The Worst Journey In The World (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said Henry David Thoreau when he read the galley proof of Walden and realized what kind of gonif editor he was faced with. Still, it did rather well. So has The Worst Journey, in spite of the fact the Natointal Geograhpic society ! has gotten hold of it.” Now the book is over, and it’s back to my stinkin’ life. This is a fudge sundae of personal history, journals of explorer friends; of mountains, glaciers, ice, crevasses, pemmican and killer whales; of hauling a sledge in the dark at 77 degrees below zero; cold and dark and light in word-pictures from every angle till you see and feel them in your sleep. There are courage and triumph and loyalty and disaster. Yet the only happiness in it is when, well, let’s face it, “All the world loves a penguin.” Cherry clearly loves the Adelie penguins, with their little dinner suits, their cheeky waddle, their brutal life cycle, and their fearlessness. He will make you love them too. Is it wrong to fall in love with an author? I feel like I know him. At just 24, he begged and bribed his way into the expedition—no doubt hoping for high adventure, like a medieval knight—after being initially turned down because of his extreme nearsightedness. Because he couldn’t wear his glasses when sledging (they fogged up), and because he volunteered so often, and because he was “often scared out of my wits,” he suffered more than most of the men from cold, hunger and sickness. He suffered, too, from the loss of his best friends when the Polar party died, and never forgave himself for waiting at One Ton Depot and not taking supplies farther south to relieve them, although on his return to the winter quarters he was so sick he could barely walk. After the Great War he sat down to write an Official Narrative, and in the Introduction apologizes to the Antarctic Committee for leaving out the tedious details they doubtless expected. This is characteristic of his self-effacement throughout. But one can imagine his friend Bernard Shaw, who read and helped write, snorting into his enormous beard.Cherry emphasizes that the Scott expedition was devoted to science, unlike Amundsen’s expedition (which beat them to the Pole, and lived to tell the tale), and he insists that he is writing for the sake of science. But he studied classics, so we will forgive him for writing a memoir instead. They did a lot of scientific observation—geology, zoology, meteorology—and some of it was actually useful, and a little of it makes sense in the text. But the reader is left wondering why in the world these men put themselves through three long years of hellish wind and wet and cold and dark at the risk of their very lives. He does address this: Science is an investment that requires patience, and its returns are seldom quick or obvious. “We are a nation of shopkeepers…If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.”Was it worth it? The question is open.I would knock the book down to four and a half stars if I could because of all the errors. The typos are annoying enough, but there are a couple of places where large chunks of text are missing. During the nightmare Winter Journey (from which, at Bernard Shaw’s suggestion, the book takes its title), Cherry, Wilson and Bowers experimented with different amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fat in their diet. But we never get to find out how it turned out, because the editor decided to skip a very large bit of information, right in the middle of a sentence. And then there are the maps. For their own reasons, the three maps the editors have included show only a few of the places Cherry mentions, not including Cape Adare, Evans Coves, any of the supply depots except One Ton, or THIS THING CALLED THE BARRIER that is basically the protagonist of the book, but nowadays it’s called the Ross Ice Shelf, which good luck figuring that out from the maps because “Map reflects present-day place names.” Seriously? This is the National Geographic Society? There are no pictures in this barren edition, and the maps are terrible, but the Public Library yielded up A First Rate Tragedy by Diana Preston, which has useful maps, some photos, more information, the full names of most of the party (which Cherry leaves out), and a detailed analysis of reasons for the Polar party’s fate. It is not nearly as good a book, but it’s a fine companion. In The Coldest March Susan Solomon, a meteorologist, re-examines the Scott expedition and concludes that the main reason Scott perished was the unusually cold temperatures they encountered on the Ross Ice Shelf. On Solomon’s recommendation, I picked up The Worst Journey, which I would never normally have read. In my (futile) search for a map with Evans Coves on it, I have found more references to this book than any other single source. It is the classic of Polar exploration. I think you should read it.
Never again. Never again will I complain. About anything. The sufferings heaped on the members of Scott’s second polar expedition make the ordinary misfortunes of modern life –- the fender-benders, hangovers and breakups –- seem like pleasant diversions. There are passages in this amazing memoir where the reader, appalled, begins to suspect that these men were collaborating on a metaphysically refined form of self-destruction.Apsley Cherry-Gerrard –- and let me say now what a wonderfully plummy name that is, worthy of some mad squire in a Waugh novel -– was, at twenty-four, the baby of the expedition. Passed over for the doomed ‘Southern Journey’ to the pole, he survived and made it back to England. Years later, at the suggestion of his neighbour, George Bernard Shaw, he put together an account of his experiences, calling it, with good reason, The Worst Journey in the World.Actually, the titular journey is not the famous ‘dash’ to the pole, but rather an earlier sub-expedition Cherry took part in: a hellish five-week slog through the permanent darkness of an Antarctic winter. This has got to be, without question, one of the most whacked, ape-shit schemes in the history of exploration. A few random details: temperatures so low that sweat would freeze the instant it emerged from the pores; frostbitten flesh that would break out in horrid, suppurating blisters, the very pus of which would itself freeze in turn; agonizing eight hour marches that would cover barely a mile, at the end of which Cherry and his two companions would spend an hour thawing out their sleeping bags so they could burrow into them, only to shake and thrash uncontrollably for the rest of the night. Oh, and here’s a nice touch: Cherry’s teeth spontaneously shattered in the -75 degree air. After a few days of this, it occurred to them that they were all going to die in that howling void. Cherry, at least, welcomed the idea:I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on…But I haven’t even told you the truly ape-shit part yet. The ape-shit part is why they did it, the goal of the journey. What, then, could have prompted three otherwise sane men to VOLUNTEER for five weeks of continuous torture? Penguin eggs. That’s right – they were looking for penguin eggs. The narrative of the ‘Winter Journey’ takes up only about 70 pages – or slightly more than a tenth of the book’s total length – but it’s clearly the emotional core of the story. Whereas much of the other material is slapdash and filled out with excerpts from other members’ letters and diaries, here Cherry is speaking in propria persona the whole time. Not a professional writer himself, and repeatedly cautioning that the horrors he endured are indescribable, he nevertheless gets across some of the – for lack of a better word - existential brutality of the journey: We were very silent, it was not easy to talk: but sledging is always a silent business. I remember a long discussion which began just now about cold snaps…what constituted a cold snap? The discussion lasted about a week. Do things slowly, always slowly, was the burden of Wilson’s leadership: and every now and then the question, Shall we go on? and the answer Yes.It almost sounds like Beckett, doesn’t it? A funny thing about The Worst Journey… For the longest time as I read, I had the nagging sense that something was missing; some hovering absence dogged the text, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it hit me: irony. There’s no irony here. Cherry may have died only twenty years or so before I was born, but the world he represents is as different from my own as feudal Japan. He belonged to the last western generation capable of living unironically. Maybe that was his tragedy (his later life was rather sad and haunted) and the tragedy of the whole expedition.Our tragedy is – irony won’t get you to the Pole.
What do You think about The Worst Journey In The World (2006)?
Apsley Cherry-Garrard's 'The Worst Journey in the World' is quite simply a 20th century classic. Published in 1922, the author recounts, in almost six hundred pages, Scott's polar expedition of 1910-1913.I find reviewing this book extremely difficult. I'm probably still in a state of reverential and dumfounded awe after reading such an eloquent masterpiece. In the field of polar exploration or travel writing, this book is utterly astounding.It is now a century past since the exploits of this 'worst journey' were accomplished. The critics of these heroic achievements of exploration still persist in written publications and reviews show their ignorance, whose only experience of a pole is something they lean against while waiting for a bus. As someone who has travelled within the arctic circle and experienced arctic winter, blizzards and frost bite, I know these men were giants.
—Pete daPixie
Read this book and you'll never bitch about stuff like not having enough towels in your hotel room or an over-cooked steak you were served at a restaurant in Paris. Yet another story that makes the modern man relize that there are no more worlds to discover. Polar exploration was just about the last of the travels into the unknown. I don't count space exploration because for that you need an entire country's economy behind you. Now any knob can circle the world with only a credit card. Sic transit gloria mundi.
—Leftbanker
The title is no exaggeration. This is the tale of Captain Scott's ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic told by one of the survivors, with large extracts from Scott's own diary, and the diaries and letters of other members of the team.Three years in some of the harshest conditions on the planet, in a time before portable radios, lightweight fabrics, vitamin tablets or reliable engines, this is a tale of bravery and determination, of abject misery, and ultimately of tragedy. I can assure the reader that had I been part of this expedition I would have deserted by the time the ship (a sailing ship with an auxiliary coal-powered engine!) docked at New Zealand. The conditions these men endured defy belief. Sledging for weeks in near-total darkness (the audacious winter journey for the sole purpose of collecting penguin eggs!), pulling heavy sledges for miles while suffering from frostbite, snow-blindness and probably scurvy, sleeping in frozen reindeer-skin sleeping bags in temperatures as low as -50C.There's a strong tone of British "stiff upper lip", with nobody ever complaining or arguing despite the harrowing conditions. All in all, this is a gripping insight into an epic undertaking that, despite being remembered as a failure, was as much a scientific expedition to Antarctica as a journey to the South Pole, and as such was very successful and provided vital information for future explorers.
—Derek Walsh
