Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.
Originally released in 1922, The Worst Journey in the World is a contemporaneous account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13, as written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Scott's second youngest team member (twenty-four at the time of sailing) who would go on to serve England admirably in the First World War and spend the rest of his life suffering trauma, depression, and PTSD. Because this book was written during the peak days of polar exploration, Cherry-Garrard includes both thrilling adventure tales (in wry, evocative prose) and scientific data points (latitudes reached over how many miles, wind speeds, minimum temps and maximum drift), and while I much preferred the former to the latter, I appreciate that the author was writing for both the armchair adventurer and they who might be planning polar treks of their own; he could have written this no other way. I loved every minute of this long, dense read. (I should also note: My edition has a hundred pages of introductory information about Cherry-Garrard's life, not counted in the volume's 600 pages, and while I thoroughly appreciated the context this gave to me, it felt a bit frustrating to read for hours and not feel like I had started the actual book.)
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.There's so much I could recount about the details of this expedition (even the last leg of the sailing out from New Zealand – with ponies and dogs tied up on deck in harsh, high seas; the dogs washed overboard to the end of their chains and then swept back on the next wave – seems incredible before they ever set foot on the Antarctic continent), but the details are too numerous for a summary to do this tale justice; it must be read in whole. I will note that one of Cherry-Garrard's primary objectives seems to have been to humanize the five expedition members who lost their lives on the Polar Journey itself, and especially to confront and correct any criticism that Captain Scott had publicly suffered in the decade since he had lost his life. Describing the daily labours in camp or on sledge runs, Cherry-Garrard describes each man around him as a “brick”; hard-working and cheerful; every man capable of good humour and selflessness in the darkest times, open to friendly debates and singsongs and general bonhomie. Of Scott he writes:
He will go down to history as the Englishman who conquered the South Pole and who died as fine a death as any man has had the honour to die. His triumphs are many – but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.And of the two men, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers, who accompanied Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey (the actual “worst journey in the world” of the title), he writes:
In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the Winter Journey and lived; later they went through the Polar Journey and died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.And so to the Winter Journey: Wilson – the chief scientific officer of the expedition, who had accompanied Scott on his earlier quest for the South Pole (1901-04) – had discovered the Emperor Penguins' remote breeding grounds on that earlier expedition and believed that if they could secure some unhatched eggs (which are laid in the dead of winter), much could be learned about the evolution of early birds from reptiles. And so these three men, in the total darkness of a polar winter, in the unprecedentedly cold temperatures of −40 to −77.5 °F, pulled their sledge over unlevel ground and unseen crevasses, for a hundred kilometres in each direction. The cold, the wet, the frozen solid fur sleeping bags that would take an hour to squirm into each night (and which were so cold that one's back felt like it would break from night-long convulsive shivering), the exhausting march, the winds, the dangers – the entire tale is harrowing. In the end, they were able to make one brief trip to the rookery and brought back three unbroken eggs.
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 any one 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 that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of 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...There is then a brief humourous interlude (made more pitiable and ironic by the knowledge that Wilson and Bowers eventually die on the Polar Journey) in which Cherry-Garrard describes the indifference with which the Chief Custodian of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington will accept his offering of Emperor Penguin eggs. (Indeed, Cherry-Garrard would return some time later with Captain Scott's sister to see these eggs and they were told that there was no record of their existence!) The eggs would eventually be recovered and studied, and according to Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University's report:
If the conclusions arrived at with the help of the Emperor Penguin embryos about the origin of feathers are justified, the worst journey in the world in the interest of science was not made in vain.So, there's that. Near the end, Cherry-Garrard has some comments about the fact that Roald Amundsen's team beat Scott to the South Pole by five weeks. There's a hint of criticism about Amundsen's show of poor sportsmanship (apparently Amundsen had announced he was embarking on a trip to the North Pole but turned his ship at sea and sneakily reached Antarctica just ahead of Scott), and Cherry-Garrard stresses repeatedly that making a journey to the Pole was secondary to the scientific survey Scott's team was doing for the advancement of global knowledge, but still, it must have been galling for Scott to fight his way, man-hauling sledges, to reach the Pole and find Amundsen's and Norway's flags planted there. (There was also found there a letter written to the King of Norway with a note from Amundsen asking Scott to mail it for him: was this an ungentlemanly way of demanding that Scott prove he made it to the Pole while also publicly proving that Amundsen made it there first?) On the other hand, Cherry-Garrard writes that if one's sole objective is to make it to the Pole, all credit should be given to the new route that Amundsen discovered, and he also backhandedly praises Amundsen's use of some 250 dogs – surplus dogs brought along to feed the working dog teams – that meant Amundsen could swiftly and comfortably ride on a sled in each direction, never once doing the back-breaking sledge-hauling that Scott et al. engaged in (hard labour which, coupled with an inadequate diet, eventually killed them).
I was fascinated by this narrative and Cherry-Garrard's writing was consistently evocative and well-phrased. The tone was also often wry and gently humourous:
Dog-driving is the devil! Before I started, my language would not have shamed a Sunday School, and now – if it was not Sunday I would tell you more about it!I loved the whole of it.
Apparently, because Klaus only wanted to go if they could travel on a working tall ship (!), the couple had to wait four years for a private cabin to be available (this ship only had a handful of cabins and most people slept in a common bunkroom). Having a bit of privacy definitely sounds worth it, but the accommodations were hardly luxurious: the floor space was mostly taken up by the smallish double bed, and although they had a private washroom, Sonja said that the journey was so rocky that every time she sat on the toilet, her head would repeatedly bounce off the tank behind it, giving her a huge and tender goose egg, and although they did have a tiny shower, it wasn't used that much: they were always cold and wet, their clothes never dried, and trying to remain standing (while swaying dramatically back and forth) under a thin stream of warmish water was rarely worth the effort.
Because it was a working tall ship, everyone on board needed to take turns as watch on deck and learn to raise and lower sails in high winds and rocky seas. Sonja said that she was always cold, her hands were always pruny with wet, and because she was banged back and forth against the walls in the narrow gangways belowdecks, every one of her fingernails turned black before the end of her trip.
Of course she said that arriving at Antarctica was breathtaking and "so worth it", and one of the highlights was when they were told they would be landing on shore for a "spa day". Everyone was told to put on a bathing suit with appropriate layers on top, and after a thrilling ride from the ship aboard inflatable Zodiacs, they were deposited on a black pebble beach. As they looked around the deserted stretch of land, someone asked, "Where's the spa?" And the tour guide pointed down to the pebbles and said, "Dig."
Now, you are apparently not permitted to bring anything like shovels onto the continent, so these tourists needed to dig down through the pebbles with their hands, but as Sonja soon discovered, there was a hot spring under the beach and she needn't dig down too far to have created a body-sized basin of deliciously warm water. She then showed us pictures of herself and others, wearing nothing but swimsuits, laying on the Antarctic beach with icebergs off the shore and white glaciers behind for as far as the eye could see. How cool is that?
After telling us her story and showing off the pictures, someone asked Sonja if she would ever do it again. Without a pause she said, "I would definitely go again, but not like that."
I have long said that I would love to go to Antarctica, but I have neither the interest or the ability to haul a sledge towards the South Pole like Scott; and after hearing the story of Sonja's own worst journey on earth, I wouldn't be lining up to pay twelve grand (each!) to take a working tall ship there either. And now, in my days of self-isolation - entering my fourth week of only leaving the house for groceries - I marvel at the idea that I ever took world travel so for granted. Perhaps when things go back to normal - if they ever go back to "normal" - I should be more bold in pursuit of adventure.
