Download Mawson and the Ice Men of the Heroic Age: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen AudioBook Free
Australia's best-selling nonfiction author of all time. Douglas Mawson, blessed in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia's ideal Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 mls of which acquired never noticed the tread of any human foot. After establishing Main Platform at Cape Denision and Western Platform on Queen Mary Land, he going east on an extraordinary sledging trek along with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After five weeks, tragedy struck. Ninnis was swallowed whole with a snow-covered crevasse, and Mawson and Mertz realised it was too dangerous to be on. With all the scant food and procedures they had kept, turning back was almost similarly perilous. Their dwindling products forced those to kill their canines to give food to the other canines, at first, and then themselves. Food cravings, sickness and despair eventually received the better of Mertz, and he succumbed to madness and then to fatality. Mawson found himself alone, 160 mls from safe practices, with next to no food. Peter FitzSimons says the staggering story of Mawson's success, despite all the chances, arriving back again just in time to see his save ship disappearing in the horizon. He also masterfully interweaves the reviews of the other giants from the Heroic Years of Polar Exploration - Scott of the Antarctic, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen - to bring the jaw-dropping happenings of the bygone period dazzlingly back again to life.
