The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913
The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913
In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott led a party of British explorers toward the South Pole, and in the brutal Antarctic winter of 1911, a small team ventured out in total darkness across the ice shelf to collect emperor penguin eggs. That journey, later called the Worst Journey in the World, claimed lives in the most harrowing way possible: through slow, certain starvation and freezing, with rescue nearly within reach. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was there. He was twenty-four years old, and he survived. He walked through months of night, temperatures plummeting below seventy degrees below zero, hauling a sledge through a landscape that offered nothing but death. Years later, he returned as part of the search party that found Scott and two companions frozen in their tent, just eleven miles from a depot that would have saved them. This book is not merely an adventure narrative. It is a reckoning with what human beings will attempt, what they will endure, and what it costs to walk toward the ends of the earth. Cherry-Garrard writes with scientific precision and devastating honesty about the expedition's noble ambitions and its crushing failures, preserving not just a historical record but an elegy for young men who died doing something magnificent and foolish.
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“And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on Earth has it worse than an Emperor penguin.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than a gruesome foe.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“I have seen Fuji, the most dainty and graceful of all mountains; and also Kinchinjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal then the vertical. And so he is the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“It is really not desirable for men who do not believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind of life. The question constantly put to us in civilization was and still is: "What is the use? Is there gold? or Is there coal?" The commercial spirit of the present day can see no good in pure science: the English manufacturer is not interested in research which will not give him a financial return within one year: the city man sees in it only so much energy wasted on unproductive work: truly they are bound to the wheel of conventional life.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“I am glad The Worst Journey is coming out in Penguins: after all it is largely about penguins.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
“I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.””
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard
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Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-worst-journey-in-the-world-antarctic-1910-1913-8a0c24db-b979-4f2c-9572-24ab5f9c2c2b.Cherry-Garrard, A. (n.d.). The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-worst-journey-in-the-world-antarctic-1910-1913-8a0c24db-b979-4f2c-9572-24ab5f9c2c2bCherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910-1913. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-worst-journey-in-the-world-antarctic-1910-1913-8a0c24db-b979-4f2c-9572-24ab5f9c2c2b.
