After world's worst journey

Books editor MARGIE THOMSON reviews an extraordinary biography of the youngest member of Robert Scott's fatal Antarctic expedition.

As a 24-year-old millionaire from England's landed gentry, and suffering from that "restriction and oppression - the subtle weight of the circumambient air" that Lytton Strachey identified in those people with their souls stuck in the Victorian era, Apsley Cherry-Garrard bought his way onto Robert Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the Antarctic.

Scott's expedition has been written about many times - his failure to be first to the Pole (the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had arrived a month before); Titus Oates' famous last words as he left his blizzard-stricken companions, "I am just going outside and may be some time"; Scott's own frozen death just 20km from a good supply of food and fuel - but this is the first biography of Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Scott's party, who later wrote his own resounding account of those hard years that he called The Worst Journey in the World.

That was first published in 1922 and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, with a new paperback edition being published just a few weeks ago (Picador $27.95).

More than a thrilling tale of adventure from the heroic age, Cherry transformed his story into a parable, as author Sara Wheeler notes, with his "elegant scepticism, the bitter brilliance of his prose and nimble sleight of hand", and it is these qualities that have given his book its peculiarly long life.

Yet the man who wrote it has remained in the shadows until Wheeler - author of Terra Incognita and surely the best-matched biographer possible for a project like this - happened to be holed up in a tent during an Antarctic blizzard, finishing The Worst Journey, and musing on the kind of person who had written it.

"Between the graceful lines I saw, dimly, a vision of a certain kind of Englishness: quizzical detachment, a finely tuned sense of irony, an infinite capacity for gloom tempered with elegiac melancholy. Or that is what I thought I saw," she writes.

Years of research later, she has produced one of those extraordinary biographies that is an empathetic examination of character, laced with genuinely thrilling adventures, told in a tone that blends admiration with irony, humour with due respect, and all beautifully set, like a precious stone in a piece of jewellery, amid the tumult of events and change in the wider society.

Cherry was born in 1886 into a family that owned several large estates and was resolutely High Tory, in an age that Wheeler describes as "remote as the South Pole" - a world of horse-drawn carriages, secure squirearchy and tribes of indoor servants.

Yet even by the time he reached middle age he felt that his ordered, codified world ("God in his heaven and sausages for breakfast," as his contemporary Siegfried Sassoon put it) had collapsed.

The certainties of his youth crumbled in the wake of world war, technological advancement, economic depression, industrial unrest and the Labour Party, and Cherry complained that the world "was losing its ancient faiths without having much to put in their place".

As the oldest and the only boy in his family, Cherry's life was more or less mapped out for him, managing the family's considerable assets. Yet he was restless and, despite his social conservatism, unconventional enough to crave adventure of some sort.

He had met some important people connected with Scott's expedition and became fired with the idea of polar adventure.

While he donated a considerable sum to Scott's cash-strapped venture, there seems no doubt that he was chosen as an "adaptable helper" also because of his obvious personal characteristics of intelligence, enthusiasm and sensitivity.

Although he had no previous experience of the tough work required aboard ship and on ice, even before they reached the Antarctic Cherry had adapted so well as a tireless, cheerful team-member that Scott was overheard describing him as "tip-top always", and others were speculating that he might be one of the chosen to accompany Scott on his dash to the Pole.

Cherry himself found a kind of freedom in the rough, manly conditions of the expedition that he had never experienced in his previous years as the son of landed gentry, or as a student at Oxford where he passed but did not shine.

He formed some of the closest friendships of his life, most notably with Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers, both of whom perished with Scott, lying on either side of their leader in their little, bereft tent below a mound of snow.

Such was the power of his Antarctic experience that it dominated the rest of his life. This was true in purely physical ways - most of his teeth, for instance, had split from the cold, and in middle age he was plagued by a series of problems including arthritis, rheumatism and backache - but also psychologically. Prone to debilitating bouts of depression, in some ways he never ceased "stumbling in the bleak psychic landscape of bereavement".

Two major episodes in particular mark Cherry's time in the Antarctic. The first came towards the end of his first winter on the ice, following what he later described as the happiest time of his life, stuck in a greasy little hut with beloved companions: "Just enough to eat and keep us warm, no more - no frills or trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life ... The luxuries of civilisation satisfy only those wants which they themselves create."

He and Bowers were chosen to accompany Wilson on what Wheeler describes as "the most ambitious of all journeys", the winter sledging expedition in polar darkness to Cape Crozier to obtain embryos of the Emperor penguins which alone in the natural world incubate their eggs on ice during the Antarctic winter (unlike Amundsen, Scott was genuinely committed to a scientific purpose, as well as exploration and "being first").

It was thought that the embryos could reveal a Darwinian prize, a link between birds and reptiles. After a journey of extraordinary hardship during which the temperature fell to minus 59 deg C, their tent blew away and their teeth shattered, Cherry was able to write: "We did not forget the Please and Thank you ... And we kept our tempers, even with God."

On his return to England, following the deaths of his two friends, Cherry did take the precious eggs to the Natural History Museum where he was treated dismissively. Those eggs, Wheeler explains, thus became the central symbol in Cherry's parable. "If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg," he wrote.

The second big event, of course, was Cherry's part in Scott's push for the Pole. He accompanied Scott part of the way, but was in the first party to break off and return to base.

Later, as a result of the cascade of events that were unfolding and, if they only knew it, leading to disaster, he sledged out to One Ton depot to meet, he thought, a triumphant Scott and to aid his speedy return to base.

A misunderstanding due to "confused and conflicting orders" prevented Cherry sledging further south with dogs and provisions to meet the returning polar party. If he had, it is possible he could have saved them. This knowledge tormented him for the rest of his life and for a time made him a scapegoat in the eyes of the media, some expedition members and the public.

After it was all over - although for Cherry it was never really all over - and he had returned to Lamar, his country estate in Hertfordshire, he largely resumed his life.

He formed a close and abiding friendship with George Bernard Shaw and his wife and through them met many stars of the age, including Charlie Chaplin. He fought occasional battles with his tenant farmers and grew tired of the strains of property ownership.

By the end of his life he had sold it all and retreated to a small London flat and the comforts of hotel rooms and ocean cruises. He brooded and obsessively replayed the events of 1910-13, often with a veiled anger at Scott for the poor decisions that had hurried the tragic outcome. Nevertheless, his book reflects a very modern portrait in both light and dark of the controversial man.

He became a curmudgeonly old fellow, "an anachronistic old grouch", Wheeler says. Apparently unconscious of the random stroke of fate that had led him to acquire his riches, he "shared the outrage of most of his class when he contemplated the horrible spectacle of working men asking for higher wages". He had the "unattractive upper-class habit" of complaining about being poor, and considered modernism a perilous destructive force.

Yet, through Wheeler's lens, we feel tremendous sympathy for this man who, while young, endured so much so well, and who was part of both the worst journey and the greatest adventure. He was able to turn that into an ordered experience, something full of meaning, for generations of readers; it was his personal tragedy that life's complexities could not so gracefully be brought to heel.

* Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, by Sara Wheeler, Jonathan Cape $75