On this day in (engineering) history…
January 17th, 1909 - Edgworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Alistair Mackay become the first to reach the Magnetic South Pole
It is a still bright summer night. The wind is blowing hard, there are kilometres of snow beneath their feet and the temperature is somewhere in the -20s °C. This is Antarctica and three men who are by now exhausted, hungry and cold have just arrived at the Magnetic South Pole. In a short, solemn ceremony they plant a flag and claim the area for the British Empire.
The three men are Professor Edgworth David, a Welsh-Australian Professor of Geology at Sydney University, Douglas Mawson, who lectured in minerology at the University of Adelaide, surgeon Alistair Mackay. They make up the core of the scientific team of Ernest Shackleton’s great 1907 – 1909 expedition to reach the South Pole and are tasked with finding the Magnetic South Pole.
They men don’t know it yet, but the main expedition to reach the South Pole has already failed.
The root of the achievement lies eight years and thousands of miles away at the other end of the world. In 1901, Ernest Shackleton joined Robert F Scott’s British National Antarctic (Discovery) Expedition of 1901 – 1904. In March 1903, 3rd Lieutenant Shackleton was forced to return home after an arduous sledge journey across the Ross Ice Shelf, his health shredded by the experience.
That didn’t end his interest in Antarctica. In February 1907, inspired by Roald Amundsen’s talk at the Royal Geographic Society, Shackleton announced an attempt to reach the Magnetic and geographical South Poles. This would be the British Antarctic (Nimrod) Expedition (1907–09).
As Shackleton began recruiting for the venture, he hit a snag. He had approached many of the men he had worked with on the previous Scott expedition (known as the ‘Discovery’ expedition, named after Scott’s ship). They had largely rejected his offer of adventure because they were signed up for Scott’s next venture. One man he did find was the surgeon, Alistair Mackay.
Short of money and time, Shackleton was forced to leave for Australia in the forty year old ‘Nimrod’, which had been used in hunting seals. After a refit, the expedition set off for Australia.
Professor David and Douglas Mawson already had plans to visit Antarctica, joining the Nimrod in Australia before catching the return voyage. They would be in the frigid continent for weeks at most. This was until Shackleton persuaded them to join the main expedition, Professor David being appointed Chief Scientific Officer.
In New Zealand, the at Lyttleton, 50,000 people turned up to wave goodbye to Nimrod and her crew.
They arrived in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, in early January, 1908. After the ship was (eventually) unloaded and returned to Australia, the sea ice in McMurdo Sound - near Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf (then known as the Barrier) - broke up cutting off any route to the Ross Ice Shelf the pole.
To give the expedition a sense impetus and purpose, Shackleton ordered the climbing of Mt. Erebus, Antarctica’s second highest volcano and the southernmost active volcano on Earth.
The team consisted of Professor Edgeworth David, Sir Douglas Mawson, Dr Alister Mackay, Jameson Adams, Dr Eric Marshall and Phillip Brocklehurst, who couldn’t reach the summit due to badly frostbitten feet. They set out on March 7, but were held up for 24hours at their camp by a blizzard, moving off on the 9th. They summitted after a four hour climb and descended rapidly by sliding down successive snow slopes.
On October 5, 1908, David, Mawson and Mackay set out by motor car to find the Magnetic South Pole. The task was to plant the British flag and claim the surrounding Victoria Land for the British Empire. After the first few miles, they got out of the vehicle and went on foot, man hauling their equipment and supplies .
They rode in a motor car for the first few miles, but sea ice conditions, and poor weather slowed them down. By the end of October, they had crossed McMurdo Sound and moved sixty miles up the Victoria Land coast.
Now they would put all of their effort into locating the Magnetic South Pole. Before leaving the coast, they had to cross the Nordenskjold Ice Tongue and the Drygalski Ice Tongue. After a north-west turn, they headed for where the magnetic pole. It was at this point that David fell into one of the crevasses that criss-cross the ice. Mawson pulled him out before the expedition lost its Chief Scientific Officer.
The Reeves Glacier was their way into the inland plateau, where the hard snow allowed them to make good progress of twelve miles a day. On the January 16, they finally found what they were looking for, measurements that showed they were very close to the Magnetic South Pole, just fifteen miles away.
The next day, the 17th, Alistair Mackay, Edgeworth David, and Douglas Mawson made it to 72° 15' S, 155° 16' E, the Magnetic South Pole, some 7,260 feet (2,210 m) above sea level.
They were left with only 15 days for their return journey of 290 miles. The further they walked, the weaker they became, but still managed to make it to 18 miles from their pick up point with Nimrod. At this point, January31, they were hit by bad weather which held them up until February 2, reaching the rendezvous point later that day, where the team made camp.
They were certainly in time to catch Nimrod, but Nimrod didn’t see them, the camp was hidden by huge drifts of snow. Two days later, after spotting them men, Nimrod returned to pick up the exhausted party. But the drama still wasn’t over.
As they rushed to the ship, Mawson fell 18 feet into a crevasse, but clambered to safety.
After four months wearing the same clothes, the men stank to high heaven. But they were safe.
Postscript: What was not realised at the time was that the Magnetic Poles are not stable, but move over time from place to place. As such, Magnetic South is no longer to be found where David, Mackay and Mawson recorded it. Even so, Mawson and David would both later say they had only reached “an outlier of the main magnetic pole,” not the Pole itself. But still...
Stephen Phillips is a Content Producer at the IET, with passions for history, engineering, tech and the sciences.
