The Worst Journey in the World

"It is ostensibly the story of Captain Scott’s 1912 expedition to the Antarctic, but it’s really about all places in all times and is possibly the best book ever written. Cherry – as he was known – was on the expedition and the book has been in print since 1922. It started out as the official story of the expedition but became the unofficial story as he elevated it to the universal. The actual worst journey is a little side journey to collect the eggs of the emperor penguins, and he writes about the absence of people and the spiritual dimension of that, describing the endeavour as not just as his endeavour but as all endeavours, whether it is building a shed or a fence, going on any journey, putting down your last glass. For him, Scott didn’t really fail and I suppose he had to think that. He came back and three of his friends had died, the war had happened while he was away, the world had changed, for the worse, and his big act of redemption was writing this book. None of the current books you read about journeys are about the journey being worth it in itself, any journey. It’s a masterpiece and definitely part of what inspired me to go to Antarctica. It is a deeply inspiring book in which he tries to redeem something from the journey. The last line is: “If you march your winter journeys you’ll have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.”"

"This is a great book because it was a terribly difficult journey – an ordeal. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was 22, the youngest and in a way the frailest member of Scott’s expedition [to the South Pole in 1911-1912]. The worst journey in the world which he describes isn’t Scott’s race to the pole, it’s Cherry-Garrard’s trip with two other men to find the emperor penguins. The book is framed by Scott’s expedition, but the quest for the penguins is the centre of it. It’s a book about a young man who is inexperienced, not particularly strong and with bad eyesight, travelling with other men who are great explorers, mentally very strong, physically powerful and who have travelled to many places before, both hot and cold. Among the many things that appeal to me about the book is the extreme precision of the writing – the scientific poetry of it. Cherry-Garrard also had the major advantage of being a neighbour of George Bernard Shaw. He writes about the weather, the quality of the snow, and all aspects of the trip there in this old banger of a boat, a coal ship called the Terra Nova . The book starts very dramatically, and gets better and better. It’s not grandiose. This is about going to the last frontier, the last undiscovered place. No one had gone to the South Pole. No one had seen the emperor penguins. No one had endured that sort of cold. They record a temperature of minus 79 Fahrenheit. It’s a form of hell – the bottom of Dante’s hell is ice, if you remember. The trip was not just about enduring and surviving this, it was a scientific expedition, unlike [Roald] Amundsen. Amundsen was a skier, and his only mission was to get to the pole. He wasn’t interested in penguins, he just wanted to get to the prize, and he did. The Scott expedition was not as focused. It was a group of men with different notions and personalities, and the leader, Scott himself, was a problem. He was mentally frail, he cried very easily, and he was something of a manic depressive. He got sad and stayed in his tent for long periods. A lot of explorers were like that – [David] Livingstone for example. And in the Antarctic winter there is no sunshine, it’s dark 24 hours a day, which isn’t good if you’re depressive. No, it wouldn’t. A blissful travel book is much less appealing than a travel book which is about an ordeal, because we like to see people tested to their limits. War stories, stories of captivity and escape, or survival, are compelling because those are problems that people face in their lives, to a much lesser extent. The ideal travel book is about someone pushed to their limits, and overcoming the obstacles rather than succumbing to them. A lot of the best travel, and the best travel books , are about suffering. They’re about the ordeal. The human element is so strong in that. There’s no dodging it. It’s as though we are creeping along the ledge of a building. And The Worst Journey in the World has all of that. It was really the only book that Cherry-Garrard wrote. He published it himself, and it’s still in print all these years later. I still pick it up sometimes, and read it the way you read passages in Madame Bovary or Moby Dick , because I think the writing is so vivid and you know he is telling the truth."