The Worst Journey in the World

In 1910, Cherry-Garrard and his fellow explorers travelled by sailing vessel, the Terra Nova, from Cardiff to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Scott's strategy called for a large team of men, ponies, motor sledges and dogs to start out southward from their base, hauling food and fuel on sledges. As the team progressed southward, the leader would successively send support groups back home, leaving a small Pole party of the fittest men to make the final advance to the South Pole.Cherry-Garrard accompanied the initial team across the Ross Ice Shelf and up the Beardmore Glacier, that discharges ice from the Antarctic Plateau down onto the shelf. At the edge of the polar plateau Scott told him that he would have to return northward. The men not chosen to go on to the Pole all returned to the base camp at Cape Evans. Some returned by ship to Britain while others stayed in the Antarctic and prepared to meet Scott and his four companions on the return journey. But for a variety of reasons, the rendezvous failed.Cherry had been given the task of using the dog teams to meet Scott's party and assist them home, but in fact Cherry-Garrard did not penetrate beyond One Ton Depot, only 11 miles distant from Scott's final location where he and his companions froze to death.Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. It was written and published in 1922 by a member of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and has earned wide praise for its frank treatment of the difficulties of the expedition, the causes of its disastrous outcome, and the meaning of human suffering under extreme conditions.