by Paul Theroux
In that same T. E. Lawrence essay he wrote, "To go through a terrible time of mental and physical stress and to write it down as honestly as possible is a good way of getting some of it off your nerves. I write from personal experience."
It seems that The Worst Journey in the World, brilliant as it is, did not get enough of the stress off Cherry-Garrard's nerves. While writing his book and afterward, he endured a number of nervous breakdowns. Yet everywhere in his writing his voice is clear, articulate, humane, and sometimes startling. "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised," he wrote. It is an unexpected and oblique observation, but characteristic of this neglected polar explorer.
He had the older English gifts of understatement and stoicism, a dignified refusal to fuss or exaggerate, yet his experience was so horrific he wrote, "This journey had beggared our language; no words could express its horror."
The experience he speaks of was his five-week trek to Cape Crozier, in the polar winter (June—July) of 1911, to study the emperor penguins. Cherry-Garrard's epic (and successful) trip, which became known as the Winter Journey, was overshadowed by the tragedy of the later polar party, which he accompanied only part of the way. Scott spent more than two and a half months battling to the Pole through blizzards only to discover that Roald Amundsen had reached it a month earlier. Scott arrived to find the Norwegian flag flapping over the Pole. "Great God this is an awful place," he confided to his diary. He still faced a return trip to his base of eight hundred miles. On the way back, he and his team of four men were stranded by storms only eleven miles from shelter. In dying of cold and hunger, the Scott team became national heroes and a lasting example of British fortitude. The British needed just such a symbol, for the First World War began very soon afterward. Cherry-Garrard went home from Antarctica and enlisted in the army. It was not until the war was over that he was able to begin his book. The Worst Journey in the World was first published in 1922 and reissued with additional material in 1951. It goes in and out of print, but it is indestructible, because it is a masterpiece.
When people ask me (and they often do), "What is your favorite travel book?" I nearly always name this one. It is about courage, misery, starvation, heroism, exploration, discovery, and friendship. It vividly illustrates the demands of science and the rigors of travel. It is a record of the coldest, darkest days that can be found on our planet. It is written beautifully but not obviously, with a subtle artistry. It recounts a diabolical ordeal. It was composed by a man who was very kind and not particularly strong. He was one of the bravest men on the expedition.
Recently graduated from Oxford, where he had read classics and modern history, Cherry-Garrard was the youngest man, just twenty-four, when he set sail on Scott's expedition ship Terra Nova. His classical education stood him in good stead, providing comparisons for the almost mythic horrors he was to encounter. One night at a remote camp in Antarctica, Cherry-Garrard's Fahrenheit thermometer read minus 77.5. "The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out that records are not worth making." And he goes on to say, "I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire."
After the Winter Journey he wrote, "Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured. Madness or death may give relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, [death in] a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift."
The title of the book is slightly misleading. Although this is a thorough account of Scott's effort to reach the South Pole, the Worst Journey was that Winter Journey, on which Cherry-Garrard and two other men, Edward Wilson and Henry "Birdie" Bowers, searched for the remote nesting place of the emperor penguin. No human being had ever ventured in the winter to Cape Crozier, the site of the penguins' rookery. It was suspected that the male penguins tended the eggs, but how? And when did the eggs hatch? No scientist had ever retrieved, much less dissected, the egg of the emperor penguin.
There was a very good reason for this. Until then, no one had seen the penguins' eggs in situ. For the several months that the birds nested at Cape Crozier, they were in complete darkness, obscured by the sunless Antarctic winter. The winds were gale force for much of the time. The temperatures were the lowest in the world. Deep and deadly crevasses cut across the route along the ice shelf. Scott preferred ponies to dogs (that preference was another reason his expedition failed), but neither dogs nor ponies would have been much use over the sixty-three miles of broken ice and cliffs that separated the scientists from the penguins. Accordingly, the men had to split their 790 pounds of food and gear among three sledges, which they manhandled. This they did, in appalling conditions, for the three-week journey out. They endured frostbite, nightmares, near starvation, and exhaustion. "And then we heard the Emperors calling."
The birds were "trumpeting with their curious metallic voices" in the darkness—hundreds of them. Cherry-Garrard and his two companions gathered scientific information, noting the strong protective instinct of the males: how they balanced the egg on the upper part of their feet to keep it off the ice, and warmed it further by plumping it under a tuck of their belly. With three eggs safely stowed in the sledges (two other eggs had broken), the men set off on the return journey, near death on many occasions. This eighty-page chapter is the most harrowing I have ever read in a travel book, and it easily vies with Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym for menacing weather and mounting terror.
The close attention to detail, to mood, to pace, and to the very shape of the sentences that make Cherry-Garrard's Winter Journey chapter so powerful a piece of writing also characterizes the rest of the book. It is rare to find a person who is at once such a great traveler, recounting an overwhelming experience, and such an accomplished writer. (This is one of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing.) The book is an almost unparalleled account of courage. Even if it were clumsily written, as many histories are, the book would be worth reading for its story alone. But Cherry-Garrard gives aesthetic pleasure as well, and his prose style is so efficient and even-tempered—never depending for effect on the quick-to-fade colors of hyperbole—that when he uses a word like "horror" or the expression "death as a friend," he means just that. Each word he writes is deliberately chosen.
Here is his account—he was on the search party—of finding Scott's last camp six months after the men died: "That scene can never leave my memory. We with the dogs had seen Wright turn away from the course by himself and the mule party swerve right-handed ahead of us. He had seen what he thought was a cairn, and then something looking black by its side. A vague kind of wonder gave way to real alarm. We came up to them all halted. Wright came across to us. 'It is the tent.' I do not know how he knew. Just a waste of snow."
It was not a sense of misplaced masculinity that fueled Scott's expedition and drove it onward, Cherry-Garrard said. It was the desire for knowledge. Amundsen's expedition was a classic of national competitiveness; Scott maintained disingenuously that his was essentially a scientific endeavor. The Antarctic represented the unknown, and so it had to be investigated thoroughly in spite of the risks, because, as Cherry-Garrard wrote, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."
This clear-sightedness, which reflects truthfulness, modesty, and a capacity for portraiture, is well illustrated in his subtle sketch of Captain Scott in the book. It begins, "England knows Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man." Cherry-Garrard first makes the point that Scott could be charming when he wanted to be, then says of this complex man that he was both domineering and much more reserved than anyone could possibly guess. "Add to this that he was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be
clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom." Cherry-Garrard enumerates Scott's other limitations: he had continual indigestion, an unstable temperament, and "moods and depressions which might last for weeks." That last is a frightening statement when you consider what weeks of depression might mean to the other members of an Antarctic expedition. In a last crushing judgment, Cherry-Garrard says, "He cried more easily than any man I have ever known."
Yet Cherry-Garrard maintains that Scott was heroic, and it is characteristic of his book that this subtlety is so memorably conveyed. It is in contemplation of the negative aspects of Scott—his weaknesses—that the heroism of his men can be truly appreciated. He had many triumphs, Cherry-Garrard says, and goes on, "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."
Scott's leadership qualities have been questioned. Scott has been variously depicted in other accounts as a blunderer, an enigma, and something approaching a villain, with a merciless ambition. But it is for the compassion in this apparent paradox that I have read The Worst Journey in the World again and again, because among many other things it is a book about overcoming enormous odds while at the same time preserving civility and humanity. Cherry-Garrard was quite specific in asserting that conventional heroism is essentially a display of foolishness. It is fear and faint-heartedness that make a person truly brave. He writes similarly of T. E. Lawrence: "The fact that in the eyes of the world Lawrence lived the bravest of lives did not help him prove to himself that he was no coward. For we are most of us cowards, and had not Lawrence been a coward to himself he would have had no need to prove his bravery. The man who is not afraid has no feelings, no sensitiveness, no nerves; in fact he is a fool." It was also a satisfaction to Cherry-Garrard that at the worst moments of the Winter Journey his comrades still said "please" and "thank you" and kept their tempers—"even with God."
He was of ancient lineage, and lived with his wife on his family estate. They had no children. In many ways he seemed a sort of lord of the manor, but the causes he championed were uncharacteristic of that role. In his later years, Cherry-Garrard became interested in animal rights. He was part of a vocal opposition to the destruction of penguins; he stood firm and made himself unpopular by campaigning against fox hunting. He saw himself as weak and nearsighted but regarded these apparent handicaps as a lasting source of strength.
He was always philosophical, his feet firmly on the ground. As he writes in his last chapter, "Never Again":
And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say "What is the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.
Racers to the Pole
WHAT MOST PEOPLE know of the conquest of the South Pole is that Captain Robert Falcon Scott got there and then died heroically on the return journey. That when the polar party lay tent-bound and apparently doomed, Captain Oates unselfishly said, "I am just going outside and may be some time"—and took himself out to die so that his comrades might live. That Scott represented self-sacrifice and endurance, and glorious failure, the personification of the British ideal of plucky defeat. Scott's expedition was essentially scientific; he was beset by bad weather. Roald Amundsen is sort of an afterthought: oh, yes, the dour Norwegian actually got to the Pole and planted his flag first, but that's a mere detail; he was very lucky and a little devious. So much for the South Pole.
Roland Huntford, in his The Last Place on Earth—its original title was Scott and Amundsen—proves all of this wrong, and much more to boot. Thus the kerfuffle.
It is a measure of the power of this book that when it first appeared in Britain, it caused an uproar. A few years later, a television series that was adapted from it created a flurry of angry letters to newspapers and a great deal of public discussion in which the book was rubbished and its author condemned, even vilified in some quarters, for suggesting that Fridtjof Nansen was engaged in a sexual affair with Kathleen Scott while her husband lay freezing in his tent.
The polar quest was not just exploration, a journey of discovery, but was indeed (although Scott tried to deny it) an unambiguous race to be the first at the South Pole. National pride was at stake, Norwegian and British; two different philosophies of travel and discovery, skis versus trudging, dogs versus ponies, canvas and rubberized cloth versus fur anoraks and Eskimo boots; two cultures—Norse equality ("a little republic" of explorers, as one of the Norwegians wrote) versus the severe British class system; and two sorts of leadership—more particularly, two different and distinct personalities, Roald Amundsen's versus Captain Scott's.
The great surprise of the book is that Amundsen was not a moody, sullen Scandinavian but rather a shrewd, passionate, approachable, thoroughly rational man who tended to understate his exploits, while Scott—quite the reverse of the British stereotype—was depressive, unfathomable, aloof, self-pitying, and prone to exaggerate his vicissitudes. Their personalities determined the mood of each expedition: Amundsen's was spirited and cohesive, Scott's confused and demoralized. Amundsen was charismatic and focused on his objective; Scott was insecure, dark, panicky, humorless, an enigma to his men, unprepared, and a bungler, but in the spirit of a large-scale bungler, always self-dramatizing.
"It was Scott who suited the sermons," Huntford writes. "He was a suitable hero for a nation in decline." Amundsen had made the conquest of the Pole "into something between an art and a sport. Scott had turned Polar exploration into an affair of heroism for heroism's sake." Captain Oates's mother, who was privy to a running commentary on the Scott expedition through her son's letters home—Oates was throughout a remarkable witness—called Scott the "murderer" of her son. As for Oates's opinion, "I dislike Scott intensely," he wrote in Antarctica.
Far from being a belittler or having an ax to grind about the phlegmatic British, Huntford merely points out that Britain took Scott as a necessary hero; it is not the British character that is being assailed in this book, but the process by which Scott took charge of the disastrous expedition. Scott was the problem. Though he knew little of actual command (and was unsuited to it), he was ambitious and sought advancement, even glory, in the Royal Navy. He was a manipulator and knew how to find patrons, which he did in Sir Clements Markham, a wonderfully sly subsidiary character in the narrative—vindictive, pompous, queenly, attracted to Scott more for Scott's being strangely epicene. This femininity in Scott's personality was remarked upon by one of his own men, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest in the expedition. Cherry-Garrard also mentions that the men considered Amundsen "a blunt Norwegian sailor" rather than "an explorer of the markedly intellectual type," sagacious and weather-wise.
The weather has always been regarded as the determining factor in Amundsen's success and Scott's failure. Yet it offered little advantage: conditions were pretty much the same for both expeditions; the fact was that Amundsen was far better prepared, and Scott left no margin of safety for food, fuel, or weather. For a journey of four months, Scott had not allowed for four days' bad weather. Parallel diary entries for a given period show Amundsen hearty and bucked up as he skis through fog, and just behind him Scott's diary shows Scott fatigued, depressed, complaining, slogging along. Huntford sees this not as a difference in style but in approach:
Scott ... expected the elements to be ordered for his benefit, and was resentful each time he found they were not. This was a manifestation of the spiritual pride that was Scott's fatal flaw.
The difference between
the two rivals is expressed in the way each called on the Deity. Scott did so only to complain when things went wrong; Amundsen, to give thanks for good fortune. In any case, Scott was an agnostic and believed in science; Amundsen was a Nature-worshipper. For that reason alone, Amundsen found it easier to accept the caprice of blizzard and storm. He and his companions were in tune with their surroundings; they were spared the angst that tormented Scott and, through him, pervaded the British expedition.
The Norwegian expedition, though vastly underfunded, were all of them skiers, had a better diet, simpler but more sensible gear, and the bond of friendship. Skis were a mere novelty to the non-skier Scott, whose class-ridden expedition had plenty of money and patrons. He had planned to depend on ponies and motorized sledges, but when these proved useless he was reduced to hauling sledges by hand. In the base camp, long before Scott's party set out for the Pole, one of his men—significantly it was the one Norwegian, Tryggve Gran—wrote, "Our party is divided, and we are like an army that is defeated, disappointed and inconsolable."
Amundsen had heart and compassion but had his peculiarities. He had a prejudice against doctors and wouldn't take one on an expedition. "He believed that a doctor created sickness," Huntford writes, "and, because of [a doctor's] priest-like role, meant divided command." On the other hand, his men were master navigators. Only one of Scott's men could navigate, and he was not taken on the polar party, though at the last minute Scott decided to bring along an extra man, which meant that rations would inevitably be short.
