A few random details: temperatures so low that sweat would freeze the instant it emerged from the pores frostbitten flesh that would break out in horrid, suppurating blisters, the very pus of which would itself freeze in turn agonizing eight hour marches that would cover barely a mile, at the end of which Cherry and his two companions would spend an hour thawing out their sleeping bags so they could burrow into them, only to shake and thrash uncontrollably for the rest of the night. This has got to be, without question, one of the most whacked, ape-shit schemes in the history of exploration. Years later, at the suggestion of his neighbour, George Bernard Shaw, he put together an account of his experiences, calling it, with good reason, The Worst Journey in the World.Īctually, the titular journey is not the famous ‘dash’ to the pole, but rather an earlier sub-expedition Cherry took part in: a hellish five-week slog through the permanent darkness of an Antarctic winter. Passed over for the doomed ‘Southern Journey’ to the pole, he survived and made it back to England. There are passages in this amazing memoir where the reader, appalled, begins to suspect that these men were collaborating on a metaphysically refined form of self-destruction.Īpsley Cherry-Gerrard –- and let me say now what a wonderfully plummy name that is, worthy of some mad squire in a Waugh novel -– was, at twenty-four, the baby of the expedition. The sufferings heaped on the members of Scott’s second polar expedition make the ordinary misfortunes of modern life –- the fender-benders, hangovers and breakups –- seem like pleasant diversions.
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