Product Description

MAWSON'S WILL is the dramatic story of what Sir Edmund Hillary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history." For weeks in Antarctica, Douglas Mawson faced some of the most daunting conditions ever known to man: blistering wind, snow, and cold; loss of his companion, his dogs and supplies, the skin on his hands and the soles of his feet; thirst, starvation, disease, snowblindness - and he survived.
Sir Douglas Mawson is remembered as the young Australian who would not go to the South Pole with Robert Scott in 1911, choosing instead to lead his own expedition on the less glamorous mission of charting nearly 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline and claiming its resources for the British Crown. His party of three set out through the mountains across glaciers in 60-mile-per-hour winds. Six weeks and 320 miles out, one man fell into a crevasse, along with the tent, most of the equipment, all of the dogs' food, and all except a week's supply of the men's provisions.
Mawson's Will is the unforgettable story of one man's ingenious practicality and unbreakable spirit and how he continued his meticulous scientific observations even in the face of death. When the expedition was over, Mawson had added more territory to the Antarctic map than anyone else of his time. Thanks to Bickel's moving account, Mawson can be remembered for the vision and dedication that make him one of the world's great explorers.

"A riveting account . . . makes Mawson's achievement a symbol of the desire to live." -- The New York Times Book Review

"A powerful reading experience." -- Publishers Weekly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231195 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-04
• Released on: 2000-02-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
One of the Ten Best Books of Twentieth-Century Exploration -- The Explorer's Club

About the Author
Australian author LENNARD BICKEL reconstructed Mawson's journey from the diaries of Mawson and other members of his expedition. He is the author of seven books, including Shackleton's Forgotten Men.

Customer Reviews

The light in his soul
Doug Mawson just kept going through the antarctic freezing climate on foot when it would have been much easier to just go to sleep and never wake up. A brilliantly written and experienced account.

Never Give Up
Lennard Bickel's "Mawson's Will" is the story of Australian geologist Douglas Mawson's 1911-1912 Expedition to Antarctica, and more particularly, his desparate struggle to return alone from a sledging expedition gone badly.

While exploring a previously untraveled portion of the Antarctic coastal plateau, Mawson loses one traveling companion, and most of his team's supplies and sled dogs, in a crevasse. His other companion dies an agonizing and lingering death of a mysterious illness. Mawson, himself suffering the same symptoms, marshals his remaining food and limited strength to walk back to the expedition's base through horrendous conditions of weather and terrain.

Bickel, working from the surviving diaries of the expedition members and interviews with family members, does a remarkable job of recreating Mawson's heroic struggle. The story is told in the third person, yet through Bickel's narrative, we are able to share in Mawson's heart-breaking daily dilemmas, as he leans out his remaining food, adapts his gear to overcome the ice and snow, and forces his rapidly deteriorating body to carry on. Mawson, possessed of a fierce will to live and a strong faith in God, was determined to fight to the last step and be open to any possibility of survival or rescue. Bickel's narrative allows us to appreciate the inner struggle of will as well as the outer one against the elements.

Mawson's expedition occured in the same timeframe as the Amundsen and Scott expeditions to the South Pole, and consequently received much less notice at the time. Bickel's narrative does an excellent job of capturing the dramatic arc of the expedition's story. This book is highly recommended to readers of polar exploration.

Bickel's Gift
Rarely has fiction served the truth so well. Rarely has the truth served fiction so well.

Mawson's own account of his ordeal, in "The Home of The Blizzard", seems relatively matter of fact. We may not have marvelled at Mawson's accomplishment in surviving if we relied only on his way of telling it. Although a good writer, his specialities were geography and exploration.

Bickel's presentation here in "Mawson's Will" makes Mawson's accomplishment more touching than Mawson's own presentation. But it took an extraordinary writing accomplishment by Bickel to convey Mawson's accomplishment. Poetic license? To fail to understand how much faithful art it took to go from Mawson's diaries and book to Bickel's account would be to not appreciate how much effort and skill it took for Bickel to bring Mawson's tale so fully alive. If Bickel hadn't taken poetic license, this tale may have been of more interest to the most purist historian but it would have been of far less human interest. Sensitive to our lack of understanding of the Antartic experience, Bickel put us there in a way we never could have gotten from Mawson's own account. The last one hundred pages of "Mawson's Will" are as riveting as anything I've read in years.

Bickel's faithfulness to Mawson has made this a special work of art. Because of Bickel, we can be amazed at how Mawson survived and understand something profound about the human will.

P.S. I wake up the next day to find the story is still strong on my mind. Mawson returned to Australia to find his beloved waiting, married her, in time actually returned to the Antartic for exploration, and lived til 73. While we may never face as extreme a challenge as he did, there seems lessons here in the value of perserverence, in the benefits of careful self-management, and in the role of loved ones in making life worth living. This is an unusual book and Mawson and Bickel have made a special contribution far beyond whether land was claimed through exploration.