The Worst Journey in the World

Prior to this sad denouement, Cherry-Garrard's account is filled with details of scientific discovery and anecdotes of human resilience in a harsh environment. Each participant in the Scott expedition is brought fully to life. Cherry-Garrard's recollections are supported by diary excerpts and accounts from other teammates. Despite the sad fate of Scott, the reader will grudgingly agree with the closing words of The Worst Journey in the World: "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion. And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.... If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."

Product Description
Only the writings of T.E. Lawrence, Sir Richard Burton, and Ernest Shackleton rank with this harrowing memoir by Cherry-Garrard, who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott to the Antarctic on the explorer's doomed quest for the Pole and who was in the party that ultimately discovered Scott's frozen body. This classic of exploration and adventure also includes the original Introduction by the author.

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


overrated and lengthy tale-for hardcore pole readers only   April 6, 1999
27 out of 44 found this review helpful

In this instance..quantity does not equal quality. The book is ponderous, repetitive, poorly edited and not even very descriptive. With so many Antarctic exploration reading choices available...there are much better books available..unless you're into reading day-by-day expedition logs. For Scott fans..read A First Rate Tragedy or even Scott's Last Voyage-(with those superb Ponting photos). For Shackleton fans..Endurance or South. Cherry-Garrard should have used an editor as Sir Ernest did to scope the story down. Your story doesn't have to be long to be dramatic or effective. Lastly...to see how an Antarctic tale should be done..read Douglas Mawson's hugely underrated The Home Of The Blizzard. The Worst Journey In The World should be read..just after you've finished better crafted pieces first and when you have the time to plow through its' almost 600 pages.


A Worse Time Than An Emperor Penguin   February 19, 2003
doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful

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.


"The Worst Journey" indeed   June 11, 2000
Susan Paxton (Columbus, OH)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.


A masterpiece of its topic and its era   August 7, 2003
bensmomma (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.