A Survival Story

Douglas Mawson was born in 1882 in Yorkshire, England.  When he was just two years old, his family moved to Australia.  He was a smart boy and enjoyed nature.  He went to college when he was only sixteen.  He became the youngest Australian to publish articles on radioactive materials.  He then got a job at Adelaide University.  He lectured on the structure of rocks.  When he was 26, he was asked to join an expedition headed by the famous British explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton.  The expedition was the first to climb Mt. Erebus and reach the magnetic South Pole by dragging their sleds over 1500 miles.  In 1911, he organized the first Australian exploration of Antarctica.  While he was there, he had to battle winds up to 300 kilometers per hour, but he gained a lot of valuable information from the expedition. 

The next spring, Mawson started another expedition with a Swiss scientist and skiing champion named Xavier Mertz, and a British soldier, Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis.  They set out to explore glaciers, map the coast, and collect rock samples.  Together, they traveled more than 1000 kilometers, with dogs pulling their sleds.  By late January 1913, Ninnis had plunged down a crevice and Mertz had died of exhaustion.  Mawson had already eaten the dogs, and had almost no food left.  He was completely alone.  He was so unhealthy that, every morning, he had to reattach the soles of his feet.  He still had over one hundred miles to help.  Many times, he had narrowly missed walking blindly into crevices hidden in the snow.  Suddenly, he felt himself falling.  The rope to his sled pulled his harness into his stomach.  He was hanging over a dark, bottomless hole.  He could feel the sled moving closer to the crevice.  It was the only thing keeping him from falling to his death.  Suddenly, the sled stopped moving closer.  He could not gain a foothold on the side of the crevice, and he would have to pull himself up the fourteen foot rope.  He was in horrible shape from almost starving to death for a long time.  He slowly climbed to the top, but he slipped back down to the bottom of the rope again.  Somehow, he managed to climb all of the way back up the fourteen foot rope and pull himself out of the hole.  Somehow, he managed to walk the last hundred miles to help and safety.  It took him thirty days with no food. 

Later, he would lead two more expeditions in his forties, which he carefully planned and were very successful.  It is because of his work that Australia owns almost half of Antarctica.  Douglas Mawson died in 1958 in Adelaide, South Australia.  I think that Douglas Mawson was a strong and brave individual who was able to pull through even when it seemed impossible to.