Cherry by Sara Wheeler, Jonathan Cape, 拢18.99, ISBN 0224050044
鈥淧OLAR exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a
bad time which has ever been devised.鈥� So said Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member
of Captain Robert Scott鈥檚 Antarctic expedition. By the time he was 28, 鈥淐herry鈥�
had survived a desperate journey through the long, frigid night of an Antarctic
winter. He had travelled with Scott much of the way to the South Pole. He led
the team that failed to rescue the ailing Scott and his men, and was one of the
party that finally discovered the dead Scott and his companions in their
half-buried tent. These last two events were to haunt him for the rest of his
life. He tortured himself with the notion that had he acted differently he might
have saved his friends.
Cherry鈥檚 version of the story is told in his marvellous book The Worst
Journey in the World. But until now nobody has chronicled the rest of his
life. Sara Wheeler has made an estimable job of this first biography. Though her
account of his early life is rather fact-heavy, she paints a vivid portrait of
his later years. This is a full and much-needed portrait of the troubled
Antarctic hero.
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