The Worst Journey in the World recounts Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Scott’s team and one of three men to make and survive the notorious Winter Journey, draws on his firsthand experiences as well as the diaries of his compatriots to create a stirring and detailed account of Scott’s legendary expedition. Cherry himself would be among the search party that discovered the corpses of Scott and his men, who had long since perished from starvation and brutal cold. It is through Cherry’s insightful narrative and keen descriptions that Scott and the other members of the expedition are fully memorialized.
Henry Bowers, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Bill Wilson took 35 days to collect three emperor penguin eggs in July 1911. In the middle of the Antarctic winter, they had to survive intense blizzards and temperatures that plunged to –60C. It was pitch black and the three had to navigate by candlelight and the stars. They took turns falling into crevasses. Cherry’s teeth chattered so violently that they shattered, while Wilson was blinded in one eye by a blob of boiling blubber from a camp stove.
In the end, the three men – members of Robert Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole – returned to their base camp, utterly exhausted and close to death, with the three penguin eggs packed in their sleds. Cherry never recovered from the ordeal – which he vividly described in his book, The Worst Journey in the World – while Wilson and Bowers died with Scott on his final trek back from the pole. The eggs were supposed to reveal the evolutionary links between reptiles and birds but their collection nearly killed the journey’s participants.
Read more: Worst Journey in World – Apsley Cherry-Garrard
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
