Customer Reviews

The Worst Journey in the World

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Robert Falcon Scott's scientific expedition to the South Pole in 1911 was like that famous medical cliché: "the operation was a success, but the patient died." The Polar Party did reach the South Pole, but were 34 days late from being the FIRST party at the pole. The entire Polar Party died in a blizzard returning to home camp. Invaluable scientific, geographic, and biologic data were obtained, but the hideous Winter Journey to collect Emperor penguin embryos at terrible risk turned out to be useless information. They hoped the embryos would show a connection between the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. (It did not.)

Cherry Gerrard is a highly likeable, very human teller of the tale. He was the youngest member of the expedition, very much the gentleman and an Englishman to his fingertips. He shows us his human side (he didn't have the usual Englishman's fondness for animals and thought the dogs and ponies were miserable, exasperating beasts). He has a knack of bringing his fellow explorers to life, yet never criticizes at all. He has the highest regard for everyone in the party. He recaps from some of the other members' diaries to great effect. The enthusiastic Bowers writes his mother, "There is so much to see and do here; I just wish I could be three places at once!" Bowers was the best of them, to my way of thinking, and I was appalled when he "volunteered" for the Polar Party (already knowing the fate of same). Cherry Gerrard had enormous artistic appreciation for the austere beauties of Antarctica, but no matter how brilliantly he described them, my enthusiasm was nil for such a bleak landscape. He shows his depressive side in remarking on the "beauty of sleep" in the Antarctic---"sleep where you never need awaken." He was tremendously brave and endured what no man should have to bear.

This is the best kind of book for me to read for it sparks my interest to find out more. Cherry Gerrard is so deferential to Captain Scott, some of whose decisions seemed downright odd to me; I am going to read Huntford's "Last Expedition on Earth" that does a critical comparison of Scott and Amundsen. To find out more about the elusive Cherry Gerrard, I shall read Sara Wheeler's "Cherry" plus her "Terra Firma" just because it looks so good. One heroic seaman who should star in his own movie was "Tom Crean: Unsung Hero of the Scott and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions" by Michael Smith.

My only fault to find with "The Worst Journey--" was a lack of pictures. I would have liked to see the type of clothing they wore (it sounded pitifully inadequate). The constantly referred to "sledges" sometimes pulled by ponies, sometimes by men--I would like to see what they looked like so I had a better idea how they operated. Highly recommend this book for all the right reasons: adventure, information and life changing.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

In the first paragraph of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's introduction to this book, he starts his tale of Antarctic travails with the droll line, "I do not believe anybody on Earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin." This displays his very modest and understated tale of what was really the worst journey in the world. This book deserves its reputation as an adventure classic, as Cherry-Garrard outlines the disastrous expedition for the South Pole by Captain R.F. Scott in 1913, in which the author was a young expedition member. This book certainly has its share of great adventure narratives and tales of hardship as experienced by the early explorers, including many falls into crevasses, continuous deadly weather, and near-madness brought on by the midnight sun or snowblindness. There are some unexpectedly interesting tales from before the actual expedition as well, as the author describes the voyage by ship to Antarctica with the trouble of having ponies and sled dogs on board, while the ship got trapped in pack ice for weeks.

This book can be a tough read however, because Cherry-Garrard was a rather tedious writer. Note that the book was written in 1922 and styles were different back then, while the author admits that he meant to create a field guide for future explorers and not armchair adventurers, like most of us are today. However, this doesn't alleviate some of the writing difficulties. About a third of the time the author's style is very conversational and light-hearted, especially when he is praising his teammates in the expedition and describing their personal interactions. Otherwise though, the book often gets stuck in extremely verbose technical explanations of provisions and logistics. An example is an episode early in the book when the author, a few colleagues, and their horses were trapped on shore ice that was breaking up, and they had to jump the horses and themselves from floe to floe, over stretches of frigid water, all the while being observed ominously by a troop of killer whales. The author describes this harrowing episode with such clinical, detached understatement that all the obvious horror and heroism are ironed out. This problem is alleviated in the later stages of the book, as Cherry-Garrard describes the tragic death of Captain Scott and other team members in the doomed return trip from the South Pole. Plus, the final chapter is very moving as the author philosophizes on the loss of his comrades and the ethics of such dangerous exploration, with an eloquent sense of survivor's guilt. So while some portions become a tedious technical manual rather than a tale of heroism and exploration, this classic book is still a very worthy read for adventure fans.

Casual glancers at the title of this book about the 1912 Scott expedition may automatically assume that it refers to the death of Captain Scott and four of his companions on their return from the South Pole. Instead, "The Worst Journey in the World" was the trip to the Emperor Penguin rookeries undertaken in the middle of the Antarctic winter by Cherry-Garrand, Dr. Wilson, and Lt. Bowers, the latter two of whom would die with Scott on the polar trip. It makes absolutely terrifying reading; the men were not equipped or trained for the rigors of the expedition, and the scientific results from their collection of penguin eggs appear to have been absolutely nil (Shackleton fans will be interested to know that Dr. Eric Marshall suggested such a journey during the 1907-1909 Shackleton expedition, but Shackleton thought the idea was cracked and refused to countenance it). Cherry-Garrand is indeed a bit of a ragged writer, but as a non-heroic account of the Scott expedition (compared to Scott's own journals, written with Posterity in mind and "improved" by J.M. Barrie) this book is a valuable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the heroic era of Antarctic exploration.

Although this book is something like 550 pages long, it maintained its grip on me for the three weeks it took me to explore it fully. Cherry-Garrard was a young wealthy Englishman with a longing to test his mettle, who joined the famously doomed Scott expedition to the South Pole. Despite a complete lack of experience, he proved to be both a stalwart explorer and an excellent writer.

Imagine this: three men pulling their own sleds hundreds of miles across broken ice, living for weeks in temperatures as low as -77 F. Then, a blizzard. Then, there tent blows away and they are left in this blizzard with no shelter for more than a day. How will they ever make it back to the home base? This particular episode, Cherry's "Winter Journey", is only a detour on the main narrative about the journal to the Pole.

Not only does he convey the "what" - the breathtaking and death-defying details of his experiences, he conveys the "why" - what it meant to him to be there, and why he went. If you have read elsewhere that the expedition proved to England that its men were still capable of great things, you may have scoffed at this as the last longings of a dying Empire. But when Cherry-Garrard writes it, it is with utmost sincerity, and you believe him.

What an amazing story.
Hiking through cold over a hundred degrees below zero (at times), in lacerating snowstorms, tied to enormous sleds, mottled in blisters full of freezing pus, and starving for real food.
And then: making camp with frozen hands, spending forty-five minutes to slowly worm into a frozen solid sleeping bag, feeling your spine buck and chatter from the cold, and then, having your tent blow away and leave you stranded in the middle of Antarctica, in the middle of nowhere.
Just reading this book will make you cold.
And it will probably make you want to go to Antarctica.
The author's descriptions are almost loving in their unbelieving accounts of the impossible terrain and the weather. The author's optimism and determination make it all seem almost bearable and worth it. And the author's quirky character and extreme nearsightedness (and the uselessness of eyeglasses in a place so cold that they can only fog over) makes him a sympathetic character unlike so many of ths stock, stoic heroes in so many of these stories.
This book is an adventure--especially the side trip to obtain emperor penguin eggs "for science" that devolves into "the worst journey in the world," the book's namesake. This book is also a touching account of an expedition that becomes a group of friends, and by the time it winds up to expedition leader Scott's heartbreaking last note, "For God's sake, please take care of our men" (or something like that), you really feel what those people meant to him.
By all means, read this book. In 2001, National Geographic Adventure magazine named this the very best adventure book ever, and I can't think of one better.

It's unacceptable how could we quit being real men in less than a century, and this splendid book is the synthesis of this idea. In times when the biggest adventure is to find room for your car in a shopping center parking lot, Mr. Cherry-Garrard shows how strength, courage, boldness, fortitude, and most of all, comeradeship, can overcome the harshest conditions found in our planet. And, in the end, we get the opportunity to find out what is the greatest lesson brought by the adventure: the essence of the adventure of living is to practice the fraternal love. In the winter jorney, Mr. Garrard had his Revelation, and set the standards for the new men that we all should be - and we're sorry we heaven't learnt in yet.

You cannot read this book without being inspired by the courage of the early Antarctic explorers; you cannot read it without being impressed by the good literary taste of the author; nor can you, after reading this book, fail to recognize the total absence of self-aggrandizement of the author. Cherry-Garrard was a first-rate Antarctic explorer, a first-rate writer, and a first-rate human being. What makes Capt. Robert F. Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson and their fellow explorers particularly admirable is that their chief goal was not fame, but to acquire Scientific Knowledge: it was the interest in the penguins as an important evolution chain that led to the Worst Journey by the three valiant men, and it was, in part, the insistence not to abandon the 30 pounds of specimen (let alone a companion) that eventually resulted in the tragedy of the Polar Journey. Indeed, what a price to pay!

Whereas the book _Endurance_ may have created a "Shackleton mania", it is books of such quality as Cherry-Garrard's book that will occupy a lasting, lofty place in the history of exploration literature.

My favorite passage is also the concluding paragraph quoted by some other people, but here I cannot resist sharing with you another one in its entirety (and chuckling for one more time), which is a little far from the main subject of the book, but which shows that even in recounting a side episode like this one, Cherry-Garrard surpasses many writers in that he makes memorable, not only the scene, but the words that describe it:

"One day there had been a blizzard, and lying open to the view of all was a deserted nest, a pile of coveted stones. All the surrounding rookery made their way to and fro, each husband acquiring merit, for, after each journey, he gave his wife a stone. This was the plebeian way of doing things; but my friend who stood, ever so unconcerned, upon a rock knew a trick worth two of that: he and his wife who sat so cosily upon the other side.

"The victim was a third penguin. He was without a mate, but this was an opportunity to get one. With all the speed his little legs could compass he ran to and fro, taking stones from the deserted nest, laying them beneath a rock, and hurrying back for more. On that same rock was my friend. When the victim came up with his stone he had his back turned. But as soon as the stone was laid and the other gone for more, he jumped down, seized it with his beak, ran round, gave it to his wife and was back on the rock (with his back turned) before you could say Killer Whale. Every now and then he looked over his shoulder, to see where the next stone might be.

"I watched this for twenty minutes. All that time, and I do not know for how long before, that wretched bird was bringing stone after stone. And there were no stones there. Once he looked puzzled, looked up and swore at the back of my friend on his rock, but immediately he came back, and he never seemed to think he had better stop. It was getting cold and I went away: he was coming for another."

Young Aspley Cherry-Garrard was rich enough to buy himself a space on Robert Scott's journey to the Antarctic in 1910. The trip ended badly for Scott, as everyone knows, but it was also a deeply life-altering experience for survivors of the expedition. Returning to England many were loudly criticised for not pressing on in their search for Scott, who as it turned out, died of hunger and cold not so far from where the rescue party turned back. Cherry-Garrard took the criticism very much to heart. Deeply sensitive, he wondered if he could have done more. Years later he wrote his recollections of the expedition in prose so strong and lyrical, yet so measured and insightful, that it illuminates the pages. The "worst journey" of the title is a metaphor for the entire expedition, which ended so badly, and also a literal description of a quixotic side trip that Garrard and some companions took in the middle of a bitterly cold Antarctic winter to retrieve an egg of the Emperor penguin. Mistakenly, as it turned out, one of the scientists on the trip felt that the penguin embryo held some crucial clues to evolutionary history. The little band on that dreadful journey returned to base camp, but after they had been through the most extraordinary privations. Yet though it all, says Garrard, they never forgot their pleases and thank yous. Gentlemen they were, and so they remained even at the point of death.

The expedition was composed of such men and Garrard was certainly among the bravest and best. And how he could write! He put his soul into this book, which has been described (by a well-known travel author) as the best travel book ever written, and perhaps one of the best books ever written. It really is enough to make one proud to be human. And yet the book is not the least self-serving - Garrard was too honest for that. His portrait of Scott, a man dogged more by bad luck than bad management, is required reading for anyone interested in that amazing polar expedition.

Though the book ends with Garrard's return to England, the remainder of his life was rather sad. Plagued with depression, afflicted with ulcerative colitis, he never quite forgave himself for not being able to pull off the miracle needed to save Scott and his companions. Though he was a only a junior member of the expedition - in the end crucial decisions were made by others - that seemed not to have comforted him much. And unfortuately he has not been well served by the biography "Cherry" by Caroline Alexander - she seems basically out-of-sympathy with her subject. In the end Cherry-Garrard's book stands as his legacy, and what a legacy it is.

This is the classic work describing the experience of life in the Antarctic during the Heroic Age, written by a participant. Apsley Cherry-Garrard went "South with Scott" in 1912. Unlike his expedition leader, Cherry-Garrard came home to England - minus most of his teeth, but alive. One of England's richest young men, he seemed to have every prospect of succeeding in whatever new challenges life would throw at him. And yet, for Cherry-Garrard, his years with Scott's Last Expedition would prove to be the most intense and all-consuming experience of his life, and in a very real sense he would spend the rest of his days re-living his days in the Antarctic.

Cherry-Garrard wrote and rewrote his memories to produce this classic book. It interleaves pages from his diary, quotes and letters from many of Cherry-Garrard's surviving expedition comrades, memories, and reminiscences - some of them startingly piercing and balanced. The reputation of Robert Scott and his fellow explorers has come under sharp scrutiny in recent decades, with many criticisms pointed at the explorer's weaknesses. In many cases these criticisms are based upon Cherry-Garrard's own sharp insights and balanced judgment.

In the end, however, Cherry-Garrard was loyal to his dead commander and deceased comrades. The men who died on their way back from the South Pole, Robert Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, "Birdie" Bowers, "Titus" Oates, and Edgar Evans, had been among Cherry-Garrard's closest friends in life. Cherry-Garrard is honest enough to point out the mistakes they all made, but his concluding judgment is that these men wrote a page of heroic endeavor that is unlikely to ever be surpassed. Read about it here.

I read this book two years ago, and have read a lot of true adventure books since then. I can honestly say that I have compared all others to "Journey" - it has become my benchmark!

The level of human suffering combined with positive life affirming attitudes in this book is overwhelming! It's difficult to apprehend the challenges these men faced, and for such long periods of time. Their feats are nothing short of miracles.

To top it off, "Cherry" recounts the story with superb style and grace. In todays world of "keep it simple", "dumb it down", and "shorter is better", it's refreshing to read an author who lets the language flow and uses it with a beauty of it's own. Granted, it was "normal" language at the time that it was written, but even among his peers, he excelled at the written word. That's why "this" book is a better choice that other books on the same topic. You get this one from Cherry's own diary and words, not a modern author looking at it from the outside in.

In spite of the illustrations included in the edition that I read, it would be helpful to consult other maps of the area. There were times when it took some digging to figure out exactly where the authors were (geographically) and the terrain difficulties that they discussed. Once you figure it out, though, there is usally another "WOW" moment attached to it.

If there is anything wrong with this book, it would be that it needs better maps in a variety of scales for frames of reference, and MORE PICTURES! There are times when your imagination just won't do justice to reality. Seeing it in a photo would be fantastic. There are many other sources for those photos... check them out while reading this book.

All in all, a GREAT adventure book. If you are interested in true life adventure which tests the limits of the human soul, spirit, and physical abilities, this book is an absolute MUST read.