The Home of the Blizzard

The Home of the Blizzard is the story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914, by Sir Douglas Mawson. The preface says the object of the book is to present a connected narrative of the Expedition from a popular and general point of view. The text recalls that Captain James Cook held that the far-southern lands had no future, yet great profits were being returned to Great Britain and the United States from sealing-stations a few years later.

A sledging account tells of McLean and the writer having very badly cracked lips after several sunny days. On December 5, at the top of a rise, the writer and his companions are suddenly confronted with a new vision: a plain of pack-ice, thickly studded with bergs and intersected by black leads of open water. A short account of Mertz, twenty-eight years of age, single, of Basle, Switzerland, says he was a graduate in Law of the Universities of Leipzig and Berne, and that on January 7, 1913, during a sledging journey, he lost his life.