How many expeditions did mawson go on

I, sir Douglas Mawson, do hereby so claim and declare to all men that from and after the date of the present, the full sovereignty of the territory that we have discovered and explored south of latitude sixty-four degrees and as far as the south pole, this in his majesty King George the fifth, his heirs and successors, forever.

Along with his mentor Professor T. Edgeworth David , Mawson completed the longest Antarctic man-hauling sledge journey of days. Explorers during this time were focused on being the first to reach the South Geographic Pole. Embarking on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition AAE with Mawson, John King Davis captained the Aurora with a crew, 31 expeditioners and materials for living huts, and wireless masts to establish the first radio communications in Antarctica.

On the traverse, Belgrave Ninnis was lost when he plummeted down a crevasse with a sledge carrying many of the supplies. Alone, Mawson was determined to return with the data and specimens they had collected. He struggled for 30 days, eventually reaching the base only to miss the ship retrieving the men by hours. Instead of returning on the Aurora , six men who had volunteered to search for the party overwintered again with Mawson. But unbeknown to them, this apparently nutritious addition to their meagre diet in fact put them in greater peril.

Both of them began to sicken. On 30 December, Mawson wrote: "Xavier off colour. We did 15 miles, halting at about 9 am. He turned in - all his things very wet. The continuous drift does not give one a chance to dry a thing, and our gear is deplorable. Tent has dripped terribly, all caked with ice. As the days passed, their skin started to fall off.

They suffered terrible stomach pains and diarrhoea - symptoms of an excess intake of vitamin A. Dog livers contain high levels of the nutrient and too much of it is toxic to the human body. For some reason, Mertz suffered the worst and the one-time Olympic skier was soon reduced to a demented sliver of his former self. Mertz's suffering reached its climax on 7 January.

Mawson described the event in his journal: "During the afternoon he has several fits and is delirious, fills his trousers again and I clean out for him.

He is very weak, becomes more and more delirious, rarely being able to speak coherently. At 8 pm he raves and breaks a tent pole. I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful and I put him quietly in the bag. He dies peacefully at about 2 am on the morning of the 8th. He had lost all the skin of his legs and private parts.

I am in same condition and sore on finger won't heal. Mawson had another km to slog across to reach the safety of his base on the coast. And he had a deadline - 15 January. That was the date by which all the sledging parties had to return for the imminent departure of the expedition's ship, the Aurora, for Australia. The ship would not be able to return for at least eight months, after the next Antarctic winter. But if it had seemed his situation could not get any worse, he then fell into a crevasse himself.

His sledge caught on the edge of the opening and he was left dangling on a harness. One attempt to haul himself out failed just as he reached the crevasse lip, and he fell metres deeper into the abyss.

Exhausted, weak and chilled for my hands were bare and pounds of snow had got inside my clothing I hung with the firm conviction that all was over except the passing. It would be but the work of a moment to slip from the harness, then all the pain and toil would be over. Somehow he managed to summon the strength from his starved body for another bid to pull himself up and out. And this was only the first of several crevasses into which he fell. The psychological trauma of Mawson's ordeals after the death of Mertz cannot be under-estimated, says Mark Pharoah, curator of the Mawson Collection at the South Australia Museum in Adelaide.

It was a very disturbing time in Mawson's life. His one eventual stroke of luck was to come across a stash of food and a note left by a search party. The message had been left the previous day and told Mawson that he was now only about 40km from the base at Cape. But slowed down by raging blizzards and his ravaged physical state, he reached the final approach to the base only to see his ship, the Aurora, far out to sea on 8 February.

Source: Australian Antarctic Expedition Scientific reports, Series A Vol 1. Part 1 by Douglas Mawson. He was not alone though. A party of six men were waiting for him at the base. Using the wireless telegraph, they tried to recall the ship but the weather was so bad it could not return to shore. Mawson had to remain for another year and endure a second ferocious winter in the land of the blizzard. On 23 March, he wrote: "I find my nerves in a very serious state, and from the feeling I have in the base of my head I have suspicion that I may go off my rocker very soon.

Six parties set out from the base in early November on journeys of varying lengths. The three men intended to map the coastline east of Cape Denison — a round trip of kilometres.

A month later, kilometres from Cape Denison, Ninnis fell into a crevasse at least 50 metres deep, taking his sledge and most of their supplies and huskies with him. Peering into the crevasse, Mawson and Mertz could see little trace of Ninnis, and their calls went unanswered. The rope they had with them was not long enough to mount any effective rescue attempt. We could do nothing, really nothing.

This was our only consolation, the last honouring we could do for our beloved friend Ninnis. After nine hours Mawson and Mertz began their return to base with only ten days of food for a journey that would take at least As they retraced their steps they were forced to eat their dogs. Mawson recorded in his journal:. That night we ate George. He was a very poor sample; chiefly sinews with a very undesirable taste.

It was a happy relief when the liver appeared which, if little else could be said in its favour, could be easily chewed and digested. It is thought that this contributed to the deterioration of both men, particularly Mertz. Outside the bowl of chaos was brimming with drift-snow and as I lay in the sleeping-bag beside my dead companion I wondered how, in such conditions, I would manage to break and pitch camp single-handed.

There appeared to be little hope of reaching the Hut, still miles away. Mawson cut his sledge in half and loaded it with the barest minimum of equipment. Nonetheless it took another 30 days to man-haul the sledge to base, his survival only made possible by stumbling across small food depots left by a search party. But he was falling apart physically. At one point, a blizzard trapped Mawson in an ice cave for a week. On another occasion, he fell into a crevasse and was only saved by the sledge getting stuck in a snowdrift.

He managed to climb five metres of rope to safety despite exhaustion, sickness and near starvation. Mawson knew that the Aurora would have arrived to relieve the base at Commonwealth Bay.

His main worry was getting back before the ship was forced to leave in time to pick up the men at the Western Base before the winter pack ice closed in. His concerns were well founded. Davis had delayed his departure for as long as possible but as Mawson staggered towards the base he was greeted with the demoralising sight of the Aurora sailing off into the distance.

Mawson then glimpsed the six men who had chosen to remain behind in the hope that his party might return. Forced to spend another 10 bitterly cold winter months at the station, Mawson wrote his account of the expedition while the group as a whole succeeded in keeping sane by continuing their scientific work, establishing intermittent radio contact with the outside world, and publishing a monthly newspaper called the Adelie Blizzard.

The one exception was the radio operator, Sidney Jeffryes, whose symptoms of mental illness grew increasingly alarming. On his return to Australia he was committed to a psychiatric institution. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition was the first major scientific expedition by Australians beyond their shores.

It explored some kilometres of mainland Antarctica as well as Macquarie Island. The analysis and report of the scientific data collected during the expedition was so extensive that it filled 22 volumes when it was published in In the cause of science, the men of the AAE quietly made breakthroughs in Antarctic geology, biology, meteorology, magnetism and oceanography.