Douglas Mawson: The Antarctic Explorer Who Ate His Own Sled Dogs to Survive
In January 1913, a man staggered into a hut on the coast of Antarctica, alone, half-starved, and missing most of the skin on the soles of his feet, which he had taped back on so he could keep walking. He had been dragging a sledge he'd sawn in half with a pocket knife because it was too heavy to haul by himself. He had eaten his own dogs, liver included, which — though nobody realised it at the time — was quietly poisoning him. And when he finally reached safety, the ship sent to rescue him had sailed a few hours before he got there.
That man was Douglas Mawson, and if you think your commute is rough, read on.
A three-man sledging party, a very long way from home
Mawson was a geologist by trade, which is a polite way of saying he was the kind of person who looked at the single most hostile landmass on Earth and thought, "I should go and catalogue its rocks." In 1911 he led the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, a three-year mission to map and study George V Land and Adélie Land — a stretch of coastline south of Australia that, at the time, basically nobody had properly looked at. The expedition set up its main base at Cape Denison, a spot Mawson himself would later dub "the windiest place on Earth," where katabatic winds pour off the polar plateau at speeds that can top 300 km/h. Charming place to pitch a hut.
In November 1912, Mawson set out with two companions on what became known as the Far Eastern Party: Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis, a British Army officer, and Dr Xavier Mertz, a Swiss skier and lawyer. The plan was to sledge far along the coast with dog teams, mapping as they went. It started well enough. Then, on 14 December, more than 500 kilometres from base, Ninnis — walking alongside the lead sledge — vanished. He'd stepped onto a thin snow bridge covering a crevasse, and it gave way beneath him.
Mawson and Mertz called down into the crevasse for hours. There was no reply, only the whimper of an injured dog far below — the drop was too sheer, the ropes too short, to reach him. Ninnis was gone, and so, catastrophically, was the sledge he'd been walking beside: the one carrying the stronger dog team, the tent, and almost all of the party's remaining food.
Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-14. Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The trek back: eating the dogs, and an accidental poisoning nobody understood yet
Mawson and Mertz were left with one sledge, a single spare tent cover rigged over skis, and about ten days of food between two men who were roughly 500 kilometres from home. There was nothing left for the six remaining dogs, so the men did the only thing that could keep them alive: they fed the weakest dogs to the others, and then, one by one, ate the dogs themselves — meat, and organs, including the liver, which was considered a nutritious way to stretch painfully scarce rations.
It should have worked. It very nearly did — for the first week they made solid progress. Then, not long after dragging themselves and their sledge across a vast glacier, Mertz began to fade. He'd lost his waterproof overpants along with Ninnis's sledge, so his clothes stayed wet and freezing. By 30 December, Mawson noted his companion was "off colour." Over the following days Mertz grew weaker, delirious, and increasingly unwell — his skin, Mawson recorded with evident alarm, had begun peeling away from his legs.
At the time, nobody could explain it. Mawson suspected colitis. It wasn't until 1969 that researchers Cleland and Southcott put forward the explanation now most widely accepted: hypervitaminosis A — vitamin A poisoning. Husky liver, it turns out, is extraordinarily concentrated in vitamin A, far beyond anything the human body can process, and the very organ meat the men were relying on to survive was slowly and savagely toxic. Skin shedding, hair loss, and the delirium both men experienced line up unsettlingly well with the symptoms. It's a bitter irony: the food that should have saved them may have helped kill one of them instead.
Mertz died in the early hours of 8 January 1913, roughly 160 kilometres from the hut, after a final stretch of raving and refusing food. Mawson buried him in his sleeping bag beneath blocks of snow and, now entirely alone, carried on.
A hundred-mile crawl, and a ship that left a few hours too soon
What followed is the part of the story that sounds made up. Mawson was suffering the same symptoms that had killed Mertz — the skin was coming away from the soles of his feet, which he reportedly bound back on with bandages so he could keep walking. He sawed his sledge in half with a pocket knife to make it light enough to haul alone, fell into a crevasse himself and hauled himself out hand over hand on sheer willpower, and was pinned down for days at a time by blizzards in a tent built for three, now occupied by one increasingly skeletal man.
He pushed on anyway, navigating by dead reckoning across hundreds of kilometres of featureless ice, and — this is the detail that really deserves its own small plaque — on 1 February he reached a supply shelter called Aladdin's Cave and found, sitting there waiting for him, oranges and a pineapple. Fresh fruit. In Antarctica. It was unmistakable proof the relief ship had arrived at base. He was so close.
Then the weather turned and pinned him down for another week.
On 8 February 1913, Mawson finally crested the ridge above Cape Denison and looked down at the hut — just in time to watch the ship Aurora disappearing over the horizon. It had waited three weeks for him and sailed only a few hours earlier. Five men had stayed behind at the hut specifically in case he turned up, and they ran out to meet him, but the ship itself was already gone. There was no radio chase, no turning back for one bedraggled survivor. Mawson had walked out of one of the most horrific ordeals in exploration history, alone, having buried two companions along the way, and the reward for his survival was another ten months stuck at the bottom of the world waiting for the next boat.
If you ever need a benchmark for "missed it by minutes," this is it.
The sledge Mawson cut down with a pocket knife so he could haul it alone. Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Knighted, immortalised, and briefly worth a hundred dollars
Mawson made it home to Australia a national hero and was knighted the following year, in 1914. He went on to lead another Antarctic expedition in the late 1920s and helped secure Australia's claim to a vast slice of the continent — though it's fair to say nothing he did afterward quite topped "survived solo across Antarctica on dog liver and sheer stubbornness." In 1954, Australia named a permanent Antarctic research station, Mawson Station, after him, and it's still staffed today. From 1984 to 1996, his face looked out from the Australian hundred-dollar note, meaning there was a solid chunk of the 1980s and 90s where Australians were routinely handing each other a man who once ate his own huskies to survive.
It's the kind of story that makes modern inconveniences feel a bit smaller. Next time your flight's delayed by a few hours, spare a thought for the man who walked for weeks across a frozen continent, arrived precisely on time, and still missed the boat by minutes.
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