Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires
Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art
The Worst Journey in the World Apsley Cherry-Garrard
I love the poetry and good humour of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s introduction:
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on untilChristmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London,more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic asa medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell’s party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance ,I am unable to see how it can be done.Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.
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.
Cherry-Garrard’s wide learning and sense of humour were one of the reasons he survived Antarctica. You need grit of character as well as physical endurance!
The Worst Journey in the World is a memoir of the 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. It was written and published in 1922 by a survivor of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
Here is Wikipedia’s account:
In 1910, Cherry-Garrard and his fellow explorers traveled by sailing vessel, the Terra Nova, from Cardiff to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. ‘Cherry’ was teased at first by some of the other members of this expedition because of his lack of Antarctic experience, his lack of specialized credentials for the position of ‘assistant zoologist‘ to which he had been named, and persistent suspicions among some of his comrades that he had in fact bought his way on board by contributing £1,000 to the expedition’s troubled funds.
Cherry-Garrard responded to these taunts with modesty, a self-sacrificial ability to work hard, and acute observational skills. He was also, according to novelist, biographer and socialite Nancy Mitford, the only intellectual amongst the crew. These traits were to serve him well when it came time for him to write down his memories of the expedition. They also caught the eye of the expedition’s second-in-command, Dr Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson, who adopted Cherry-Garrard as a protégé.
Dr Wilson’s personal goal in Antarctica was to recover eggs of the Emperor penguin for scientific study.[4] It was thought at the time that the flightless (and “primitive”) penguin might shed light on an evolutionary link between reptiles and birds through its embryo. As the bird nests during the Antarctic winter, it was necessary to mount a special expedition in July 1911 from the expedition’s base at Cape Evans to the penguins’ rookery at Cape Crozier. Wilson chose Cherry-Garrard to accompany him and ‘Birdie’ Bowers across the Ross Ice Shelf under conditions of complete darkness and temperatures of -40 and below. It was this “Winter Journey”, not the later expedition to the South Pole, that Cherry-Garrard later described as The Worst Journey in the World.[6]
All three men, barely alive, returned from Cape Crozier with their egg specimens, which were stored as the expedition swung into preparations for a march from Cape Evans to the as-yet-undiscovered South Pole. This second and much longer march, in contrast with the Worst Journey, was to be done during the Antarctic summer in 1911-1912.
The men not chosen to go on to the Pole reassembled at the base camp at Cape Evans and waited there through 1912 for Scott and four companions to rejoin them, but the expedition’s leader never returned. In 1912-1913 Cherry-Garrard and other survivors once again marched southward, this time to try to find traces of their lost comrades. Cherry-Garrard’s description of the frozen tent that contained three of them is one of the most dramatic sections of the book. Inside the tent were the remains of Scott and Cherry-Garrard’s two companions on the Worst Journey, Bowers and Wilson.[8]
Cherry-Garrard’s description of the closing scenes of the expedition, based on lengthy excerpts from his own journal, transitions first into a gentle and empathetic description of Scott’s mistakes, and then into a written meditation on the themes of self-sacrifice and heroism.
Although The Worst Journey in the World was published only nine years after the end of the Scott expedition, that short length of time had made clear that new technology, particularly caterpillar-tread vehicles and airplanes, would revolutionize future work in the Antarctic and make much of the suffering endured by Scott and his men unnecessary.
The Worst Journey in the World asks, but does not answer, the question of whether this suffering was futile, or whether it would inspire future human beings facing very different challenges.
The Winter Journey eventually became a case study on how a paradigm shift in scientific methodology can devalue data that had begun to be gathered before the shift. At the time the Terra Nova expedition sailed, many biologists believed in recapitulation theory. They believed that examining the embroyos of key species, such as the Emperor penguin, would show how the species – and, by extension, how the family of birds as a whole – had evolved. The expedition’s scientists determined to try to collect specimens based upon this theory.
As the survivors of the Terra Nova returned to England several years later, recapitulation theory had begun to be
discredited. The egg specimens were turned over to embryologists at London’s Natural History Museum, who were largely uninterested in the donation.! Cherry-Garrard describes how he was told that the retrieved eggs had added little to their knowledge of penguin embryology, nor to scientific knowledge as a whole.!”
Thank you, Wikipedia!
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In Him was life, and that life was the light of men
In him was LIFE.
Another of the great words, the great themes of this Gospel.
LIFE for our lifelessness, our hopelessness, our inner deadness
. LIFE, the great antidote for the depression that is inevitable when we lose sight of the source of life.
And that life was the LIGHT of men.
Light, like God himself, is one of the simple, humble, unregarded, taken for granted things.
Light like God is many things
SAFETYAnd yet from earliest childhood we know that in it lies our safety. In cities, when there is street lighting, crime falls. When there is a city wide power failure, crime soars. At night, in the darkness, the world over, crime increases exponentially–murder, rape, muggings, burglaries. We knows these things from earliest childhood if we are female. There are few places in the world in which a woman can walk completely safely alone after dark. Certainly not Oxford, England.
And the power of light is stronger than the power of darkness. Not all the darkness in the world can extinguish a tiny candle, but a tiny candle can illuminate, however slightly, the most majestic hall.
Posted by Anita Mathias at 13:36
“Ten Shekels and a Shirt” Paris Reidhead’s fiery sermon is one of the most listened to sermons of all time. Read the transcript here http://www.parisreidheadbibleteachingministries.org/tenshekels.shtml
What I am Reading: Pictures from an Institution, by Randall Jarrell. Luscious, carefully written sentences, each one a delight. One of the most carefully written novels I’ve read in a long time. Not just funny, but absolutely hilarious. Enjoyed the portrayal of Mary McCarthy as Gertrude
Another academic novel, this one set in Oxford High School which my daughters attend. Daughters of Jerusalem by Charlotte Mendelson. Carefully observed but a bit too caustic and misanthropic for my taste. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
We were saddened recently by the death of Gene Golub, my husband Roy’s post-doctoral adviser at Stanford. A brilliant scientist, but more a people person, genuinely interested in people, who gave each person the impression that he thought they were really interesting, and unique. And of course, he did. Giving people this gift of attention brings out what is really interesting in them; you feel yourself coming alive, becoming more interesting.
I thoroughly enjoyed our dinners and conversations with Gene. In the moving memorial website, it seems hundreds of others, treasured their friendships with him.
http://genehgolub.blogspot.com
On reaching mid-life, I grow more convinced, that what you are as a person matters far, far more than anything you achieve. Many mathematicians have died, few have received the genuine outpouring of grief, and the accolades for what they were as a human being that Gene has received.
Give me knowledge, a seeker cries in Christina Rossetti’s poem
But he learns
“That all is small, save love,
For love is all in all.”
Oh rats!
Flushed out by the July floods, evidently–they are everywhere! Scampering in the garden in full daylight, eating the ducks’ food, getting into the rabbits’ hutch, scampering above our heads at night.
Liberal applications of Rodean ( a mischievous pun on England’s poshest girls’ school) is taking its effect. Oh rats! And one reason we wanted to move to the country was for the wildlife.
Another plague is the spiders, everywhere, their startling prevalence somehow linked to the July floods too, my daughter’s biology teacher says.
More on the downside of Country Life–Foxes, Myxomatosis
http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2007/06/town-and-country.html
and floods
http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2007/08/le-deluge.html
Here’s a lovely excerpt from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson which I am currently reading with great pleasure.
The story of Hagar and Ishmael says that it is not only the father of a child who cares for its life, who protects its mother, and it says that even if the mother can’t find a way to provide for it or herself, provision will be made. At that level, it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes–we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give him. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s.