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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