Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis

Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis (born January 22, 1887 , † December 14, 1912 on Adelie Land ) was a British polar explorer who accompanied Douglas Mawson on his polar expedition (1911-1914).

Family background

Ninnis' father, Belgrave Ninnis (1837–1922) was a polar explorer. He participated in George Nares' expedition to the Arctic Ocean from 1875 to 1876. His cousin Aubrey Howard Ninnis (1883-1956) in turn was the engineer on board the Aurora , the expedition ship of the Ross Sea Party during the endurance expedition led by Ernest Shackleton .

Ninnis himself had originally embarked on a military career. He was a lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers .

The Australian Antarctic Expedition

Ninnis pulls the sled in December 1912, shortly before his accidental death

In 1911 he joined Douglas Mawson on his expedition to the Antarctic . Ninnis was responsible for the Greenland sled dogs . Together with the Swiss Xavier Mertz and the expedition leader Mawson, Ninnis was part of a three-person expedition team that explored the Antarctic regions on dog sleds in the summer. In December 1912 there was a fatal accident. Ninnis fell into a crevasse with a large part of the supplies and a few sled dogs and was killed in the process. Mawson later wrote about this moment in his expedition report:

“Half out of my mind, I waved to Mertz to bring my sled ... I leaned forward and called out into the dark depths. No sound came back, only the whimpering of a dog that had got stuck 45 meters below on a randomly visible ledge ... Close by, as it seemed in the dark, were the remains of a tent and a linen sack with food for 14 days for three men. We broke open the firn bridge completely, leaned forward secured by a rope and shouted down into the darkness, in the hope that our comrade would still like to be alive. We called incessantly for three hours, but no answer came back. "

Mertz also died on the march back. In the absence of other supplies, Mawson and Mawson ate the dogs. The radical vegetarian Mertz couldn't cope with the switch to a meat diet.

Naming

Numerous geographical objects in the Antarctic, such as the Ninnis Glacier and the Mertz-Ninnis Valley, are reminiscent of Ninnis .

literature

• Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard , Vol. I and Vol. II , William Heinemann, London 1915 (in English, accessed May 26, 2010).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mawson, Home of the Blizzard , Vol. I, pp. 239-242.
2. ↑ Denise Carrington-Smith: Mawson and Mertz: a re-evaluation of their ill-fated mapping journey during the 1911–1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition . In: Med. J. Aust. 183, 2005, pp. 638-641, accessed January 6, 2009.