Mertz and Ninnis
Two young Antarctic explorers who perished tragically on the frozen continent are to be honoured with a new memorial in Hobart.
PROUD OF HIS EFFORTS, Royal Fusiliers Lieutenant Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis grabbed a nail and hammer and made his personal mark on newly cut timber – nail point by nail point. Recently landed in January 1912 on an unexplored coastline, Ninnis and 17 companions from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) had been hard at work erecting a prefabricated hut nearly 2700km south of Hobart, on Cape Denison – a tiny, recently named peninsula on the frigid shores of Commonwealth Bay.
Fearsome winter blizzards would shortly descend on them, and the small party was wasting no time getting organised for their expected year-long stay. After two weeks of strenuous effort, the hut neared completion and a soon-to-be enclosed skylight frame offered Ninnis the perfect opportunity for some illicit graffiti. It was an irresistible ‘I was here’ moment for the spirited 24-year-old English subaltern – a personal time capsule that would not be uncovered until 1998 when the Mawson’s Huts Foundation conducted the first thorough conservation program on the building. His nail-point inscription read: “B.E.S. NINNIS. JAN 24. 1912.” but tragically, before year’s end, that graffiti’s author would be dead.
Most of Ninnis’s companions were, as the expedition’s name suggests, Australians or New Zealanders. Their leader was 29-year-old Dr Douglas Mawson, a geologist from the University of Adelaide, and a veteran of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1907–09.
In his account of the AAE, The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson wrote of the unique opportunity this new expedition afforded for the “young men of a young country” to prove themselves against the traditions of British polar exploration stretching back to the 1770s and James Cook’s circumnavigation of Antarctica. Unsurprisingly then, all but one of Mawson’s party was either born in the antipodes, or, for a minority that included both Ninnis and Mawson, in Britain itself. The odd man out was Dr Xavier Guillaume Mertz, a 29-year-old lawyer, ski champion and mountaineer from Basel in Switzerland. Like Ninnis, Mertz would also not live to return home.
While stationed in South Africa in 1909, Ninnis learnt of plans for a second Antarctic expedition to be led by Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott. The National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–04 had met with limited success under Scott’s command. But this time Scott was determined to reach the ultimate geographical prize of the age – the South Geographical Pole.
Ninnis’s father (also Belgrave Ninnis) had been surgeon on Sir George Nares’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, and now the prospect of the largest and best equipped British party yet to venture to either pole certainly piqued the younger Ninnis’s interest. He headed home to plead his case in person but Scott turned him down. Nonetheless, Ninnis’s eagerness made an impression on Mawson who was in England at that time drumming up support for his own expedition.
With the intention of working in his family’s engineering business, Mertz had gained a doctorate in patent law from the University of Bern. While a student, his outdoor prowess saw him make a number of first ascents of peaks in the Alps, and in 1908 he won the Swiss ski jumping championship among a number of prizes. Hearing of Mawson’s plans, and armed with a further doctorate – this time in science with a specialisation in glaciology – Mertz, like Ninnis, also travelled to London in the hope of finding a path to Antarctica.
While Mawson’s patriotic and nationalistic intent was predictable for the time, the makeup of his young party left him with a worrying dearth of personnel who had any snow or ice experience. But with both his outstanding climbing and skiing credentials, Mertz was a logical choice as a ski and mountaineering instructor, and so Mawson made an exception to his stated preference for Britishness.
An aged but sound former Newfoundland sealing vessel, Aurora, was secured by Mawson as the expedition’s transport. And despite their total inexperience, Ninnis and Mertz were duly appointed as novice sledge-dog handlers for the long voyage from England to Australia. Aboard Aurora, the two young men quickly bonded over the care of 48 unruly Greenland canines and the pair struck up a close friendship that would endure for the remainder of their short lives. They left London in July 1911, and Aurora finally set sail from Hobart for Macquarie Island, and then Antarctica, on 2 December.
Mawson’s plan had been to set up three exploratory bases on the Antarctic coast. But running desperately short of time before the onset of winter, two of those bases were merged into one at Cape Denison. The third party headed west in Aurora under the experienced command of Frank Wild, a veteran of the first expeditions of both Shackleton and Scott.
By February 1912, the Cape Denison hut was complete and a relieved party bunkered down to wait out the winter darkness. That winter was brutal by any measure, with wind speeds reaching as much as 290km/h. In early August, Mertz and Ninnis ventured just 8km inland with supplies for a depot established the previous March. But with the expedition pinned down through a near-relentless succession of blizzards, Mawson’s exploratory ambitions looked in danger of remaining unfulfilled by the time of the expected return of Aurora, in mid-January 1913.
Finally though, at the end of October, a concerted sledging campaign was underway. Parties relying on their own muscle to haul their sledges headed south, west, and east along the coast. A further group, known as the Far Eastern Party, left Cape Denison on 10 November with two teams of dogs and the intention of reaching Oates Land, and possibly Cape Adare at the head of the Ross Sea. A return journey of more than 1000km lay ahead. Mawson himself led this group, with his two dog handlers, Mertz and Ninnis, as companions.
The going was tough, but the trio made good progress. After a month on the trail, they were nearly 500km from Cape Denison. Then, on the morning of 14 December, calamity struck. The day started like any other in a string of long days. Mawson had taken the opportunity to write up his journal as he rode on the forward sledge. Mertz skied ahead, scouting the best route through a stretch of crevassed terrain while also giving the dogs something to chase. Ninnis brought up the rear, running alongside the second dog team. But as Mawson paused to record their latitude, he glanced up. He saw that Mertz had stopped and was gazing back over the path just travelled, looking anxiously to where Ninnis and the second dog team should have been.
They were gone without trace, vanished as if the ice had silently opened up, swallowing them in one monstrous gulp. Fearing the worst, Mawson and Mertz raced back over their tracks only to be confronted by the sight of a chasm disappearing from brilliant blue into an inky blackness. Not a sound came from the depths of that ugly maw other than the pathetic whimper of a dying dog. The concealed lid of a 3m-wide crevasse had collapsed, and Ninnis, his entire dog team, the second sledge, and much of their food and vital equipment, had vanished into the abyss.
The pair called into the depths for several hours, but the echo of their own voices was the only grim reply. They were finally forced to accept the unthinkable – their much-loved companion was lost to them. With less than two weeks of rations remaining, a desperate Mawson and Mertz turned immediately for Cape Denison. To augment their meagre supplies, the pair was forced to progressively shoot and eat the remaining dogs as each one weakened. A scrawny bunch at best, the dogs lasted for just two weeks before the last of them was killed – their livers bringing an easy, if noisome, reward for the effort of butchery and cooking.
As the year turned, Mertz’s health began failing fast. He was possibly suffering from hypervitaminosis A, unwittingly poisoned by excessive amounts of vitamin A concentrated in the livers the pair were eating. Frost-bitten, delirious and agitated, Mertz was dragged by Mawson on a sledge for a time, but to no avail. On the morning of 8 January, Mawson found himself now utterly alone, reading the burial service for the champion Swiss skier, the odd one out who had become such a vital personality among an otherwise very British group of young antipodeans.
By the time Mawson finally reached Cape Denison after a herculean struggle for his lone survival, Aurora had come, waited as long as she dared, and then departed, anxious to relieve Frank Wild’s party before the winter. With a small group of six remaining at the hut, Mawson endured a second winter as harsh as the first, before Aurora arrived at Cape Denison for a third and final time in December 1913.
In preparation for their departure, the remaining members of the expedition erected a memorial cross to their two fallen comrades, Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz, and their brave sacrifice and contribution to science. Restored and reinforced in 1998, the cross survives to this day on top of Azimuth Hill, immediately to the west of the hut that Ninnis so gleefully personalised in January 1912. Visible from most of Cape Denison, the cross appears as a moving signpost – two splinters of wood bolted together, pointing the way to the eternal white sepulchre of the Antarctic wilderness in which both men lie.
A new memorial to Mertz and Ninnis is planned for Hobart from where Aurora sailed in 1911. It’s due to be unveiled in November after COVID-19 delayed its original launch date of July during the Antarctic Festival.