Douglas Mawson · 1915 · polar

Douglas Mawson's account of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911 to 1914. It went for the science rather than the pole, based itself by accident in the windiest place on earth, and produced the single most harrowing solo journey in polar literature.

1. 1
   Hobart

   December 1911, and the Aurora sails - an Australian expedition with a scientific programme rather than a race, going to the sector of Antarctica directly south of the continent that was paying for it.

2. 2
   Macquarie Island

   A party landed to run a wireless relay - the link that would make this the first Antarctic expedition able to send a message home, and the first to hear one back.

3. 3
   Cape Denison

   Commonwealth Bay, and a hut built in the windiest place at sea level on earth - katabatic winds averaging fifty miles an hour for a year, gusting past two hundred, and men learning to walk leaning at forty-five degrees.

4. 4
   The Western Base

   Frank Wild's party landed on the Shackleton Ice Shelf, fifteen hundred miles west - a second complete expedition running in parallel, which is why the scientific results were what they were.

5. 5
   Ninnis's crevasse

   14 December 1912, three hundred miles out on the far eastern journey: Ninnis, the best dog team, most of the food and the tent go through a lid of snow and are gone. Mawson and Mertz turn for home with a week's rations.

6. 6
   Mertz

   Sledging back on dog meat, and both men going to pieces - Mertz dying in the tent on 8 January, probably of vitamin A poisoning from the livers, though nobody knew that for another forty years.

7. 7
   Aladdin's Cave

   Mawson alone for a month, half his hair gone and the soles off his feet, hauling a cut-down sledge - and reaching the depot five miles from the hut to see the Aurora already hull down on the horizon.

8. 8
   Cape Denison

   Six men stayed behind to wait for him. Another full winter in the hut, the wireless finally working, and the ship back the following summer.

9. 9
   Adelaide

   February 1914, and a return to a country about to have other things to think about - and a book two years later that is the best written by any leader of the heroic age, and the least read.