The Worst Journey in the World (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

CHERRY-GARRARD, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic, 1910–1913. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2007.

Octavo. Full black leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. Maps and illustrations by Dr. Edward A. Wilson and other members of the expedition throughout. One folding map. Collector's Edition.

In the winter of 1911, three men walked away from the main hut of the British Antarctic Expedition into complete darkness and temperatures that fell to minus sixty degrees Celsius. They were dragging two sledges. Their destination was the Emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier, sixty-five miles away across the Ross Ice Shelf. The scientific purpose of the journey was to collect Emperor penguin eggs at the moment of incubation — it was then believed that the penguin embryo might reveal the evolutionary link between reptiles and birds — and since Emperor penguins breed during the Antarctic winter, there was no other time to attempt it. The three men were Edward Wilson, the expedition's chief scientist; Henry Robertson Bowers; and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, at twenty-four the youngest member of the Terra Nova expedition. They were gone for five weeks. When they returned, frostbitten, their sleeping bags frozen solid around them, Scott described what they had done as "the hardest journey ever made." Cherry-Garrard later used that phrase as the starting point for his title — for it was this journey, not the polar journey, that he meant by the worst.

The polar journey followed in the summer of 1911–12, and Cherry-Garrard was not among the five men chosen for the final march to the Pole. He was part of the support party that turned back from the polar plateau. In February 1912 he was sent south with the dog teams to a pre-arranged position at One Ton Depot to await Scott's return. He waited. He could have pushed further south. He turned back on schedule, following orders he had been given. Eleven miles further south, in a tent that would not be found until November, Scott and his two surviving companions were dying. The question of whether Cherry-Garrard could have saved them by driving on would occupy him for the rest of his life, producing what his doctors identified as a nervous breakdown and what George Bernard Shaw — his neighbour in Hertfordshire, and the man who urged him to write the book — recognised as the specific weight of survivor's guilt carried by an extraordinarily sensitive and honest mind.

The Worst Journey in the World, first published in two volumes by Constable in 1922, is the product of that mind working at full stretch. It is not a straightforward narrative but a meditation — on the nature of scientific endeavour, on the bonds formed between men under extreme pressure, on the particular character of Antarctic light and cold and silence, and on the gap between what was decided and what might have been decided differently. The writing is of a quality unusual in exploration literature: precise, self-critical, and capable of genuine beauty. Cherry-Garrard's account is supported by diary excerpts and accounts from his companions, and each member of the expedition is brought fully to life. The book has been ranked by National Geographic Adventure as the greatest adventure book ever written.

Near fine. Some very minor and sporadic markings to gilt edges; otherwise clean and bright throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000471