‘The Worst Journey In The World’

It would be a daunting undertaking today, with the most modern equipment, but 110 years ago? They didn’t flinch.

How long do you think it took to walk those 60 miles? In decent conditions fit, young men like these might be expected to knock it off in a couple of days. But conditions weren’t decent, they were appalling, so bad indeed they lacked the strength to drag both their sledges. So they’d drag one sledge a mile, walk back a mile, then drag the other to meet it, day after day, walking and man-hauling three miles for every mile gained. It took 19 days at barely more than two miles a day.

The cold was such that everything froze instantly. From waking up in the morning to being back in harness again took, on average, four hours. Cherry once made the mistake of lifting his head at exactly the wrong moment, his clothes froze in that shape leaving him with no choice but to haul for hours in that position. Sweat left the body, froze and built up as ice inside their clothing during the day. It was so cold at night they had to close their sleeping bags over their heads, causing their breath to freeze and the air to become so tainted you could strike a match inside the bag with no chance of it lighting.

How cold? Cherry’s diary records typical, note typical, temperatures of between -45 to -50 deg Centigrade. He describes waking one morning to discover it was only -33 deg C as ‘a great relief’. The lowest reading he records is -60.5deg C, or in his language -77deg Fahrenheit. On their feet they wore finnesko boots with fur on the outside, insulated with sennegrass. Around the top they wound puttees and beneath three pairs of socks, one hair, two wool. It was not enough. As Cherry recorded, ‘there were few days that Wilson and I did not get some part of our feet frost-bitten.’

After a journey that included being stuck in their tent for three days during a Force 10 blizzard, they made it to Cape Crozier, pitched their tent and built an igloo. All without light, you will recall. But to get to the rookery they had to cross a crevasse field in total darkness. Wilson was good at finding them, Bowers excellent at crossing them but poor Cherry was neither, on one day falling into at least six, saved only by being harnessed to the sledge. They then had to scale a 200ft ice cliff to get to the birds. It really does beggar belief.

But finally, after a journey of a kind no man had ever attempted, they collected five precious eggs, of which two were promptly dropped by Cherry.

Sat there in the igloo with their precious quarry, having survived so far and knowing the terrain they faced on the way home, they must have thought the worst was over. In fact it had barely begun and not just because their poor, ravaged frames were deteriorating daily.

But by then it seemed Cherry was past caring. The following extract from his book is the most hauntingly, horrifically beautiful paragraph I have read on the subject of polar exploration:

‘The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and anyone would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better – they were far worse – but because we were callous. I for one had come to the point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on…’

The trouble is to go on. Half a lifetime since I first read those words and my emotions still rise when I think of those three brave, mad young men not merely risking their lives but accepting suffering on a scale that cannot be comprehended, all in the name of the advancement of understanding. Also known as three white eggs.

Cherry began to look upon death as a friend. And then things got worse. Much, much worse.

Suddenly a new storm blew up and ripped away the tent, gone into the howling gale. At that moment the men must have known they were finished. They still had the igloo, but could no more take it with them than build another every night. Then the storm smashed that up too. Although he never discussed it with Bowers or Wilson, Cherry knew this was the end. In his words they had now spent four weeks ‘under conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few days, if that.’ And now, as they all knew beyond a scintilla of doubt ‘without the tent we were dead men.’

So Cherry decided to die on his own terms. He chose no longer to try to keep warm, as that was counter to his aim. If freezing to death got too painful he was going to reach for the morphia, ‘Yes, not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! Comfortable, warm reader. Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.’

So he lay down, drifted off into unconsciousness neither knowing nor caring whether he’d wake, as a storm Bowers logged at Force 11 raged overhead.

It blew itself out a day later and the day after that Bowers found the tent. Despite being presumed by now to be well on its way to New Zealand, it had in fact travelled less than half a mile before dropping, its silk untorn, into a hollow. The chances of that happening and then being found in the depth of the Polar winter must have been millions to one against. But found it was.

I won’t dwell on the return journey because I expect you’ve got the picture by now at least to the extent that such an ordeal can ever be understood by an outsider. They suffered, suffered and suffered some more. But eventually they made it.

They were greeted by the team as ‘beings who have come from another world’. Their clothes were cut from their bodies, countless blisters lanced and the slow agonising process of thawing out began. One teammate estimated Cherry’s appearance had aged 30 years, his nails were falling out and his fingers didn’t work. The cold was so extreme his teeth had literally shattered, causing dental problems that would trouble him for the rest of his days.

But it was all worth it, right? It had to be after that. But no, if fairytale endings are rare, they are rarest of all in Antarctica. And there was to be none here. Quite the reverse in fact.

When Cherry finally returned to London in 1913 and proudly presented the eggs to the Natural History Museum it was not the reception he had expected and thought he deserved. ‘I handed over the Cape Crozier embryos, which nearly cost three men their lives and cost one man his health, to your museum personally and your representative never even said thanks,’ Cherry wrote in a letter brimming with bitterness.

His health by then had indeed taken a turn for the worse though how much was due to his trip to Cape Crozier and how much to what happened during the rest of his time in the frozen south will never be known. Because the trials of Apsley Cherry-Garrard were very far from over.

His fondest wish even after his ordeal was that he’d be selected for the pole with Scott, and he was duly chosen for the ‘Southern Journey’, but as a member of one of three supporting teams, not the actual polar party. They started on 1 November, 1911, and after 42 days on the ice his was the second team to head back to base having just reached the top of the Beardmore Glacier. He’d have been heartbroken, for he could not have known that Scott’s decision to press on without him undoubtedly saved his life.

After returning to base on 26 January, 1912, Cherry’s next mission was in March to trek out the way he had come to ‘One Ton depot’, a massive stash of food and fuel and wait for Scott’s polar team to return. They never arrived. He waited a week before turning back, little knowing that at the time Scott and his team were both alive and only 55 miles away. In a journey of 1532 geographical miles, they were barely a stone’s throw apart. In the end they perished just 11 miles short of One Ton.

Yet even now Cherry’s ordeal was not over, for just over a year after he’d set out with Scott and having sat through his second polar winter, he was among the search party to find the polar party’s tent and the very first to see the bodies of Scott and his Cape Crozier comrades Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers. Together they had shared something both extraordinary and terrible, and now he alone would have to bear the burden of that experience.

He never got over it. He tortured himself too over his decision both to stay at One Ton rather than look for Scott further south, and also to turn around when he did. But the weather that killed Scott was no better for Cherry and by staying he could easily have added further to a death toll that already stood at five.

After his final return from the ice in 1913, his mental health collapsed, suffering from what today would unquestionably be diagnosed as PTSD. He returned to England and became bed-ridden, often for months at a time and took to writing as a form of therapy. His book ‘The Worst Journey In The World’ whose name I have borrowed for this article was published in 1922, a full decade after he left the Antarctic never to return. It is the best of its kind, better even than Shackleton’s extraordinary ‘South’. But the happy, enthusiastic, boyish adventurer who’d so eagerly boarded the Terra Nova in Cardiff in June 1910 was gone for good.

He got married three days after Britain entered World War Two, but lost the family estate through ill-health and financial difficulties thereafter. He moved into a flat in the West End where he died aged 73 in 1959.

And the eggs? Over 20 years after Cherry donated them to the museum, in 1934 its staff finally got around to having the embryos removed and properly investigated, the examining zoologist concluding that ‘they did not greatly add to our understanding of penguin embryology’. It turns out that Wilson’s theory about them helping establish the missing link between reptiles and birds was wrong. It had all been for nothing.

Or had it? Today the Natural History Museum egg collection contains 1.5 million specimens, by a distance the largest in the world. But of them all, there are just three that visitors ask to see more than all the others. Now you know how they got there, you will have no trouble understanding why.