Cherry-Garrard was twenty-four, half blind without his glasses, and paid to join Scott’s last expedition. The title journey isn’t the pole. It’s the winter trip he made with two others to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks in total darkness at seventy below, teeth cracking from chattering, the tent blown away, sleeping bags frozen solid. They got the eggs. Then he was one of the party that found Scott’s tent the following spring, eleven miles from the depot. He wrote it a decade later, angry and precise about how the whole thing was organized.
The Worst Journey in the World