Racing With Death by Beau Riffenburgh

Author:Beau Riffenburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

10

Abandoned

When Mawson sent the message to Davis, asking him to return to Cape Denison and pick up the small party still there, he was not the only one desperately looking forward to leaving the windiest place on Earth. Five men with whom he had spent the previous year had agreed to stay behind and search for the members of the Far Eastern Party, but they had not all been willing volunteers. The organisation of the party was the result of a complicated, nerve-racking, and at points bitter and unhappy month, during which the crew and shore party alike were intensely anxious, and Davis was almost overwhelmed by his conflicting responsibilities to Mawson, the other men at Winter Quarters, and Frank Wild’s party, waiting more than 1,500 miles away on an ice shelf.

Aurora had originally begun the journey back to Commonwealth Bay on Boxing Day of 1912, crammed with 521 tons of coal, thirty-five sheep – taken in case they needed to provision another wintering – and twenty-one sledge dogs, a gift from Roald Amundsen, who had sailed to Hobart after his successful assault on the South Pole. Also aboard were expedition secretary Conrad Eitel and several other supernumeraries, including Sidney Jeffryes. A wireless operator originally from Toowoomba, Queensland, Jeffryes had impressed Mawson to such an extent when he unsuccessfully applied for a position a year and a half before that Mawson wrote he wished Jeffryes had applied before Sawyer, the Macquarie Island operator. Now he was brought aboard by Eitel to establish wireless communication on the ship, which he did within several days, although the equipment allowed them only to receive, not to transmit.

The journey down was so hellacious it caused one old whaler aboard to comment that he had never seen such a fortnight’s rotten weather in all his thirty-five years at sea. But once in Antarctic waters, the ice pack was considerably lighter than the previous year, and they easily steamed through areas in which it had stopped them the year before.

Early on 13 January, Davis dropped anchor in Commonwealth Bay with a sigh of relief. But many of his problems were just beginning. Having been on the bridge for forty-eight hours, Davis retired, only to be woken three hours later when a violent squall caused the protective lashings on the cutting tackle to part. This released the anchor chain, and, according to seaman Bertram Lincoln, ‘before anyone could get to the brake the whole lot of cable disappeared … one anchor and 125 fathoms of new heavy navy-cable.’

With his best anchor gone and his hopes of sleep ruined, Davis went ashore, where the nine men at Winter Quarters were unaware of the ship’s arrival. When he presented them with mail and fresh provisions, ‘the delight of these lonely men, who had lived so long completely severed from their families and from the world, may be better imagined than described,’ he wrote. ‘To us they had the appearance almost of strangers, a band of wild, hairy veterans whose looks bore little resemblance to the hopeful young men we had landed here a year ago.

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