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Clip description
Frank Hurley continues telling the story (begun in clip two) of the terrible journey made by Douglas Mawson, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis, during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. Mawson’s party, with two dog teams, set out on 10 November to travel east from Cape Denison, exploring the coastline. By 14 December 1912, they had come about 500 kms from the main Hut when Ninnis and his dog team disappeared into a crevasse so deep that they were lost from sight. Most of the food and supplies disappeared with them. Mawson and Mertz and the remaining six dogs turned immediately for home, with one week’s worth of food for two men, and no food for the dogs. They survived by killing and eating the dogs, one by one, feeding most of the meat to the remaining dogs. Mertz died after an agonising journey, on 8 January 1913 – emaciated and with pronounced symptoms of madness.
Mawson was alone, 160 kms from Cape Denison. He struggled the remaining distance with no food, dragging a cut-down sledge, falling into crevasses, and finally, crawling on hands and knees. Hurley describes how Mawson was lucky to run straight into a food dump left by a search party only hours before. That revived him enough to make his way eventually back to the hut at Cape Denison. He arrived a few hours after Captain Davis, on the Aurora, had sailed out of Commonwealth Bay. He had waited three weeks for Mawson’s return, until he decided the ship could wait no longer, for fear of the coming winter. Mawson had to wait another year for a rescue voyage.
Curator’s notes
Frank Hurley describes here one of the most famous and terrible stories in the history of Antarctic exploration. Historians are still arguing over what happened, especially what caused the death of Xavier Mertz (see Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica, 2007). In the late 1960s, two scientists in Adelaide put forward the theory that Mertz died of vitamin A poisoning, a consequence of eating too much of the dogs’ livers. In 1913, no-one knew that dog’s liver contained high amounts of Vitamin A, or that ingesting it was harmful to humans. There were other contributing factors: Mertz’s waterproof trousers disappeared on the sledge with his friend Ninnis, which made him more vulnerable to the cold than Mawson. He was also largely vegetarian, so there is a theory that a meat diet was too much for his system. Another is that he died partly of psychological stress – which might just as well be termed a broken heart.
Mertz was a Swiss mountaineer and champion skier who joined the expedition in London. Belgrave Ninnis was the son of an Arctic explorer and a lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers – a gentleman, in other words. He and Mertz became the closest of friends. Their bunks in the hut were next to each other. Ninnis looked after the 49 Greenland huskies brought on board in London. Mertz had little to do during the voyage so he helped Ninnis. Both men were extremely close to their animals. Mertz had to endure not just the death of his closest friend, but the deaths progressively of each dog. His final days, according to Mawson’s account, were a terrible progression into madness and pain.
Mawson’s journey, trudging alone, without food, across terrible terrain for another 32 days, is considered one of the greatest feats of endurance in polar history. Frank Hurley played a small part in his survival, as part of the team that went looking for Mawson, as he explains in the clip. Mawson and Hurley would have their differences in the years after this expedition, but they had a high regard for each other’s talents and toughness. Mawson invited Hurley to join his British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions (BANZARE) on two voyages between 1929 and 1931.
