Commemorating Douglas Mawson

By Paul Homewood

 

We have been following the story of the research vessel trapped in pack ice off the coast of Antarctica. The voyage is part of an expedition to commemorate the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s exploration there.

Mawson’s expedition landed in January 1912, and undertook much scientific research and surveying. The trip, though, was notable for the remarkable journey undertaken by Mawson and two colleagues a few months later, which has gone down in the annals of polar exploration as probably the most terrible ever undertaken in Antarctica.

 

 

The last photo of Mawson’s Far Eastern Party, taken when they left the Australasian Antarctic Party’s base camp on November 10, 1912. By January 10, 1913, two of the three men would be dead, and expedition leader Douglas Mawson would find himself exhausted, ill and still more than 160 miles from the nearest human being.

 

There is a very good account of his terrible and remarkably brave journey, well worth a read.

 

Even today, with advanced foods, and radios, and insulated clothing, a journey on foot across Antarctica is one of the harshest tests a human being can be asked to endure. A hundred years ago, it was worse. Then, wool clothing absorbed snow and damp. High-energy food came in an unappetizing mix of rendered fats called pemmican. Worst of all, extremes of cold pervaded everything; Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who sailed with Captain Scott’s doomed South Pole expedition of 1910-13, recalled that his teeth, “the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces” and fell victim to temperatures that plunged as low as -77 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cherry-Garrard survived to write an account of his adventures, a book he titled The Worst Journey in the World. But even his Antarctic trek—made in total darkness in the depths of the Southern winter—was not quite so appalling as the desperate march faced one year later by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson. Mawson’s journey has gone down in the annals of polar exploration as probably the most terrible ever undertaken in Antarctica.

 

Read the rest of the story here.

 

And be proud of our ancestors.