Book Review: The Worst Journey In The World

Author: Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Title: The Worst Journey In The World

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised… so says Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of one of the first teams of Antarctic explorers, part of the ill-fated Scott expedition in 1912. The book details the horrors that polar explorers had to go through, and the spirit of the men who did so. With little preparation, and animal skins as their clothing (not modern fabrics), they braved blizzards, numbingly cold temperatures and a diet of penguin, seals and fish in their pursuit of science. In order to be the first humans to view a penguin rookery when the chicks are hatching, Cherry-Garrard and his companion survive overnight temperatures in the -70s (Fahrenheit) while camped in their tent. On the way back, their tent blows away, but somehow they press on and survive, sleeping under a blanket of snow. Robert Falcon Scott, although he made it to the South Pole with four others, did not survive an unusually cold Antarctic summer, a victim of the cold, blizzards and his own planning mistakes. Cherry-Garrard’s gripping account of the discovery of the bodies of Scott and his teammates is well worth reading. But the entire book is full of dramatic escapes and stupid blunders. I couldn’t put the book down.