CHAPTER XXXVI
ACROSS THE ICE BARRIER
How to reach the Pole was still our engrossing subject of discussion, and on November 1 we decided that our only hope of reaching it, was by travelling on half-rations from the point we had reached to the point on the coast at the Drygalski Glacier, where we might hope to be able to turn inland with reasonable prospect of success. Mawson was convinced that we must keep six weeks of full rations for our inland journey, and this meant that we must march on half-rations for about 100 miles.
While I was busy in calculating times and distances for the remainder of our journey, Mawson and Mackay conducted experiments upon the cooking of seal-meat with blubber. At winter quarters Mackay had experimented with blubber as a fuel, but his efforts had not been taken seriously, and, to our sorrow, his blubber lamp had been left behind.
Eventually, however, as a result of Mackay and Mawson's experiments, we secured an effective cooking stove, which was made out of one of our large empty biscuit tins, and a broth from seal-meat was made upon this stove. The broth was apparently very nutritious, but in my case it was also indigestible.
While Mawson was still engaged on cooking experiments, Mackay and I went to the highest point of the island, and chose a spot for a cairn to mark our depot and Mackay began to build the cairn.
It had, of course, become clear to us, from what we had already seen of the cracking sea-ice, combined with our slow progress, that our retreat back to camp from the direction of the Magnetic Pole would probably be cut off altogether through the breaking up of the sea-ice.
Under these circumstances we resolved to take the risk of the Nimrod returning safely to Cape Royds, where she would be instructed to search for us along the western coast; and also the risk of her not being able to find our depot and ourselves.
We knew that there was some danger in this course, but we also felt that we had got on so far with the work entrusted to us by our commander that we could not honourably turn back.
Under these circumstances we each wrote farewell letters to those who were nearest and dearest, and at 4.30 A.M. on the following morning we posted them in one of our empty dried-milk tins, which had an air-tight lid, and, having walked up to the cairn, I lashed our post-office to the flagstaff by means of cord and copper wire.
There we also left several bags of geological specimens, and with lighter loads were prepared to go onwards towards the Pole.
It was later than usual when we left our depot, and as the sun's heat was already thawing the surface of the snow our progress was painfully slow. So terribly hard, indeed, was it to get along at all, that, after going two miles, we camped and resolved to go on again at midnight, when we hoped to avoid the sticky surface.
This experiment was fairly successful, and by November 5 we were opposite to a most interesting panorama some twenty miles north of Granite Harbour.
During that same day we had a very heavy surface to hamper and tire us, but as an offset to these troubles we had that night, for the first time, the use of a new frying-pan, ingeniously constructed by Mawson out of one of our empty paraffin tins. Indeed, Mawson's cooking experiments continued to be highly successful and entirely satisfactory to the party.
At this time we encountered a good deal of brash ice, and noticed that this type of ice surface was most common in the vicinity of icebergs. The brash ice is, I think, formed by the icebergs surging to and fro in heavy weather and crunching up the sea-ice near to them. The sea-ice, of course, refreezes, producing a surface covered with jagged edges and points.
But although brash ice was too plentiful biscuits were too scarce, and we were already reduced to one Plasmon biscuit each for breakfast and one for evening meals, and we had become exceedingly careful over the crumbs. At first, on this expedition, when biscuits were more plentiful we had munched them boldly, regardless of the loss of crumbs. Not so at this time, when crumbs were collected most carefully by the man to whom they belonged.
Uneventful days of sledging followed—days on which we were tired at night and hungry nearly always; but on the 9th we were cheered by a fine, though distant, view of the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier to the north of us, and we were all extremely anxious to find out what sort of surface for sledging this great glacier was going to offer us.
According to the Admiralty chart, prepared from observations by the Discovery expedition, this glacier was twenty-four to thirty miles wide, and projected over twenty miles from the rocky shore into the sea. We hoped that we should be able to cross it without following a circuitous route along its seaward margins.
Two days later we reached the Nordenskjold Ice Barrier, and as Mawson wished to take some observations, Mackay and I decided to explore the glacier for the purpose of selecting a suitable track (if we could find it) for our sledges.
On our return we were able to tell Mawson the good news that the barrier was quite practicable for sledging; while he informed us that, as the result of his observations, the Magnetic Pole was probably about forty miles further inland than the theoretical mean position calculated for it from the magnetic observations of the Discovery expedition seven years before.
Early on the morning of the 12th we packed up and started to cross the barrier, and on the second day we had not sledged for more than a thousand yards when Mawson suddenly exclaimed that he could see the end of the barrier, where it ended in a white cliff some 600 yards ahead.
We halted the sledge, and while Mawson took some theodolite angles Mackay and I tried to find a way down the cliff, but failed to find it. Once more we reconnoitred, and this time Mawson and I found some steep slopes formed by drift snow, which were just practicable for a light sledge lowered by an alpine rope.
We chose what seemed to be the best of these slopes and Mackay, having tied the rope round his body and having taken his ice-axe, went down the slope cautiously, Mawson and I holding on to the rope meanwhile.
The snow gave a good foothold, and he was soon at the bottom without needing support from the rope. Then, when he had returned to the top, we all set to work unpacking the sledges, and after loading one sledge lightly we lowered it little by little down the slope, one of us guiding the sledge while the other two slackened out the alpine rope above. The man who went to the bottom unloaded the sledge on the sea-ice, and then climbed back again, while the others hauled up the empty sledge. This manœuvre was repeated again and again until everything was safe, and we very glad to have crossed the ice barrier so quickly. There can be little doubt, I think, that this Nordenskjold Ice Barrier is afloat.
On the following day we were naturally anxious to be sure of our exact position on the chart, in view of the fact that we had come to the end of the barrier some eighteen miles quicker than the chart had led us to anticipate. Accordingly, Mawson worked up his meridian altitude, while I plotted out the angular distances he had found respectively for Mount Erebus, Mount Lister and Mount Melbourne.
As the result of the application of our calculations to the chart it became evident that we were opposite to what on Captain Scott's chart was termed Charcot Bay, and consequently were nearly twenty miles nearer north than we had thought ourselves to be. This was splendid news, and cheered us up very much.
We were still travelling by night and sleeping during the afternoon, and when we got out of our sleeping-bags at 8 P.M. on the night of the 15th there was a beautifully perfect "Noah's Ark" in the sky. We also saw fleecy sheets of frost-smoke arising from over the open water on Ross Sea, and forming dense cumulus clouds. This warned us that open water was not far away, and impressed us with the necessity of pushing on if we hoped to reach our projected point of departure on the coast for the Magnetic Pole before the sea-ice entirely broke up.
Difficult surfaces continued to beset us, and our progress was consequently exceedingly slow.
By the 24th we were suffering both from exhaustion and want of sleep, and I rued the day when we chose the three-man bag in preference to the one-man bag.
A three-man sleeping-bag, where you are wedged in more or less tightly against your mates, where all snore and shin one another, and where each man feels on waking that he is more shinned against than shinning, is not conducive to real rest.