Crevasse Roulette by Jon Stephenson - Review

Crevasse Roulette
by
Jon Stephenson
Rosenberg, (2009).


Jon Stephenson was the first Australian to reach the South Pole since the Amundsen expedition in 1913. But the adventure was to remain locked in his memory until recently when he decided to commit his story to print. Published in 2009, Crevasse Roulette is Jon’s remarkable story of the 1957-58 trans-Antarctic crossing. Although it happened 50 years ago, it reads as if it was only yesterday.

In 1956, the young Australian geologist was studying in London. He had dreamed of going to Antarctica, so imagine his delight when ‘Bunny’ Fuchs invited him to become a member of the 1957-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The plan was to cross from the Weddell Sea, via the South Pole, to Scott Base at the other side of the continent. It was to be the first overland crossing of Antarctica.

The expedition included 18 huskies. Driving one of the two teams to the South Pole, Jon was the first to do so since Amundsen in 1912. He remembers the attachment he had for his dogs. Today dogs are prohibited from travelling to the continent for fear they may transmit disease. This makes Jon’s trek even more remarkable, as such a journey will never be repeated.

Jon experienced a winter of 24 hour nights and freezing temperatures, and as one of the two pathfinders for the mission, recollects setting off on the 2000 mile journey crossing ‘country which no one had ever seen’. He zig-zagged the unforgiving ice which, at any time, could collapse beneath him, plummeting him and his team down a crevasse. He describes one lucky escape: ‘I felt the ground suddenly give way under me and just managed to catch myself on one elbow and my chin.’ With a gaping dark hole beneath him, he describes it as: ‘the stuff of nightmares’.

Crevasse Roulette is well written and is illustrated by Jon’s remarkable original photographs. For anyone who loves a challenge, has a sense of adventure and is awed by the aura of the unforgiving Antarctic continent, I thoroughly recommend this real-life adventure.

Frozen in time – the tale of two amazing dogs

Dog's bones - the oldest and the coldest!
The remains of two amazing dogs, frozen in time, echo the past. One reflects the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration, the other reaches back to the hearty days of Henry VIII.

If only the bones could speak, what a tale those canine ghosts could tell!

When Henry VIII’s warship, Mary Rose, sank off the coast of Portsmouth in 1545, hundreds of sailors and soldiers, went to the bottom of the Solent with her.

The Mary Rose had been sent out with other Tudor navy vessels to engage the approaching French fleet, but without a cannon being fired, the king’s favorite warship heeled over allowing water to pour in through her open gunports. In full view of the royal party, the ship sank to the bottom of the busy roadstead. Settled in layers of silt, the Mary Rose remained there for hundreds of years until twenty years ago when a mammoth effort succeeded in lifting the remains of the near 500 year old ship.

After transporting the remains of the ship's hull to the Royal Naval Dockyard, restoration work began and today the Mary Rose is still undergoing preservation.
Amongst the artifacts collected from the wreck and only recently released for display, is the skeleton of a dog which had been aboard on that fateful day. This exhibit proved to be a star attraction at this years Cruft's Dog Show.

But who had this mongrel dog belonged to - the Captain or one of the nobles? As it was found near the hatch to the carpenter’s cabin, it has been named, Hatch. Being a terrier, it probably was kept busy catching rats as there were no cats on board. Cats were thought to bring bad luck.


During the Heroic Era of exploration in Antarctica, many of the famous explorers used huskies to pull the sledges. Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton, Mawson and others before them all used dogs. In some instances, when provisions ran out, the dogs were killed for food. But eating dogs’ liver, which contains toxic levels of vitamin A, at times proved fatal to some of the explorers.

Captain Scott refused to kill either dogs or ponies for food but in the end he and his four companions died near the South Pole during their unsuccessful attempt to return from it. Scott's unrealistic expectations of the ponies, and his attitude to the dogs, contributed to his disastrous final expedition.

Following the Madrid Protocol on protection of Antarctica, a ruling was made that dogs of any kind should not be allowed on the continent, the reason being that they had the potential to carry and transmit diseases (e.g. distemper) to the polar wildlife – namely penguins and seals.

But the fate of all the dogs which ever went to the pole is not known. Some were returned to northern Europe to work on the snow fields, some died on the Antarctic continent, their carcasses being preserved for who-knows-how long.

In 1998 the carcass of a husky was recovered from the Antarctic Plateau near Cape Denison. How long it had been buried in the snow, no one knows.

I wonder whose sledging team this dog was part of. I wonder if it died on an expedition or ran away. From all appearance of the curled up carcass, it would appear that the dog had settled itself in the snow and gone to sleep, however, its body had succumbed to the sub-zero temperatures with its carcass quickly being covered by the snow of the driving blizzards.
Today the dogs remains are regarded as a historical artifact and preserved as part of the heritage of a bye-gone era.

More to come on Antarctica and a dog sled team.

Pic of Mary Rose, by Geoff Hunt
Pic of 'Hatch' the dog with John Lippiett, Chief Executive of the Mary Rose Trust.
Husky pics from Australian Antarctic Division website.