Xavier Mertz - Antarctic

Antarctic

In early 1911, Mertz went to London to meet with the Australian geologist and explorer Douglas Mawson. Mawson, who had served as physicist during Ernest Shackleton's 1908–09 Nimrod Expedition, was planning his own Antarctic expedition. In his application letter, Mertz wrote that he hoped Mawson would be using skis, as "they have proved so good for the purpose & knowing that I am as good as any one on skys." While Mawson was intending to recruit only British subjects (chiefly Australians and New Zealanders), Mertz's qualifications prompted him to make an exception, and hire the Swiss as a ski instructor. First, however, he was given responsibility for the expedition's 49 Greenland Huskies, aboard the expedition ship SY Aurora, bound for Hobart.

On the Aurora, Mertz met Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis, a lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers. Like Mertz, Ninnis was responsible for the expedition's dogs; Aurora's captain, John King Davis, regarded the pair as "idlers". "I wish we had some one on board who could look after ," he wrote in his diary, "it is a great shame that they should suffer from neglect." On 2 December 1911, after final preparations and loading were completed in Hobart, the Aurora sailed south; she stopped briefly at Macquarie Island, where a wireless relay base was established, and reached the site of the expedition's main base at Cape Denison in Adélie Land, on the Antarctic continent, in early January.