Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
78
a pair, the men were resigned to relaying them for many weeks to come. First, they would
haul the sledge with camp gear and scientific instruments for a third or half a mile, then
they would hike back to the sledge loaded with provisions and haul it up to the first. This
procedure meant that on the outward leg of the journey they would be covering their dis-
tances three times.
On the morning of October 13, they reached Butter Point, having taken eight days
to travel a distance that some previous parties had achieved in two. Already they were
well behind the schedule Shackleton had set. To lighten their loads, they cached seventy
pounds of food and gear at Butter Point and turned north, crossing New Harbour the
next day. On October 15, one of the finest days of the journey, the men enjoyed excellent
views up Ferrar Glacier. David wrote, “Towards evening we had a wonderful vision of
several large icebergs close ahead of us; it seemed that they were only a mile or so distant,
as one could see clearly the re-entering angles and bright reflected sides of the bergs lit up
in rays of the setting sun. Suddenly, as if by magic, they all vanished. They had momen-
tarily been conjured up to our view by a wonderful mirage.”
For the latter half of October, the party worked its way north along the coast, averag-
ing four or five miles on a good day. Conditions on the sea ice varied greatly. At places the
ice was mercifully smooth; in others, it was cracked and shingled by compression. On sev-
eral occasions, the party had to cross leads over thin, recently frozen ice. Rough sastrugi
were common obstacles, and freshly fallen snow always was a drag on the hauling. Back
at Cape Royds, Mackay had rigged a sail out of the tent bottom and poles, but it could be
used during precious few intervals.
The view of the mountains north of New Harbour was attenuated across a broad,
ice-covered piedmont. Although high ranges appeared to rise behind the foothills, the
character of these mountains remained vague. Scattered along the shore of the piedmont
were a number of promontories and small islands, which the geologists visited and sam-
pled at every opportunity. The buVet oVered a variety of metamorphic rocks and granite.
At each camp Mawson would shoot a round of summits with his theodolite (a surveying
instrument with a telescope that measures vertical and horizontal angles), mapping the
positions of the mountains as the party moved northward. On October 25-26 the party
passed the mouth of Granite Harbour, resisting the temptation to “geologize” among the
cliVs that Scott, Wilson, Shackleton and Koettlitz had spot-sampled seven years before.
Scott's original plotting of Granite Harbour from the Discovery had it twenty miles farther
north than David's party found it to be, based on the readings from their sledge meter (a
wheeled device attached to the back of a sledge that recorded distance traveled).
The rate at which the party moved was woefully inadequate to allow any chance of
reaching the magnetic pole. The only hope for increasing speed was to lighten the load.
As early as October 23, David had proposed the possibility of caching food and supplies
and marching forward on half rations. Mawson and Mackay had agreed. For the next
week, they mulled over the details and kept a lookout for a proper spot for laying their de-
pot. On October 30 they picked the spot, an islet three-quarters of a mile oVshore and ten
miles north of the mouth of Granite Harbour. For the geologists this prominent point of
land, which they called Depot Island, had the added attraction of a suite of exceptionally
large and unusual metamorphic minerals.
