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IC-007 Polar expedition · Antarctica, Adélie Land 1913

Mawson’s Far Eastern Party — two men died on the ice and one walked back alone

crevassestarvationpartial-loss1900-1949
Lost
2 of 3
Bound for
The Antarctic far east
Ended
Cape Denison, 1913
Status
Partial loss

Summary

In November 1912 the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson set out from Cape Denison in Antarctica with two companions — Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers and the Swiss ski champion Xavier Mertz — to sledge east across Adélie Land as the Far Eastern Party of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Two of the three died. On 14 December 1912, more than 300 miles out, Ninnis broke through the snow lid of a crevasse with the rear sledge and was lost into it, taking with him the strongest dog team, the tent, and almost all the party's food. Mertz died on the return march around 8 January 1913, most likely poisoned by vitamin A from the dog livers the two starving men had been eating. Mawson covered the last roughly 100 miles alone, half-dead, and reached base on 8 February 1913 — only to find the relief ship had sailed hours earlier, condemning him to another year in Antarctica.

The journey is remembered, accurately, as one of the great ordeals of solo survival in polar history, but the verdict on the party itself is plain: a single crevasse fall, in a region riddled with hidden crevasses, destroyed the expedition's margin in an instant and killed two of its three men. Everything that followed — the starvation, Mertz's death, Mawson's skeletal crawl home — flowed from that one collapse and from the decision, forced by it, to keep the men alive on a diet that was quietly poisoning them.

What makes the case unusually legible is that Mawson kept his diary throughout, recording the loss of Ninnis, Mertz's decline and his own disintegration in clinical detail. His account, together with later medical analysis, allows the mechanism to be traced precisely: not a single villain but a chain — a crevasse, a catastrophic loss of supplies, an improvised survival diet, and a poison no one in 1912 knew to fear. Mertz and Mawson ate the livers of their Greenland huskies, and those livers carried concentrations of vitamin A high enough to be lethal.

Timeline

1911
Mawson establishes Cape Denison
The Australasian Antarctic Expedition sets up its main base at Commonwealth Bay, one of the windiest places on earth.
10 Nov 1912
The Far Eastern Party departs
Mawson, Ninnis and Mertz leave base with three sledges and seventeen Greenland huskies to explore the coast far to the east.
Nov–Dec 1912
Eastward across the glaciers
The party crosses heavily crevassed glacier country, making good distance while the dogs and supplies hold out.
14 Dec 1912
Ninnis is lost
More than 300 miles from base, Ninnis and the rear sledge break through a crevasse lid; the strongest dogs, the tent and most of the food vanish into it.
14 Dec 1912
The turn for home
Mawson and Mertz, left with ten days' food for themselves and almost none for the dogs, abandon the goal and start back.
Dec 1912 – Jan 1913
Eating the dogs
They shoot and eat the remaining huskies one by one, including the vitamin-A-rich livers, to stretch their rations.
~Late Dec 1912
Mertz sickens
Mertz develops stomach pain, skin and hair loss, and growing weakness as the two men struggle west.
8 Jan 1913
Mertz dies
After days of delirium, Mertz dies in his sleeping bag; Mawson records his death at about 2 a.m. and continues alone.
17 Jan 1913
The crevasse fall
Mawson breaks through a snow bridge and is left hanging in a crevasse on his harness rope, then hauls himself out.
29 Jan 1913
A cache, six hours late
Mawson finds a depot and note left by searchers from base who had passed only hours earlier.
1 Feb 1913
Aladdin's Cave
He reaches the ice-cave food depot about five miles from base, then is pinned there for a week by a blizzard.
8 Feb 1913
Back at base, ship gone
Mawson reaches Cape Denison hours after the relief ship Aurora has sailed; he and a small party must overwinter another year.

A sledge journey into crevasse country

Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition had based itself at Cape Denison on Commonwealth Bay, a place later measured among the windiest on earth, and from there sent out sledging parties to map the coast. The Far Eastern Party had the longest reach: Mawson, the expedition's leader and a geologist; Ninnis, a young British army officer responsible for the dogs; and Mertz, a Swiss lawyer and champion skier who ran the dog teams with Ninnis. They left on 10 November 1912 with three sledges and seventeen Greenland huskies, aiming to push hundreds of miles east across Adélie Land toward Victoria Land.

The country they crossed was glacier terrain seamed with crevasses — deep fissures in the ice, their mouths bridged by wind-packed snow that could bear a man's weight or give way without warning. The party managed the danger by spacing themselves and ordering the sledges deliberately. The arrangement that seemed safest proved fatal: the heaviest, best-stocked sledge and the strongest dog team were placed at the rear, behind Mawson and Mertz, on the theory that a bridge already crossed by the leaders would be sound. It was a reasonable precaution that concentrated the expedition's survival margin — its main food, its only proper tent, its best dogs — onto the one sledge most exposed to a hidden collapse.

That is exactly what happened. On 14 December, more than 300 miles out, Mawson crossed a snow bridge, Mertz crossed it, and then Ninnis and the rear sledge broke through. The crevasse was sheer and deep; the men could see, far down, a dead dog and some wreckage on a ledge, but no sign of Ninnis, and no rope they had could reach the bottom. After hours of calling into the ice, Mawson and Mertz read a burial service over the hole and turned for home.

Starving home on a poisoned diet

The arithmetic was merciless. The lost sledge had carried the tent, almost all the human food, and all the dog food. Mawson and Mertz were left more than 300 miles from base with roughly a week and a half of rations for themselves, nothing for the six surviving dogs, and only a makeshift shelter rigged from a spare tent cover and a sledge. Their only way to extend the food was to eat the dogs themselves. So they did — shooting the huskies one at a time as the animals weakened, feeding the tougher meat to the remaining dogs and eating the rest, livers included, because nothing could be wasted.

The livers were the trap no one could have seen. Greenland husky liver carries an extraordinarily high concentration of vitamin A, enough that eating it in quantity is poisonous, and the two starving men ate it freely. Mertz, who may have eaten more liver as the tougher meat sickened him, declined first: stomach pain, then peeling skin, hair loss, and a slide into apathy and delirium. He could no longer pull, then could no longer walk, then could no longer keep his wits. Around 2 a.m. on 8 January 1913, after a final violent night, he died in his sleeping bag. Mawson, showing the same symptoms — the soles of his feet, he found, were detaching — buried his companion under snow blocks and went on alone, still well over 100 miles from safety.

The solo march was a slow disintegration. Mawson cut his sledge in half to lighten it and dragged on across the crevassed ice. On 17 January a snow bridge gave way beneath him and he dropped into a crevasse, caught only by the harness rope tied to his sledge, which jammed in the snow above; hanging in the void, spent and starving, he hauled himself hand over hand up the rope and out, then built a rope ladder against the next fall. He was racing a season he could not see: the relief ship was due to leave, and every day cost him.

The reckoning: six hours, one winter, and the poison in the liver

The cruelty of the timing defined the end. On 29 January Mawson reached a snow cairn holding food and a note left by three searchers from base — McLean, Hurley and Hodgeman — who had passed the spot only about six hours earlier. He had missed living company by an afternoon. He pressed on to Aladdin's Cave, the ice-hollowed food depot some five miles from base, on 1 February, and there a blizzard trapped him for a week within sight of home. When he finally descended to Cape Denison on 8 February 1913, men working outside spotted a lone, ravaged figure on the ice. The relief ship Aurora had sailed only hours before, the captain judging the sea ice too dangerous to wait longer. Mawson and the six men who had stayed to search for him now faced a second Antarctic winter before another rescue could come.

The medical reckoning came decades later. Mawson and others long attributed Mertz's death and his own near-death to the cold, exhaustion and the strain of an inhuman journey, and those were real. But in 1969 a study by John Cleland and R. V. Southcott matched the documented symptoms — hair and skin loss, weight loss, bleeding and peeling, depression, gut failure — to hypervitaminosis A, vitamin A poisoning, and identified the source as the husky livers the men had eaten when they had nothing else. The diagnosis remains the leading explanation, though debate continues over how large a role poisoning played versus cold and starvation. Either way, the chain is clear: the crevasse took the food, the lost food forced the dog-liver diet, and the diet helped kill Mertz and nearly killed Mawson.

The Five Factors

01
Concentrating the survival margin on one sledge
Loading the tent, most of the human food and all the dog food onto the single rear sledge meant that one crevasse collapse could erase the party's entire reserve at a stroke. Spreading critical supplies across the team, rather than concentrating them, is the difference between a setback and a catastrophe. The arrangement that felt prudent put all the eggs in the most exposed basket.
02
Travelling crevasse country with no recovery margin
The route lay through glacier terrain known to be seamed with hidden crevasses, where a snow bridge can fail without warning. The party had no rope long enough to reach the bottom of a deep crevasse and no realistic means to recover a man or a sledge that fell. Operating in lethal terrain without the capacity to recover from its known hazard leaves the first accident unrecoverable.
03
An improvised survival diet with an unknown poison
Stripped of rations, the men fell back on eating their dogs, including the livers — a reasonable act of desperation that happened to deliver a lethal dose of vitamin A no one in 1912 could have anticipated. Survival improvisation under starvation carries hidden hazards; the food that kept them moving was also poisoning them.
04
Distance beyond the margin of recovery
The disaster struck more than 300 miles from base, far past any point from which two weakened men could be quickly relieved, with one tent gone and winter approaching. The further a party pushes from support, the larger any single failure looms, because there is no slack left to absorb it. The reach that made the journey ambitious made the loss fatal.
05
The rescue gap and the unforgiving clock
Mawson missed the searchers by six hours and the relief ship by an afternoon, then lost a week to a blizzard within sight of base — small margins that, in the Antarctic, decide between rescue and a second winter. When the window for relief is narrow and weather-bound, an expedition's survival can hinge on timing it cannot control.

Aftermath

Mawson survived the enforced second winter and returned to Australia in 1914, his account of the journey — published as The Home of the Blizzard — establishing the Far Eastern Party as a benchmark of polar endurance. Edmund Hillary would later call Mawson's solo march "probably the greatest story of lone survival in Polar exploration." Mawson was knighted, became a leading figure in Antarctic science, and led the later BANZARE expeditions; the Australasian Antarctic Expedition as a whole charted thousands of kilometres of new coastline and produced 22 volumes of scientific reports across geology, meteorology and biology.

Ninnis and Mertz are commemorated in the names Mawson gave the two great glaciers the party crossed, the Ninnis and Mertz glaciers of Adélie Land — a memorial written onto the map of the continent that killed them. The medical legacy proved unexpectedly durable: the 1969 hypervitaminosis A diagnosis turned the expedition into a textbook case in the toxicology of vitamin A, and the dangers of eating carnivore liver in the field are now standard knowledge for polar and survival training. Mawson's hut at Cape Denison still stands, preserved, and his diary remains the primary record of how three men went east and only one came back.

Lessons

  1. Distribute critical supplies across a team; concentrating food, shelter and the best resources on one unit lets a single accident erase the whole margin.
  2. Do not enter terrain whose known hazard you cannot recover from — match your rope, your method and your reserves to the worst the ground can do.
  3. Treat survival improvisation with suspicion: the expedient food or shortcut that keeps you moving may carry a hazard you cannot see.
  4. The further you push from support, the larger every failure becomes; budget the distance against your capacity to absorb a loss, not just to cover the ground.
  5. Build slack into the rescue window — weather and timing will erode it, and the last few miles or hours are where survival is often decided.

References