The Worst Journey in the World

Apsley Cherry-Garrard published his memoir of the Terra Nova expedition in 1922. The expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, had sailed south in 1910 and stayed in the Antarctic until 1913.

Cherry-Garrard travelled out as assistant zoologist with no polar experience behind him, which made him the target of some of his shipmates, a few of whom suspected that the thousand pounds he had contributed to the expedition's funds had in effect bought his place on it. He answered the teasing with modesty, hard work and a sharp eye for what was going on, and Edward Wilson, the expedition's second-in-command, adopted him as a protégé.

That connection produced the journey the book is named for. Wilson wanted emperor penguin eggs for his research, and since the birds nest in the Antarctic winter the three men had to travel in July 1911 from the base at Cape Evans to the rookery at Cape Crozier, crossing the Ross Ice Shelf in total darkness at temperatures of minus forty degrees and below. They returned with the specimens, barely alive, and it is that trip, rather than the later attempt on the pole, that gave the book its title.