The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Lives up to its Name

Imagine a slow, painful disaster.

Imagine yourself and your friends trudging across a seemingly-endless plain of ice, battered by bitter wind and nursing multiple bruises, each pulling over 100 lbs of food and equipment toward a distant, invisible goal. Imagine a colleague collapsing for the third time today and hauling himself back up on broken legs. Imagine dwindling supplies of biscuit and contaminated pemmican. Imagine the sun circling the horizon like a vulture. Imagine death climbing your frostbitten limbs. Imagine later explorers piling stones in the ice, constructing a grave for the last martyrs of Prewar Britain.

 

Whatever you imagined was probably more dramatic and exciting than Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s expedition memoir The Worst Journey in the World.

Published in 1922, Cherry-Garrard’s account of exploration, camaraderie and tragedie was an instant bestseller. But today it’s the sterile hybrid of a melodramatic memoir and a scholarly account. Neither facet is particularly successful, and the author is probably to  blame. Cherry-Garrard is probably a good polar explorer, but he’s not compelling enough as a writer to make The Worst Journey in the World last into the modern era. Knowledge of Scott’s expedition has not survived either.

“Much… risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North. The moment Scott saw the Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already known” (532).

In 1910, famous explorer Robert Falcon Scott set out to conduct scientific research on the embryos of the Adélie penguin and to claim the South Pole for Great Britain. Cherry Garrard and two explorers from the expedition completed the titular “worst journey in the world” to retrieve penguin eggs. Scott and a smaller team dramatically perished in January of 1912 after returning from the pole. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had discovered it only a month earlier. This narrative would be familiar to a 20th-century audience, but cherry Garrard supplies his unique knowledge of its depiction: Weights. Longitude. Latitude. Diaries. So many diaries.

The result is a confused slog that embodies the book’s title.

This 570-page book took me 12 days to read because I couldn’t find anything that made me want to keep going. It’s not like I didn’t try valiantly. I am neither an easily-excited British child nor a researcher on the Adélie embryo, so perhaps it is just that I am not the target audience. But scientists probably don’t want the sugar-in-snow dose of Edwardian romanticization in their scientific records, and non-scientists might not have the motivation to read spare, repetitious diaries.

But it’s not completely awful: perhaps 40 pages of The Worst Journey in the World are worth reading.

“If you look at a picture of a parhelion by Wilson not only can be sure that the mock suns, circles and shafts appeared in the sky as they are shown on paper, but you can also rest assured that the number of degrees between, say, the sun and the outer ring of light were in fact such as he has represented them” (198).

These sections characterize the members of the expedition and describe beautiful, ordinary moments that slip beneath the scientist’s notice. While reading them, one forgets that there are another 530 pages to trudge through. One feels very deeply for Scott and his men, and for the noble dogs and ponies making the journey with them. But these pages make up only 7% of the book.

Reading The Worst Journey in the World is like hunting for the pole: you might succeed, but at what cost? If you are looking for a dramatic account of a polar expedition, I would advise you to go elsewhere: AMC’s The Terror is a very good show. If you are looking for a coherent scientific log, Scott’s Last Expedition is a reliable source. But I cannot warn this book away from absolutely everyone. It probably had to exist as a primary source for Scott's final expedition, and historians, a potential third target demographic, do not mind a little slogging in their research. But for the rest of the public, I recommend you steer clear of the South Pole entirely.