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

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.