The Worst Journey in the World

Record summary

Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World recounts the 1910–1913 British Antarctic Expedition, including the fatal winter journey to Cape Crozier and Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition. It is useful for studying how Antarctic hazards became narrativized as heroic catastrophe, ordeal and quasi-legendary polar history. The book also preserves tensions among expedition members and later interpretations of leadership and survival. It should be treated as a memoir and literary reconstruction, not as a folklore text or evidence that Antarctic disasters possess supernatural causes.