier and Cape Denison. He struggled up and down, always hampered by the wind, which cut his visibility to nearly nothing.

And though his spirits continued to sink, Mawson tried to tend to his physical needs as best he could. When he undressed to examine himself, he was shocked at his corpse-like appearance. All of his muscles had withered to nothing. His fingernails had blackened; most had fallen off. His teeth had become loose in their sockets, his hair was falling out in clumps, and there were wide patches of raw skin all over his body. He realized that he might be suffering from scurvy, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, but refused to entertain the thought because he needed to keep both hope—and the will to live—alive.

Mawson’s tending to his wounds and injuries was a critical activity, especially when his morale was at its lowest. It gave him a focus and a purpose on those long days when he could do little else. Most important, it filled him with hope that he would survive. For why bother if there is no hope?

The weather finally lifted on January 28, and Mawson continued to trudge ahead. He had about two pounds of food left, but was encouraged by the knowledge that Aladdin’s Cave could not be far off. He steeled himself for a final push to that little bit of underground paradise. He would make it there . . . or die trying.

The next day, Mawson spotted a dark smudge on the horizon, an unexpected bit of color against the white backdrop. Mawson made for the spot, where he found a rock cairn. It had been built by three of his men—McLean, Hodgeman, and Hurley, who had been out searching for Mawson and his men at that very same time. They had missed each other by only a few hours! Inside the cairn was a note and food.

The note told Mawson that he was twenty-one miles from Aladdin’s Cave, the other parties had returned safely from their sledging journeys, and the
Aurora
was anchored in Commonwealth Bay. Mawson knew there was no conceivable way he could catch up with his friends, so he focused on the food in the bag: tins of pemmican, butter, sugar, cookies, cocoa, chocolate sticks—even three oranges. For the first time in weeks, Mawson was sure he would survive. But Mother Nature was not through with him yet.

The cairn helps illustrate that in a survival situation, luck is always a fickle bedfellow. She may be there to help you, such as when Mawson found the cairn and the food, but she’ll also abandon you at the worst possible times, as when Mawson realized that his three comrades had camped the previous night just five miles from where he had set his patchwork tent, but he still had no chance of catching them.

Mawson struggled onward toward Aladdin’s Cave, though he lost his bearing on several occasions, once coming dangerously close to plummeting off a cliff. He cursed himself for having discarded his crampons days before in an attempt to lighten his load, as his progress across the ice was maddeningly slow. He probed his fertile mind for a way to solve the problem of slipping on the polished, windblown surface, and (of course!) devised a solution. In a fit of sheer MacGyver genius, he pried apart the mahogany case that held his theodolite—a navigation tool—cut wooden sandals for his boots, and hammered nails from the box through the sandals to project downward.

Though they were far from perfect (the nail heads were often driven upward into the soles of his raw and rotting feet), the makeshift crampons helped Mawson across the crevassed fields. On more than one occasion, he fell through the ice, only to have the sledge again save his life. He continued in much the same way until the evening of February 1, when he made it to Aladdin’s Cave! For the first time in almost three months, he would sleep without the incessant flapping of the windblown tent walls around him.

Although it was really not much more than a vertical shaft cut into the ice, Aladdin’s Cave was heaven for Mawson. The cave seemed to have been hurriedly used by the other teams, but the provisions scattered around the floor seemed like a royal banquet to the starving explorer. Here he found cookies and pemmican, milk powder, and cocoa tins.

But Mawson was not satisfied with making it to Aladdin’s Cave. It was home base, a mere five and a half miles away, that he desperately sought. He searched the cave for a pair of crampons he had left there months before, hoping they would help him down the icy slopes that separated him from his destination. They were nowhere to be found, however, and Mawson’s notion of a quick meal and final dash to the base went with them. He decided he would spend one more night at Aladdin’s Cave, rest up, and return triumphantly the next day. Or so he thought.

As luck would have it, the Antarctic wind kicked in with renewed fury that night. Mawson made frequent trips to the entrance of the cave, only to find that the winds had not abated. Dejected but not dispirited, he took advantage of the time to work on his makeshift crampons and eat. Yet the food seemed to do Mawson no good at all. Instead, he seemed to sink to his lowest physical state while in the cave. Whether it was the effects of the hypervitaminosis, scurvy, the stale food in the cave, or simply the toll of the previous three months, we’ll never know, but Mawson became depressed and angry as the storm raged overhead. If ever there was a “so close and yet so far” situation, this was it.

For seven eternal nights, Douglas Mawson was trapped in that cave—a hellish week of dejection, loneliness, and illness. Then, on the eighth morning, Mawson awoke to find the wind and snow had abated to the point where he thought he could risk the trip to camp. Come what may, he told himself, today was his last day. He picked his way down the treacherous slope, the sledge still trailing behind. Eventually, the waters of Commonwealth Bay opened before him. Beyond it, he could see the
Aurora,
sailing westward. With that sight, Mawson knew that he may well have to spend another year at the camp by himself, but he was sure he would live.

The camp soon came into view, and Mawson was dejected to see no sign of activity anywhere, not even a plume of smoke from the huts’ stovepipes. He was a mile and a half from deliverance, but the weight of his predicament almost dropped him to his knees. Then, when all hope seemed lost, he spotted three figures near the shore.