The Worst Journey in the World

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910-1913 British expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica. It was written and published in 1922 by a survivor of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and has earned wide praise for its frank treatment of the difficulties of the expedition, the causes of its disastrous outcome, and the meaning (if any) of human suffering under extreme conditions.

1 Preparations and the Worst Journey
2 Later: the tragedy and the book
3 Honors and retellings
4 References

[edit] Preparations and the Worst Journey

In 1910, Cherry-Garrard and his fellow explorers traveled by sailing vessel, the Terra Nova, from Cardiff to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. 'Cherry' was teased at first by some of the other members of this expedition because of his lack of Antarctic experience, his lack of specialized credentials for the position of 'zoologist' to which he had been named, and persistent suspicions among some of his comrades that he had in fact bought his way on board by contributing £1,000 to the expedition's troubled funds.

Cherry-Garrard responded to these taunts with modesty, a self-sacrificial ability to work hard, and acute observational skills. These traits were to serve him well when it came time for him to write down his memories of the expedition. They also caught the eye of the expedition's second-in-command, Dr. Edward Wilson, who adopted Cherry-Garrard as a protégé.

Dr. Wilson's personal goal in Antarctica was to recover eggs of the Emperor penguin for scientific study. As the bird nests during the Antarctic winter, it was necessary to mount a special expedition in 1911 from the expedition's base at Cape Evans to the penguins' rookery at Cape Crozier. Wilson chose Cherry-Garrard to accompany him and 'Birdie' Bowers across the Ross Ice Shelf under conditions of complete darkness and temperatures of -40 and below. It was this Winter Journey, not the later expedition to the South Pole, that Cherry-Garrard later described as The Worst Journey in the World.

[edit] Later: the tragedy and the book

All three men, barely alive, returned from Cape Crozier with their egg specimens, which were stored as the expedition swing into preparations for a march from Cape Evans to the as-yet-undiscovered South Pole. This second and much longer march, in contrast with the Worst Journey, was to be done during the Antarctic 'summer' in 1911-1912.

Scott's game plan called for a large body of men to start out southward from their base, man-hauling food and fuel on sledges. It was mathematically impossible for all of them to reach the South Pole, and as the party progressed southward, the leader was forced to issue repeated orders to subgroups within the expedition to take their empty sledges and head back northward.

Cherry-Garrard accompanied this southward party across the Ross Ice Shelf and up the Beardmore Glacier, an ice tongue that discharges ice from the South Polar Plateau down onto the shelf. The tender-hearted Scott, with his High Romantic sensibilities, found it difficult to issue orders that would separate the remaining members of the party from any chance of seeing the South Pole. For Cherry-Garrard, the dread command came at the top of the glacier. At the edge of the polar plateau, he was told that he would have to return northward.

The men not chosen to go on to the Pole reassembled at the base camp at Cape Evans and waited there through 1912 for Scott and four companions to rejoin them, but the expedition's leader never returned. In 1912-1913 Cherry Garrard and other survivors once again marched southward, this time to try to find traces of their lost comrades. Cherry-Garrard's description of the frozen tent that contained three of them is one of the most dramatic sections of the book. Inside the tent were the remains of Scott and Cherry-Garrard's two companions on the Worst Journey, Bowers and Wilson.

Cherry-Garrard's description of the closing scenes of the expedition, based on lengthy excerpts from his own journal, transitions first into a gentle and empathetic description of Scott's mistakes, and then into a written meditation on the themes of self-sacrifice and heroism.

Although The Worst Journey in the World was published only nine years after the end of the Scott expedition, that short length of time had made clear that new technology, particularly caterpillar-tread vehicles and airplanes, would revolutionize future work in the Antarctic and make much of the suffering endured by Scott and his men unnecessary.

The Worst Journey in the World asks, but does not answer, the question of whether this suffering was futile, or whether it would inspire future human beings facing very different challenges.