The Australian Geologist Who Walked 160 Kilometres Back to Base Alone in 1913 After His Two Companions Died and Most of His Skin Fell Off

Sir Douglas Mawson (1882–1958) was a 30-year-old University of Adelaide geologist when he led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–1914 — a project to map the previously unexplored 3,200 km of Antarctic coastline directly south of Australia, between the Ross Sea and the Weddell Sea. The expedition had been turned down by Robert Falcon Scott as a junior addition to the British 1910 venture; Mawson had decided to run it independently.

The expedition’s main base was at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay on the Antarctic coast — the windiest place on Earth (annual average wind speed approximately 80 km/h, with regular sustained winds above 200 km/h during the winter months). The base was operational by January 1912 and the inland sledging programme began in November 1912.

The Far Eastern Party

The most ambitious of the inland parties was the Far Eastern Party, which Mawson led personally. He had two companions: the British army lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis (23) and the Swiss ski expert Xavier Mertz (29). They had two sled teams, 17 dogs, and provisions for ten weeks. The objective was to map the coastline approximately 500 km east of Cape Denison.

They left base on 10 November 1912 and travelled east at about 25 km per day. By 14 December 1912 they had reached approximately 480 km from base and were preparing to turn around.

On the afternoon of 14 December the party was crossing a heavily-crevassed glacier surface in single file. Ninnis was at the rear with the better-loaded sled — the one carrying most of the dog food, most of the human food, the tent, and the spare clothing. Mawson and Mertz had crossed a snow bridge over an apparently small crevasse. Ninnis’s heavier sled broke through. He, the sled, six of the seven dogs, and almost all the supplies disappeared into a chasm whose bottom was beyond visible depth.

Mawson and Mertz lowered ropes for several hours. The chasm was at least 50 metres deep. There was no response. They could see one of the dogs on a ledge approximately 50 metres down — alive but unreachable. They waited until darkness, formally read the Anglican burial service over the crevasse, and turned west.

They were 480 km from base with one sled, six remaining dogs, no tent, no spare clothing, approximately a week and a half of human food, and almost no dog food.

The march back

The plan was to slaughter and eat the dogs as the march progressed. The dogs had not been bred for food and were small, lean working animals. Their flesh provided few calories.

Mawson’s journal record of the first three weeks of the march is mostly tactical: the daily distance covered, the dog they had killed, the temperature, the wind. They were averaging about 15 km per day. The dog meat was hard to chew but they were sharing it with the surviving dogs to keep the dogs working as long as possible.

By early January 1913 both men were showing increasingly severe symptoms. Their hair was falling out. Their skin was peeling off in sheets. The soles of Mawson’s feet were detaching from the underlying flesh. Mertz had progressively severe diarrhoea, dizziness, and intermittent delirium. They were eating the dog livers — the most calorie-dense part of the dogs they had killed — to preserve as much muscle meat as possible.

The dog livers were killing them.

Hypervitaminosis A — vitamin A toxicity — was identified as the most plausible cause of the Mawson-Mertz symptoms by the Antarctic medical researcher Sir Frederick Hooper in 1969, on the basis of postwar chemical analysis of Greenland Eskimo sled-dog tissue. Husky-breed sled dogs accumulate exceptionally high concentrations of vitamin A in the liver. The liver of one mature husky contains enough vitamin A to fatally poison an adult human; eating multiple dog livers over weeks compounds the effect. Hypervitaminosis A symptoms include precisely the skin peeling, hair loss, headache, peripheral neuropathy, gastrointestinal failure, and cerebral confusion that Mertz and Mawson developed.

Neither man knew this in January 1913. The dog livers were the highest-calorie food they had.

Xavier Mertz died on 8 January 1913 — probably of acute hypervitaminosis A complicated by hypothermia and starvation, possibly of a brain haemorrhage. He was 29. Mawson cut him out of the joint sleeping bag they had been sharing, wrapped him in his half of the bag, built a snow cairn over him, and walked on.

He was approximately 160 km from base.

Alone

Mawson cut his sled in half with a penknife — the half-sled was the largest piece of equipment he could still drag on his progressively failing feet. He cached most of his remaining gear at the cairn. He continued west on average less than 6 km per day.

The soles of his feet, by his journal entries of mid-January, were detaching completely from the underlying flesh of his foot. He tied them back on with strips of rag. He walked on the partially-attached soles. The pain was, in his subsequent published account, the dominant feature of the remaining march.

On 17 January 1913 Mawson fell into a crevasse himself. His half-sled jammed across the chasm and the rope harness caught his fall. He hung in the harness 4 metres below the surface for approximately ten minutes, gathering enough strength to climb back up the rope hand-over-hand using the knots he had tied for the dogs. He almost did not make it. He recorded later that he had spent several minutes considering whether to release the harness buckle and end it. He decided against, climbed up, lay on the ice for approximately twenty minutes, and walked on.

On 29 January 1913 he reached a snow cairn that contained food and a note. The food cache had been laid down four days earlier by a search party from Cape Denison. They had passed within 8 km of where he had been camping. The note said the relief ship Aurora was waiting at Cape Denison and could not wait past 8 February 1913.

Mawson reached Cape Denison on the afternoon of 8 February 1913 — thirty days after Mertz’s death, 160 km from his last sight of Mertz, and approximately three hours after the Aurora had departed the bay. The Aurora sent the wireless message and put about, but the deteriorating sea ice prevented her from re-entering Commonwealth Bay. Mawson and the six men of the search party were forced to over-winter at Cape Denison through the 1913 austral winter and were not relieved until December 1913.

After

Mawson recovered substantially through the over-winter period at Cape Denison, though the long-term effects (his hair grew back patchy, his teeth never fully recovered, his feet retained scarring) remained visible for the rest of his life. He returned to Adelaide in March 1914, married Paquita Delprat in spring 1914, and resumed his geological-academic career.

He led one further Antarctic expedition (1929-1931, the BANZARE — British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition). He served as Australian government scientific adviser on Antarctic affairs from the 1930s onward. He died at Brighton, South Australia, on 14 October 1958, aged 76.

His 1915 published account The Home of the Blizzard is the canonical Australian polar memoir. The Cape Denison base hut where he over-wintered after the 1913 walk-in is preserved as an Australian Antarctic Territory historic site.