I want to set the scene.

Imagine…

Extreme low temperatures, limited food, limited fuel, tents, blizzards, wet clothing and bedding.

This all sounds bad enough. But imagine if this is all experienced on a journey in darkness.

“The Worst Journey in the World” was written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. In it he shares with us his experiences during Scott’s Last Expedition during the years 1910 to 1913. I have to admit, before reading the book, I thought that the name of the book was a reference to Scott’s final journey. However, he was actually referring to the journey which he, Wilson and Bowers made during the winter of 1911.

Scott writes of this journey in his diary, while still at Cape Evans, before he was to perish on the Polar Journey; “To me, and to every one who has remained here, the result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination, as one of the most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling”.

So, why did they do it?

That old quest for knowledge!

Actually, it was a quest for the egg of an Emperor penguin. At the time, the world possessed limited knowledge about the primitive Emperor penguin, and they believed that the answer lay in the study of its embryology, to unlock the mystery of its former states, and perhaps even prove to be the missing link between birds and reptiles.

The only catch was that the birds hatched in the middle of winter. And the only known rookery of the Emperor penguins was inside a little bay of the Barrier edge at Cape Crozier.

“And so we started just after midwinter on the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has even been or ever will be.”

It took nineteen days to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier. Cherry-Garrard describes in detail the horrors of this journey. It wasn’t just the cold (the lowest temperature measured was – 75 degrees). It was the combination of cold and moisture.

But we have to remember that the moisture wasn’t from the ice (remember that this is the driest continent).The moisture was from sweat and breath. Their sleeping bags would become increasingly damp, as the moisture from them breathing inside their bags would eventually turn to ice.

“We began to suspect, as we knew only too well later, that the only good time of the twenty-four hours was breakfast for then with reasonable luck we need not get into our sleeping bags again for another seventeen hours.”

It wasn’t just their bags that absorbed the moisture, it was also their clothing, with trying consequences.

“We had had our breakfast, struggled into our foot-gear, and squared up inside the tent, which was comparatively warm. Once outside, I raised my head to look round and found I could not move back. My clothing had frozen hard as I stood – perhaps fifteen seconds. For four hours I had to pull with my head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a pulling position before being frozen in.”

And then there were the blizzards, sometimes lasting for days; bitter-sweet because of the stress of valuable food supplies being consumed without progress, while on the other hand they were able to catch up on much needed sleep.

And the crevasses. I am still haunted by one incident which Cherry-Garrard recounts.

“It was a little later on when we were among crevasses, with Terror above us, but invisible, somewhere on our left, and the Barrier pressure on our right. We were quite lost in the darkness, and only knew that we were running downhill, the sledge almost catching our heels. There had been no light all day, clouds obscured the moon, we had not seen her since yesterday. And quite suddenly a little patch of clear sky drifted, as it were, over her face, and she showed us three paces ahead a great crevasse with just a shining icy lid not much thicker than glass. We should all have walked into it, and the sledge would certainly have followed us down. After that I felt we had a chance of pulling through; God could not be so cruel as to have saved us just to prolong our agony.”

A sobering image.

And we have to remember that these men were still on the outward journey. It seems to me like utter madness. Cherry-Garrard explains that by this stage Wilson is beginning to feel responsible for bringing his companions on a fatal expedition. Still they marched on.

“More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he achieves the impossible. We never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness. We were quite intelligent people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men led on. I just did what I was told.”

They were indeed to see the penguins. But their vision of a cosy, warm hut was to be far from their reality.

When they finally arrived at the bay, a whole new set of challenges arose.

The first was to build their hut. The plan was to use rocks and ice to build an igloo, using the sledge in the construction, together with canvas as a roof. The problem was that the ice was so hard their pick made hardly any dent. While they were building the hut, they were camping in their tent, a little further down the slope.

They eventually moved into their hut, and the men decided to relocate the tent up to the same spot, beside the hut.

So, now both the hut and tent were a considerable way up the slope of the Terror, when, early one morning, a blizzard hit, and swept away the tent. The fact that the tent had still contained a considerable amount of gear, could have spelt disaster. Except that, miraculously, the gear was left strewn about – just the tent was gone. Instantly they realised that, without a tent to use on the journey back to Cape Evans, they were stranded. For the moment, though, they had to deal with the circumstances they were in, and it soon became clear that their igloo was also under threat.  Drifts of snow were blowing between the rocks in the wall; they did their best by stuffing oddments of clothing in between. The canvas roof was flapping, and together with the thunderous noise of the blizzard, they could barely hear one another shouting.

And then the roof went.

“The next I knew was Bowers’ head across Bill’s body. ‘We’re all right,’ he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes sang.”

It had been on the Saturday morning that they had last eaten. It was not until Monday evening that the wind had abated enough for them to muster up another meal; both tea and pemmican were full of penguin feathers and hairs from their bags, dirt and debris.

And then, a miracle. They found the tent. It had been picked up by the wind, closed like an umbrella, and dropped back to the ground, with the bamboo poles still attached. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us. We were so thankful we said nothing.”

They left the next day.

Cherry-Garrard shares a memory of that time…

“I don’t know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope – I don’t know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker – and thinking that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances would not give for a good warm sleep. He would give everything he possessed: he would give – how many – years of this life. One or two at any rate – perhaps five? Yes – I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below: the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting into my heart.”

Cherry-Garrard thinks back to that return journey as one filled with horrors. Even though he writes vividly about their experiences, it seems quite surreal. There is no place for weakness of mind or body in such scenarios. I’m in awe.

They made it back, and were a days trek from the hut at Cape Evans.

“As we began to gather our gear together to pack up for the last time, Bill said quietly, ‘I want to thank you two for what you have done. I couldn’t have found two better companions – and what is more I never shall’

I am proud of that.

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.”

To think that these three men had survived this journey is amazing. Ponder, for a moment, though, with the thought that this very Bill, together with the other companion, Bowers, would both be dead within the year. Both Bill Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers went on the fatal Polar Journey and both perished. Earlier in the chapter, Cherry-Garrard contemplates this when he declares the enormous respect he had of these men:

“In civilisation 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.”

As you can tell, this book has left its mark on me.