The Worst Journey in the World (INSCRIBED First Edition)

CHERRY-GARRARD, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910–1913. London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1922.

2 vols. Large 8vo. Original publisher's variant blue cloth. Spines lettered in gilt. Vol. I: lxiv, 304 pp; Vol. II: viii, 284 pp. 10 fold-out panoramic photographs, 5 fold-out maps. Numerous photographic plates and illustrations, including sketches by Edward Adrian Wilson and photographs by Frank Debenham and Charles Wright. First edition. Publisher's blue cloth variant — significantly less common than the primary issue. Inscribed by the author to the front free endpaper of Vol. I. From the library of Warwick H. Williams.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World stands, by consensus of a century of polar scholars and literary readers, as one of the greatest accounts of Antarctic exploration ever written and one of the finest works of non-fiction prose of the twentieth century. George Bernard Shaw, who helped Cherry-Garrard revise the manuscript, called it magnificent. It remains in print, continuously, more than a century after its first publication.

Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard (1886–1959) was twenty-four years old and the youngest member of the Terra Nova expedition when he paid £1,000 for the privilege of going to Antarctica with Robert Falcon Scott in 1910. He went as assistant zoologist under Dr. Edward Adrian Wilson, the expedition's chief scientist and Scott's closest companion, whose pencil sketches are among the most significant artistic records of the polar regions and whose illustrations appear throughout these volumes. What happened over the next three years shaped the remainder of Cherry-Garrard's life in ways from which he never fully recovered.

In the winter of 1911 — June to August, in permanent darkness, at temperatures approaching minus seventy degrees Fahrenheit — Wilson selected Cherry-Garrard and Henry Robertson Bowers to accompany him on a journey of sixty miles across the Ross Ice Shelf and the Cape Crozier sea ice to collect the eggs of Emperor Penguins. The scientific purpose was specific: contemporary evolutionary theory held that penguin embryos, if obtained at the right developmental stage, might represent the missing link between birds and their reptilian ancestors. The physical ordeal was almost beyond comprehension. The three men hauled their own sledge in darkness through a polar winter so severe that their teeth cracked from the cold and their sleeping bags froze solid, unable to be opened except by hours of body heat. They reached Cape Crozier, collected three eggs, and returned barely alive. Scott, on seeing them on their return, described it as "the hardest journey that has ever been made."

The following summer, Cherry-Garrard accompanied Scott's polar party as far as the top of the Beardmore Glacier before being turned back. He was later sent south with the dog teams to lay additional supplies at One Ton Depot for the returning polar party. He waited at One Ton — he had no way of knowing where Scott and his companions were, he lacked the dog food to go further south, and he did not know they were dying eleven miles away in their tent. Cherry-Garrard turned back. Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Lawrence Oates, and Edgar Evans never returned. Their bodies, their diaries, and Cherry-Garrard's letters from Wilson — letters that Wilson had written knowing he might not return — were found by a search party in November 1912.

Cherry-Garrard would spend the rest of his life asking whether he could have saved them. The question had no answer. He suffered what we would now recognise as severe post-traumatic stress disorder, spent periods in psychiatric care, and for years could not speak or write about what had happened. Over the ensuing decade Cherry-Garrard would pen his account of the expedition, titled The Worst Journey in the World - a play on the remark Scott had made to him  - and the work was published in 1922. The book is notable for its intellectual rigour as much as its emotional power and Cherry-Garrard does not hold back in his views on the costs of the expedition. Scott's decisions are examined with a clarity that is the more devastating for its evident affection for the man. The entire experience of the Terra Nova expedition — its planning, its science, its extraordinary cast of characters, its tragedy — is rendered with a precision and honesty that hagiography could not have achieved.

Cherry-Garrard was, by temperament and by the psychological damage he had sustained, an intensely private man who rarely signed or inscribed copies of his work. Inscribed first edition copies of The Worst Journey in the World are among the rarest in the literature of Antarctic exploration.

The first edition was published by Constable in two variants of cloth binding. The blue cloth variant represented here is significantly less common than the primary issue and is among the more sought-after forms of the book.

Very good. Binding on both volumes slightly cocked, though still tight. Rubbing and very mild chipping to head and foot of spines of both volumes. Slight sunning to spines. Some markings to front cover of Vol. I and rear cover of Vol. II. Contents of both volumes in excellent condition throughout. Endpapers slightly toned. Very mild age toning to page edges; some occasional light spotting. For a copy of this age, significance, and rarity, the condition is excellent.

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Provenance: From the library of Warwick H. Williams.

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