An Antarctic voyage — on the trail of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

For a month the Antarctic continent was rarely out of sight on the port side, but it still felt like I had time on my hands. Our ship, Le Commandant Charcot, was travelling 6,561 nautical miles — the equivalent of two transatlantic crossings — from Ushuaia, Argentina to Lyttleton, New Zealand. And although the extraordinary lay seemingly within touching distance, when I eventually tired of staring I decided to spend long hours reading.

Quite what to read was an easy decision: The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s 1922 account of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s calamitous 1910-13 expedition to reach the South Pole. Having travelled to Antarctica several times over the past 13 years, I was starting to feel embarrassed that I hadn’t read what is often described as the best adventure travel book ever written. The ship��s route would take me to several of the crucial locations of that doomed mission — so it seemed like the perfect time to finally tackle its 700 pages.

Of course, our Antarctic expedition would be largely unrecognisable by comparison, but at 28 days, and travelling between continents through the Bellingshausen, Amundsen and Ross seas, it was still epic by modern tourist standards. While most cruises stick to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and now come with the guarantee of seeing other ships and walking well-established routes, we were striking out for something different. It was the first time the ship’s operator Ponant had attempted such a voyage, one only possible due the ice-breaking capabilities of the Charcot, a pioneering vessel launched in 2021 that has collaborated with the Norwegian Polar Institute and British Antarctic Survey.

In 1910, the 24-year-old Cherry-Garrard sailed because of his own pioneering spirit, plus his willingness to train as an assistant zoologist — and because he made a £1,000 donation to Scott’s expedition. By the time it had ended, five men, including Scott, had died, and Cherry-Garrard was doomed to live the rest of his life as a traumatised witness and ultimate analyst of Antarctica’s most infamous misadventure.

Now, 101 years after The Worst Journey was published, we turned west at the base of the Antarctic Peninsula and met a barrier of pack ice. Ponant’s ship is the only Polar Class-2 icebreaker currently carrying tourists — even the US Navy doesn’t have a higher-rated ice ship — so we still had options.

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by a notable earlier traveller. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

Spotting sufficient gaps in the pack, Captain Stanislas Devorsine hugged the coast of Thurston Island, saving us several sea days at sea. “This was the crucial moment,” he told me later. “After we got there, we didn’t have so much information. Look” — he opened a screen showing the last similar navigation — “the Palmer. Here in 2013.” We were sailing a track not followed for a decade. This was lonely water now.

West, west and west again, time-zones dropping away every couple of days, the confusion of the dateline yet to come. By the time we reached the Amundsen Sea, we were one of the most remote ships on the planet, and yet the sun shone with such golden insistence that it felt like nothing was at risk.

The following morning, when we anchored off the Brownson Islands, we were the first tourist ship to do so. For the expedition team looking after us, this was a complicated cocktail of planning and guesswork — unlike the popular landing sites up on the Antarctic Peninsula, here there was free choice, high risk and no guarantee that our hikes would be achievable, let alone enjoyable.

In the end, the time at the Brownsons felt like the genuine privilege it was. Having scouted out a suitable landing, the expedition team loaded us into Zodiac inflatable boats to cruise around the archipelago, where occasional near-frozen waves vaulted over our bow. They then helped us ashore and led us through virgin snow. While some of the more active guests climbed to the summit of an unnamed peak, others were happy to spend a couple of hours watching Adélie penguins and their fluffy chicks bumble around by the shore.

Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, carried expedition members “whose specialist knowledge was in whales, porpoises, dolphins, fish, birds, parasites, plankton”. The Charcot too carried experts, who gave lectures as well as carrying out their own research in a dedicated onboard lab. A team from Laval University in Quebec were searching for microplastics at our rare latitudes, while a doctor from the University of Southampton was verifying a theory about phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean. The company hopes that supporting such projects, as well as helping scientific expedition ships with ice-breaking, will counter calls for tourists to stay out of pristine polar regions.

A couple of days later, Captain Devorsine wedged his remarkable ship into “fast ice”, the solid, unmoving ice pack attached to land. Doing so meant that staff could simply lower gangways, then stroll out with guests across the ice to find small detachments of moulting emperor penguins. The location was so ideal — ice stable, the volcanic Mount Siple illuminated by unyielding summer sun on the horizon — that we stayed there overnight.

After a couple of weeks, we finally arrived at what is now called the Ross Ice Shelf, but which Cherry-Garrard and the men of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration ominously referred to as The Barrier. In its shadow, the water had the blue-ish hue of old tattoos, and a 20-strong pod of orca patrolled icebergs full of condemned penguins. The men of the Terra Nova possibly encountered the ancestors of these killer whales. In one of the most striking episodes of Cherry-Garrard’s book, some of the expedition’s ponies are lost from pack ice when snatched by the orcas’ “huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes”.

The sea days continued with the seemingly infinite Barrier and the man called “Cherry” by his shipmates as my companions. By this point, we had sailed to over 77 degrees south where the ice was so thick that landings had grown impossible, and our ship had to carefully pass through mazes of tabular icebergs the size of aircraft hangars and shopping malls.

When we sailed past Cape Crozier, my reading neatly synced with our location. On the foothills of Mount Terror, Cherry-Garrard, Henry “Birdie” Bowers and Bill Wilson returned from a near-fatal foraging trip for emperor penguin eggs to find their tent blown away, with only their sleeping bags and a half-igloo left for shelter.

It was the lowest point the author reached in his whole wretched time in Antarctica. “Thus impiously I set out to die,” he wrote, “making up my mind that I was not going to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.” He seemed to reach across the century and whisper directly in my ear: “Yes! Comfortable, warm reader. Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.” At that same moment, the daily schedule aboard the Charcot was offering a brioche-baking class. 

The ship had a lot of those sorts of things — cruisy things — but I kept being distracted from the itinerary by Cherry-Garrard’s endless suffering and the yawning magnificence of the white world outside. Antarctic explorers of his era used to worry about scurvy, but such was the excess on this French ship that if I was concerned about an antique ailment, it was gout.

The gap between my universe and Cherry-Garrard’s widened, no matter how much I wanted to believe we were sharing something. In half-protest at this, I didn’t attend the cooking classes for Arctic char, far breton, or pumpkin risotto with hazelnut and truffle (instead reading passages such as “This journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror”). I ignored the morning yoga, the stretching and the aqua-gym. (“Any man who undertakes big polar journeys must face the possibility of having to commit suicide to save his companions.”) I eschewed the classes variously teaching cha-cha, salsa and tango, and I completely neglected the outdoor pool, the indoor pool, and the cigar lounge. (“I could not have wept if I tried.”) I didn’t even use my voucher for a free massage in the spa.

But Alain Ducasse’s restaurant on deck five? That I did take advantage of, almost every night, always with a gluttonous eye locked on the chariot de fromage. Thus impiously I set out to dine.

The least I could do was take Cherry with me. All the space on board meant I could take his book to lunch and dinner and read alone in peace. There its multitudes stretched in front of me: an account of adventure certainly, but also one of the disintegration of bodies and minds, of what his generation would later call shellshock and we now call PTSD, and — perhaps more than anything — a story of a man plagued by survivors’ guilt. It is a book of pain.

Eventually, we turned around the western tip of Ross Island and nudged into the McMurdo Sound, Mount Erebus looming above us in a smooth blue sky. More ice lay ahead but by this point, I had grown to enjoy watching the ice yield under the ship, a curious kind of hypnotism cast by colour and sound as we shattered the sea. Whites, blues and diatom yellows in turning ice were accompanied by a soundtrack of groans, frazzles and guttural rumbles — then, just as Cherry-Garrard experienced, “a tiny crack, no bigger than a vein, would run shivering from our bows, which widened and widened until the whole ship passed through without difficulty.”

For me and for many other passengers, Scott’s wooden hut at Cape Evans was the voyage’s most unforgettable site

We were not, however, invincible. As we continued to Cape Evans, a conspiracy of wind and ice gathered behind us. Despite his ship’s extraordinary efficiency in polar water, Captain Devorsine — who had a decade of captaining ice-breakers before joining Ponant — saw the danger clearly. “You must always be careful with pressure,” he told me. “When the ice is forced into the land, it can be dangerous — even for this ship.”

Instead, plans were delayed and we pushed south to look at the icy carbuncle that is McMurdo Station, the US base that can accommodate 1,000 members of staff in summer. Even in the sunshine there was no softening its ugliness, and no ignoring the sense that it was ruining our perfect isolation. It was a reminder that before long, our distant privacy would come to an end.

We still had Cape Adare to reach, however, which was so smothered by Adélie penguins that we could hardly find a place to stand. In the water, we watched lethal leopard seals patrolling the shallows, waiting for one of the birds to come in for a short, sharp swimming lesson.

For me, and for many of the other passengers, though, Scott’s wooden hut at Cape Evans, on the west side of Ross Island, was the voyage’s most unforgettable site. Dedicated work by the New Zealand-based Antarctic Heritage Trust has restored and renovated this tragic command post, keeping it somewhere between a museum and a mausoleum.

Inside, I found the stillness and the intimacy almost too much to bear. I saw old cans of pemmican made by De Beauvais of Denmark, and remembered that it was Cherry-Garrard’s favourite. Nearby, the writer had slept in the bed below his dear friend “Birdie” Bowers. At the side of that bunk, I found a five-of-hearts playing card wedged by the mattress and wondered if Birdie had been cheating in some long-forgotten game.

It was the huge table in the centre of the room that felt most haunted. Here the men partied, planned and plotted; later, the survivors gathered to mourn the senseless loss of Scott, Bowers, Wilson, Oates and Evans, none of whom made it back from the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard wasn’t selected for this fatal, final mission but spent much of the rest of his life wishing he had been.

I stood by the table, listening closely, hoping to hear something, or perhaps say something meaningful — the silence felt too terrible. Instead, I turned to leave, then paused to look around the hut once more, and wished the men of the Terra Nova had been able to return here as one.

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