Product Description

One of the youngest members of Scott's team, Apsley Cherry-Garrard was later part of the rescue party that eventually found the frozen bodies of Scott and three men who had accompanied him on the final push to the Pole. This is his account of an expedition that had gone disastrously wrong.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9056 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

About the Author
Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959) was one of the youngest members of Captain Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic which he joined to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin. After the expedition, Cherry-Garrard served in the First World War and was invalided home. With the zealous encouragement of his neighbour, George Bernard Shaw, Cherry-Garrard wrote The Worst Journey in the World (1922) in an attempt to overcome the horror of the journey. As the years unravelled he faced a terrible struggle against depression, breakdown and despair, haunted by the possibility that he could have saved Scott and his companions.

Customer Reviews

Worst Journey in the World
This moving book of human courage, companionship and self sacrifice is the greatest I have ever read. The haunted, emotive words of the youngest man of the expedition, Cherry Garrard, leap across the years, making it both tragic and gripping, heroic and uplifting, and with final diary enteries of his dying comrades included, heart rendering. A true story of not only the toughest expediton to the South Pole but an account full of human warmth for the men who undertook the journey. At its conclusion one is left by the sense of deep admiration for those who reached beyond their normal selves, against overwhelming odds to achieve the impossible, not for riches, nor fame, but for the sake of universal human knowledge and achievement. My favourite book of all.

Best travel book ever - and then some.
There is a recurrent weakness among travel books, which is this: they all too often give the impression that the author set out on his travels for no better reason than to write about them. This is - emphatically - not one of those books. Polar explorers, these days, are often dismissed as self-glorifying adventures. There is a case for this as far as, say, Shackleton, is concerned, for all his heroic achievements once he was in a tight spot. Scott, on the other hand, merely used the quest for the pole as a selling point for an expedition of scientific research, a reason he felt was very worthwhile indeed. Cherry makes it clear in this book that everyone in the expedition - himself included - was prepared to endure hardships that are almost beyond the imagination of most of us for the sake of adding to mankind's store of knowledge - and in doing so inspires our awed respect and admiration. What they went through in merely reaching the Antarctic continent in the first place is enough to chill the blood. Also, Scott himself is too often dismissed as an incompetent leader who got himself and his men killed - but Cherry redresses that view, and surely no-one is better qualified to make that assessment.
It's unfortunate that the legacy of this expedition, in the public mind, is that of a botched attempt to secure a scrap of glory for the British Empire. If you want to know better, this is the book to read. I may buy another copy just so that I can read it again for the first time.

The best travel book in the World?
"Polar Exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having bad time that has ever been devised..."

So begins Apsley Cherry-Garrard's "The Worst Journey in the World", a book haunted by the possibility that the author's decision to turn his dogs for home on 10th March 1912 may have cost Captain Scott and his two remaining companions their lives. Cherry-Garrard, the second youngest man to sail South in the Terra Nova, initially seemed to be the least suited to the hardships of Edwardian-era polar travel. A quiet, unassuming, chronically shortsighted member of the aristocracy he was initially plagued by self-doubt to almost the same degree as his expedition leader. All the more joyful then to find, in this excellent travel book, the emergence of one of the unsung heroes of the expedition. A gifted, gracious writer Cherry matter-of-factly chronicles the horrors experienced by the party over two long years in the South. The first half of the book records what amounts to Cherry's triumph (though is far too self-critical to acknowledge it as such). His growing confidence and adeptness on the boat journey down to the Antarctic, leading to his selection for the 3-man Winter Expedition to Cape Crozier to collect King Emperor penguin eggs. This 150 mile round trip - the 'Worst Journey' of the title - was undertaken in breath-takingly harsh conditions six months before the attempt on the Pole. Along with Edward Wilson and Henry 'Birdy' Bowers Cherry hauled 790 lbs of stores and equipment across treacherous, uncharted terrain in permanent darkness. The temperature reached minus 76C.

The Winter Journey can be seen as the saving grace for the entire fated trip - carried out at huge personal cost for nothing but the furtherment of scientific knowledge. The text is plain but wholly affecting. "I don't know why our tongues never got frozen but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces." Cherry came through this experience but it had shattered more than his teeth. Phyiscally drained to an extent from which he never really recovered, he was not subsequently selected for the final leg of the Polar assault - a bitter blow to even this humble man. Instead, and maybe worse, he returned to base, waited and, when the Pole party failed to reappear, was ordered out with dogs to find them. He got as far as the infamous One tonne depot - the food & fuel cache which Scott just failed to reach - before blizzards and rations forced him back again. His leader Scott and his best friends Wilson and Bowers were less than two miles distant. The realisation of this fact, uncovered along with the bodies the following spring, broke Cherry completely.

He returned home, fought in the First World War, and afterwards slowly set about both dismantling his country estate and honouring his lost comrades by writing the clearest, closest, most moving account of the tragedy I have read. More than just a dry account for Polar enthusiasts 'Worst Journey..' is a must for anyone who has complained that they were too cold, too tired, too overworked or too undervalued as a human being. Awe-inspiring in content, beautifully written and a real treasure on almost every level "Worst Journey" fully reveals the highs and lows of this famous episode with a magnifcent gentility that many of the men who went South found in the vast empty landscape. True, there are no photographs in my edition (an enormous oversight by the publisher surely) but don't let this put you off. There are plenty of Cherry's prematurely aged face in other Scott books but none have the quiet authority of the words that this man found for this doomed adventure story.