Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Response of the Spirit
Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient
Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man's
habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions
than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the
ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an
undiscovered continent in the south.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, from
The Worst Journey in the World
IN
1911, in the heart of the polar winter, the saintly Bill Wilson, Scott's right-hand man, pulled a
sledge from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier with Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard in order
to collect emperor penguin eggs. No human being had yet seen such eggs. The temperature dropped
to minus seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit, the tent blew away, and when they finally got back to
the hut after five weeks the others had to use tin openers to get their clothes off. 'I for one had come
to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain,' wrote
Cherry-Garrard.
When three eggs reached England, the men in starched collars labouring in the Gothic scientific
institutions sniffed and said that the Crozier trip 'had not added greatly to our knowledge of penguin
embryology'. In
The Worst Journey in the World
, a book which deals with the whole expedition,
though the title refers to the march to Crozier, Cherry-Garrard artlessly turns the journey into the
quest for truth and the penguin eggs into a symbol of its spiritual goal. It is the archetypal transmog-
rification of failure on a human plane into success on a higher one. He said this:
Superficially they failed. I have heard discussions of their failure. The same men would have dis-
cussed the failure of Christ hanging upon the cross: or Joan of Arc burning at the stake . . . To
me, and perhaps to you, the interest of this story is the men, and it is the spirit of the men, 'the
response of the spirit', which is interesting, rather than what they did or failed to do: except in a
superficial sense they never failed. That is how I see it, and I knew them pretty well. It is a story
about human minds with all kinds of ideas and questions involved, which stretch beyond the fur-
thest horizons.
Cherry wrote the topic after he had been invalided home from the Western Front, and by then the
war had shattered illusions like so many eggshells. 'Never such innocence, never before or since,'
Philip Larkin wrote of 1914. For Cherry, the trek to Crozier became a one-way journey out of pre-
lapsarian innocence. Nobody needed to believe the mythical elevation more than he did. His two
companions, Wilson and Bowers, had gone on to die with Scott, and he tortured himself with the
