The Worst Journey in the World

This is a gripping account of expeditioner Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of this adventure gone disastrously wrong. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced along the way, Cherry's account is filled with stories of resilience, belief in the human spirit, and to persevere in the face of adversity, no matter the cost. Through frostbitten flesh, teeth chattering so hard they spontaneously shatter in the cold of the air, to sweat freezing the instant it emerges from the pores – this… show more.

This is one of the greatest memoirs of Capt. Robert Scott’s last and fatal expedition to Antarctica, written by expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The ‘worst expedition’ in the title is, believe it or not, not even the one where Scott’s entire party starved and froze to death on the way back from the South Pole. It’s about an earlier jaunt by the explorers to try and acquire the egg of the emperor penguin. Only after that did Scott make his shot for the Pole, get beaten to the punch by Roald Amundsen, and then died, trapped in his tent in… show more.

A strange, complex, and ultimately transformative chronicle of the Terra Nova expedition, including the Scott Party’s catastrophic 1912 attempt to be first to the South Pole, The Worst Journey in the World is part adventure story and part witness statement. Through Apsley Cherry-Garrard's jaundiced eye, we learn of the triumphs as well as the banalities of polar exploration, including a gripping narrative-within-narrative of the eponymous “worst journey in the world,” which was not the race to the Pole, but the dangerous winter trip to Cape Crozier, where Cherry, Birdie Bowers, and Edward Wilson almost died in their attempt to collect… show more.

In 1910 the wealthy, Oxford-educated 24-year-old Apsley Cherry-Garrard joined Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole as its youngest and most intellectual member – a berth he obtained by donating £1000 to the expedition’s meagre coffers. Although the title of his book refers specifically to the harrowing mid-winter trek Cherry-Garrard made to Cape Evans to collect an emperor penguin’s egg for science, it could well apply to the disastrous expedition as a whole. Although many of the early Antarctic explorers wrote rough-and-ready memoires, Cherry-Garrard’s is easily the best; a beautifully written piece of literature and a travel classic in… show more.