Season 5 Episode 5 Transcript The Worst Journey in the World

Alok: [Let me take you on a journey. To the coldest place on earth, and its last and greatest wilderness. On a voyage to Antarctica…]

Hello and welcome to A Voyage to Antarctica, brought to you by the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. I’m Alok Jha.

The winter before Captain Scott’s ill-fated attempt on the South Pole, his youngest team member Apsley Cherry Garrard - known as “Cherry” - set off across the ice in the deep Antarctic night.

It was a treacherous expedition and Cherry’s subsequent memoir The Worst Journey in the World remains one of the greatest works of travel and adventure writing to this day.

Here to tell me all about that gripping journey is Henrietta Hammant.

Henrietta is an anthropologist specialising in the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. Her research considers how this era of Antarctic history is displayed in museums. She has worked across the UK and Canada, most notably at the Polar Museum in Cambridge.

She's also recently submitted her PHD thesis at the university of Reading

We're gonna be talking about a very famous story in the history of Antarctica.

The story's about someone called Apsley Cherry Garrad. Just tell us who he was.

Henrietta Hammant: Apsley Cherry Garrad was the assistant zoologist on Captain Scott's second expedition to the Antarctic, the Terranova expedition that went south from 1910 until 1913. But he wasn't a traditional polar explorer. He came from a very well todo family. His father had been a colonel in the army, and he was from a line of lawyers and civil servants.

And his mother was a doctor's daughter, and Terry himself had been a student. And then in his early twenties, unfortunately, his father had died and he hadn't really started his own career yet. So he was looking for something to do basically.

And he had inherited the wealth of his family and his father's titles, and he was looking for something that he felt his father would be proud of him for.

So he had lived a very short life before he kind of got embroiled in what was to become his big story.

Alok: Well, just before we get onto that story, he made quite a lot of effort to get onto it in the first place. I mean, Scott, one of the most famous Antarctic explorers, of course, heralded around the world for his expeditions.

And Cherry wanted to go, but kind of was rebuffed by Scott a couple of times, wasn't he?

Henrietta: He was. And I think it's important to note at this point that there was stiff competition to get onto this expedition,

Alok: to go on this terrible journey.

Henrietta: Definitely everyone wanted a piece of this terrible journey. So there were about 8,000 applicants for this expedition. And Cherry was a bit of a strange one because he didn't have a kind of normal polar background of someone that you might expect. So he hadn't been in the Navy, in the Royal Navy, in the Merchant Navy, he didn't have a maritime background.

And he also wasn't a scientist. He was, as I mentioned, just kind of an heir, really, the son of a wealthy man. And so he basically, as all young people who've come into an amazing fortune does, decided that he was gonna go traveling. And so he goes traveling and he eventually ends up at his cousin's house, and there he bumps into his cousin's friend.

Edward Wilson. And Wilson of course was Captain Scott's right hand man. He'd been on his first expedition. Everybody loves Wilson, and in fact, Wilson loved Cherry. And so when Cherry later found out that this expedition was looking for men. He sent them a letter asking to be considered, and, he didn't have that normal background, so they said, well, thanks very much, but actually probably no thanks.

And then he sent them another letter and said, well, I might be able to offer some money for the expedition. So he kind of offers them a thousand pounds, which isn't. Too unusual people were doing it.

ALok: do we know how much that is in modern terms? I mean a thousand pounds.

This sounds like a lot of money now, but I mean it must have been a fortune back then.

Henrietta: Yeah, it really was. I'm not sure exactly what the equivalent is, but certainly, yeah, it was a not inconsiderable amount of money and it was not inconsiderable for Scott who was really putting this expedition together on a shoestring.

So he says that he'll send them this money and he also has Wilson's backing 'cause they've met before and they really like each other. But even so, Scott, you know, he's not gonna be drawn. And Cherry takes it really, really well.

And he says, okay, well basically thank you for considering me and you can still have the money.

And then that act was the thing that kind of got Scott's attention that he was gonna give them this money anyway.

And so only a few days later, he kind of gets summoned to go and see Scott. And then eventually he wins him over with what I can only assume is his great charm. And he ends up being invited to be part of the expedition.

I think there's a lot in that just small story that tells you a lot about Jerry. You know, his persistence, the fact that he was well liked and that actually he, he had this kind of, even though I'm not sure he would've thought that way at the time, he had a kind of vision and he knew what he wanted, even though it took him a little while to kind of get there.

Alok: Jessie, our producer just told me how much a thousand pounds is today. It's almost 150,000 pounds in today's money, right? So this is not a small amount of money. And what did he buy himself? He bought himself a trip on the terra nova and then he would go on to write the story, which we can reveal now the worst journey in the world.

This is what he bought himself.

Henrietta: It's an incredible thing. But you know, that's the beauty of polar exploration is you dunno what you're gonna get until you get it.

Alok: Well, so this is the book of course that we referred to earlier, the worst Journey in the World, which many people have probably heard about.

And it's a sort of tale, it's one of the most famous stories about anarchy, exploration, a beautifully written thing. And it's about terranova, it's about this expedition that Scott went on, which eventually Scott would die on. And I mean, just tell us a bit about that trip.

So it tells the story of the Terranova expedition. You are right, but also the worst journey in the world itself is surprisingly not actually the one that Scott took to the South Pole.

The Terranova Expedition was interested in getting to the South Pole, but it was also really interested in science and scientific discovery, and both of those things were really important to Scott.

And another thing that was important to Scott was Wilson, his right hand man, his great friend and Wilson was an ornithologist, and he was really interested in birds. He was the chief of scientific staff of the expedition, and so he had this kind of side quest essentially that he wanted to achieve before they tried to reach the South Bowl, which was that he wanted to go and collect some emperor penguin eggs.

No one had ever been able to collect them before because of the time of year that EmPro Penguins breed, which is the middle of winter. No one had ever attempted it before, but he wanted to go and look for those EmPro penguin eggs because he thought that they would tell him something about the history, the life history, the evolution of Emperor penguins.

Alok: So they were trying to collect these penguins, eggs, what to study, how the embryos within them were sort of growing to compare them to other birds and animals to see how they're related.

Henrietta: That's exactly it. It was all about embryology.So that's why it had to be the eggs, and it couldn't be chicks. It couldn't be adults that had to be eggs before they'd hatched,

Alok: which made the project even harder.

Henrietta: Exactly. No one had seen any emperor penguin eggs really, that had been viable before. They only knew at this time of one emperor penguin rookery, kind of colony, Cape Crozier.

And they discovered it during Scott's first Antarctic expedition. But when they'd first seen it, they'd only seen adults and chicks. So they knew that they were too late, even in the spring to get the eggs.

And the eggs. You are entirely right. Were important because of the embryos. And so just to put this kind of in a bit of scientific context, in 1859, Darwin's Origin of Species was published, which kind of gave his idea about the theory of natural selection and the idea of evolution.

And from that, Wilson was taking the idea that in studying embryos of Emperor Penguins in particular, he might be able to show that. Emperor Penguins had essentially evolved from lizards that they were connected to what we would now think of as dinosaurs.

So he really felt that emperor penguins were the most primitive of the birds. That was quite key. he thought that they, you know, they can't fly and they live this kind of horrible, hostile life in this horrible, hostile place. And so they must be one of the earliest forms of birds, one of the most primitive.

And so they therefore would be the closest in evolutionary terms to lizards, to dinosaurs. So hopefully the plan was, in studying their embryos, they will be able to see almost like the missing link between those lizards and the EmPro penguins. That was the plan.

Alok: So what were the conditions like when they were trying to get these Emperor penguin eggs, which had never been got before?

What was his life like during that attempt to get those eggs?
Henrietta: it was the middle of the polar night. They set off five days after mid-winter, so it couldn't get darker. Sometimes they didn't see the moon, you know, at all. And they really, really struggled. There are some really nice passages where he talks about kind of being led by the light of a single candle, and it just sounds impossible.

And the thing is as well, cherry had really, really bad eyesight. Really bad eyesight, so bad that before he went away, basically the doctor said, well, look, he can go if he's willing to take the risk. 'cause his eyesight is so bad.

Alok: So hang on. So he was following a candle whatever distance away with very little ability to even see it in the pitch black.How did he know which way to go?

Henrietta: Well, I mean, you've gotta remember that they did have a good sense of where Cape crazier was. So it wasn't like they were kind of exploring entirely unknown territory, but essentially, yeah, they just really struggled.

There's a really nice extract actually, that I could read from the worst journey of the world, to give you a sense of that kind of all consuming darkness.

It was the darkness that did it. I don't believe minus 70 temperatures would be bad in daylight. Not comparatively bad. When you could see where you were going, where you were stepping. Where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the Prius, the food could see your footsteps lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find your way back to the rest of your load.

Could see the lashings of the food bags could read a compass without striking three or four different boxes to find one dry match. Could read your watch to see if the blissful moments of getting outta your bag was calm without groping in the snow all about when it would not take you five minutes to lash up the door of the tent and five hours to get started in the morning.

Alok: Sarah Wheeler, who we've had on this podcast in a previous episode, who wrote a biography of Cherry writes that it took Cherry and his team about 45 minutes to chip their way into their sleeping bags each night, because during the day, these sleeping bags are just frozen, completely flat, like as if there were big slabs of stones.

They had to chip their ways in with their feet to warm up the bits at the end to sort of get all the way in.

Henrietta: Yeah And those sleeping bags are really, they're like an extra character in the story.

And the problem that they have with them is that, so they're made out of reindeer fur, and what happens is that over the course of the day, while they're doing their work, they are sweating obviously, and they're sweat. It doesn't really escape from their clothes like it would more usually in the summer.

So it kinda condenses quite close their skin. There's this lovely bit where he says that, you know, there would've been snow between their vests and their shirts if they had been able to undress enough to get it out, but it was too cold. So they just left that snow there. And then at nighttime they would get into their sleeping bags and they would thaw that snow, that ice that they'd taken with them all day.

But at the same time, it was too cold to leave a little hole out for their breathing. So they would cover themselves over the sleeping bag, and then their breath over the course of the night would condense and freeze. And so their sleeping bags just got more and more and more clotted with ice.

And by the end of the journey, they weighed more than double what they had to begin with because they were just so overcome with this ice that they were never able to get rid of.

Alok: It's something that we've talked about on this show before, which is that people talk about the difficulty of going to Antarctica today.

And we've talked to many scientists who've been there and spent winters there even, and kind of terrible weather and the extreme situations. But a century ago when these first explorers were going, the technology that they had, the fabrics they wore and the sleeping bags they had, and their tents they used were just another level of like simplicity compared to what people have today.

They didn't have energy bars and technical fabrics and water heaters, uh, powered by the sun and all that other stuff that people have these days.

It's incredible to me that these people did what they did a century ago in these situations.

Henrietta: Yeah, Absolutely. And it's funny that you mention energy bars as well, because something that I wanted to bring up was that as if this wasn't bad enough, as if they weren't already going on this midnight polar journey that no one else had done before.

they also essentially kind of experimented on themselves at the same time. So they took with them some pemmican which is basically meat, kind of suspended in fat and biscuits and butter and tea, and that was it. So already they had very, very few rations and then they wanted to know what was the best kind of ratio of that carbohydrate to fat to protein to take with them on sledding journeys in the future with a mind to the South Pole journey.

And what better way to test that than with this horrible journey that they were already gonna be undertaking. So they do this little experiment where Cherry eats mostly carbohydrates. Wilson Eats mostly fat, and Bowers Eats mostly protein

Alok: who survived.

Henrietta: Well, unsurprisingly, none of them have a particularly happy time, but Cherry has a very, very sad time of it.

He finds himself much colder than the others. He suffers much more with frostbite. And so over the course of their journey, they kind of even out their rations so that they get what they think is the perfect amount of everything. But that's the thing is that actually by the end of it, they think that those rations are great.

They think that they're the best possible rations that you could take with you. And in fact, when they got back to base, they were actually quite pleased with the equipment that they taken with them. They thought that it had done as well as it could. And so it's all kind of relative to what they had available

MUSIC BREAK 1 - TBC

Alok: So they're on this terrible journey. They're doing experiments on each other. It's not just the sleeping bags that causing the problems. Of course, at one point. Their tent blows away as well as if to make things even worse.

Henrietta: Yes, and this sounds impossible, but what happens is
they'd kind of been dreaming the whole way that they were walking to the penguins the whole way that they were walking to Cape Cozier of this little stone igloo that they were going to make for themselves and how cozy it was gonna be, and how they would be able to dry out the sleeping bags finally.

And it was gonna be lovely. And they do manage to make the stone igloo, and they kind of cover it over with snow, and they put a little canvas roof on it, and it's meant to be really lovely and cozy. And then they set up their tent just outside. And then there's this terrible, terrible gale. Actually, Cherry describes it as what he thinks was a hurricane, forced wind.

And they've pitched the tent and I think what they felt had happened was that part of the tent was outside of the lee of the hut itself, so it was catching a little bit of the wind.

And so that meant that eventually it was picked up by the wind and taken, they didn't know where, kind of thrown into the air. They thought it was lost forever.

And it had taken them 19 days just to get to where they were with the ability to camp.

So actually taking away that shelter was kind of a death. Fell. Essentially, there was no way that they were gonna be able to get back to their base camp without that tent. So they were understandably very, very concerned about whether they would be able to make it back and how long they will be able to survive without it.

And then this miraculous thing happens. So they wait out the storm in their little igloo. And there are some wild recollections from Cherry about how they all got into their sleeping bags and they put them so that the entrance was underneath them so that there was no entrance for any of the wind to get through around their faces.

And he says that he can remember the other two. Wilson and Bowers, his companions singing hymns and songs and really anything that they could to kinda keep them going. And they just wait out the storm for two days and two nights, and in that time, they don't have anything to eat or that they have to drink.

A little pinches of snow that they take from the kind of corners of the sleeping bag, where they're able to open it up just a little bit to kind of save their thirst. And eventually when all abates, they look around them and look to find that tent, see whether they can salvage any means of getting home, although they have really no belief that they're gonna be able to find it.

And then I think it's about half a mile away. Bowers sends up this shout and he's managed to find it. It's been kind of world up into the air, taken up almost like a closed umbrella, and then just drops back down to Earth again. Really, really close to them. So they're incredibly lucky.

Alok: Just going back to that moment you described where they were in their igloo and they're in their sleeping bags waiting out the storm for two days. So for two days they were sort of intermittently, I guess, just lying there, sleeping, singing hymns or songs, not eating anything, drinking melted snow.

I mean, that's a hell of a long time.

What do we know about sort of characters of these three individuals that kind of kept them driving on in this?

You know, what was going on in their brains? Did they write about that?

Henrietta: So that is something that cherry notes in the worst journey in the world, that he has taken some notes of Bowers who says that he decides to sing every song on hymn that he knows.

And I think there's almost a kind of, there's a feeling that it's all unsalvageable. But nobody really says it aloud. So there's a kind of, we are all right actually, aren't we?

Keeping ourselves going, kind of camaraderie to it. And I think that really is one of the most important things about the Worst journey in the world, is that it is so much about human relationships and Cherry's friendships with those men. You know, it's one of those bonds that you make with someone where something so terrible happens that it's just a complete force forging a relationship.

They've had such a horrible time, but all they have now is each other. And the only thing that they can do is try to keep each other going as best they can.

Alok: I mean, I kind of, I know the answer to this of course, but I feel bad for asking what happened to the eggs? Did they get the eggs?

Henrietta: They did, they did get the eggs. It was very, very difficult. You'll be unsurprised to hear, to get those eggs, they had to climb down an ice cliff.

There were many, many crevasses. It was extremely dangerous. But they did manage to collect five eggs and they put them in their fur mittens. And then they tied them around their necks to keep them safe as they kind of scrambled back to their igloo. So this was before all of the drama with the igloo and the tent disappearing.

But unfortunately, two of those five eggs are smashed.

And then there's some question after everything that happened with the tent and they lost it, and Bowers says, well, are we gonna go and try get some more penguin eggs. In the end they say, look, enough is enough. We've got these three. Let's just get home. There's no way that we'll be able to kind of add this extra bit of the journey on again. So then they walk back again with these three precious eggs, only three.

Alok: That's an even harder journey, I'm assuming, because you know, you're not only watching out for crevasses and other dangers under the ice and snow, which they had on the way there and the darkness and all of that. But they've got three very delicate objects they've got to carry with them.

Henrietta: Yeah, exactly. And you know, when they set off, they were as fresh as they could be from leaving their relatively cozy base huts and they had as much food and fuel as they were ever going to have. And then on the return journey, they had been really beaten and battered and they were running perilously low on fuel as well. So it was a very different journey back again as well.

Alok: When they did get back, of course the actual Terranova expedition had to continue, and Scott wanted to go to the South Pole, and Cherry actually went with Scott on that part of the expedition too. Just tell us about that.

Henrietta: So the way that Scott's expedition plan worked was that he was going to take a number of different teams and some of those teams would turn back before the final party that were selected to go to the South Pole.

And he didn't know exactly who that was gonna involve until he had to make the final decision essentially.And so Cherry actually started off when they all set off from the camp together in a little group with Scott and Wilson.
And obviously they all secretly wanted to be those people to try and get to the South Pole.

And also, Cherry is still really young at this point. He's one of the youngest members of the expedition. He was like 25. And this was a real kind of path for glory. It was something that he felt that he could do almost in his father's honor, an amazing achievement. So he set off with Scott and Wilson, and then unfortunately it was to decided that he would be sent home in the first group that were sent home.

You can really see how disappointed you would be. You know, there's almost a kind of false hope when you set off with Scott, the leader of the expedition, and then you're the first to be sent home. But I think something that Scott was probably thinking about was certainly thinking about at that moment was which of the skills that he wants to take with him, but also, which are the skills necessary to keep people at base.

It's a kind of division of your team. Rather than just taking all the best people with you in a way, you need to send people home who are capable. There's also a suggestion that because he was so young, it was only kind of right that he wasn't one of the ones who were taken to the pole.

But then Wilson and Bowers, these best friends who have been on the worst journey in the world with are of course the ones who go to the poll with Scott. And then there is this great tragedy where all of those men who went with Scott to the pole and Scott himself all unfortunately die before they're able to make it back to base.

Alok: And it's cherry that sort of locates their bodies, isn't it?

Henrietta: It is. And Cherry has this other role to play as well. So as I mentioned, it is more complicated than just kind of walking straight to the pole and walking straight back again. There are quite a lot of logistics involved in these expeditions and one of the things that was part of the plan was that there will be a resupply of rations and fuel to one ton depot, which is quite an important depot for Scott's journey out on his journey back again.

And eventually Cherry is selected to be the person to do this resupply. And he takes a team of dogs with him and he goes to one ton depot and he spends six days. Waiting, kind of working out whether anyone is gonna arrive, whether he's gonna see anybody coming back. And his orders are not to tire out the dogs too much, not to waste the dogs that he has and to bring them home safely.

And also his companion. Dmitri isn't doing very well, he's not very healthy. And so he decides that the best thing for them to do is to go back and to wait for the return of his friends. And it's a really sad thing because there's no suggestion that that was the wrong thing to do. But he was following the orders that he had been given.

He was following the plan that had been laid out, but unbeknownst to him, not a hundred miles away, you know, 60, 70 miles away, actually his friends were at the very end of their lives. They were trying to make it back to that depot. And in fact, Scott's Wilson and Bowers died within 11 miles of one ton depot in the end.

And so. Over the course of his life that begins to haunt Cherry that maybe there is more that he could have done. You know, with the hindsight of everything that came afterwards, he begins to feel that perhaps he could have played a different kind of a role rather than the person who would later go on to discover their bodies as part of a search mission that happened the following spring.

MUSIC BREAK 2

Alok: I mean, we know what happened to Scott and to Wilson and to Bowers, unfortunately, and it's one of the great tragedies of that age of Antarctic exploration. I mean, cherry did make it back to England with the eggs. He brought back the eggs. What happened to those eggs?

Henrietta: So immediately in the west, only in the world, immediately Cherry writes about coming back to base. He then goes straight on to say, okay, well what happened to these eggs? And he took them in 1913 to the Natural History Museum in London.

And he writes this lovely, lovely piece. He calls it a dramatization of exactly what was said and how he was treated. So he goes to the National Music Museum and he has this interaction and they say, Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg shop. What call of you to come? Meddling with our eggs. Do you want me to put the police onto you? Is it the crocodile's egg You're after? I dunno. Nothing about no eggs. So it's just this, you know, obviously that's not exactly what was said, but there is this feeling that they don't even really know what he's talking about. They haven't been waiting with bated breath for these eggs that he and his friends have risked their lives for.

They don't even really know that they're coming. And then he makes notes that he isn't thanked for bringing them, and you can really feel how upset he is with the way that he was treated.

He asks for a receipt and then he ends up essentially sitting outside this museum curator's office for a long, long time, just waiting for someone to give him a receipt that they've received the eggs. And then he goes back with Scott's own sister a while after and asks after the eggs and is kind of met with a, oh, what eggs they don't exist.

Kind of very upsetting response and needs to kind of chase them up again. So actually nobody really looks at these eggs for a really, really long time. In fact, nobody studies them for 21 years after they are delivered. Alok: What did people learn from those eggs? Eventually when they were studied, like in the 1930s, then?

Henrietta: So unfortunately what happens is that,

Alok: don't tell me the eggs get broken. No, don't tell me.

Henrietta: They don't get broken. They don't get broken. And actually they are originally given to a professor to study and he does prepare the slides of the embryos, but he himself dies before he's able to study them.

And that's part of the reason why it takes such a long time to get to them. But eventually they are given to a professor at the University of Edinburgh and by then they've kind of discredited the idea that embryology is helpful for learning about evolution. And so they're just not really helpful for what Wilson thought they will be helpful for.

Which sounds very sad, but I wonder whether actually Wilson would be kind of satisfied with that. You know, he was about the science, he was interested in getting things right and yes, they maybe didn't fulfill the purpose that he was expecting them to, but that was also a result. You know, sometimes a negative finding is still a finding.

Alok: But I guess it's still amazing that the eggs came back and one hopes those slides still exist and that people can see after having read the story and understanding the trials and tribulations that the men went through to get them.

It gives just these objects a bit more of a, a meaning, I suppose, doesn't it,

Henrietta: Absolutely. And also some of the specimens, emperor penguin specimens that were brought back by that expedition were later used as a baseline for an experiment in the 1960s that proved that the chemical DDT was newly present in Antarctica.So again, you just don't know what kind of scientific discoveries your work will enable in the future.

Alok: When did Cherry end up writing the book, the Worst Journey in the World? I mean, it's famous now, but I mean, when did he start thinking about it and how was it received when it came out?

Henrietta: he started to think about it soon after the expedition returned.

It was going to be Scott's responsibility to write essentially an official report of the expedition. But obviously after his death in the Antarctic, that was impossible. And so the committee that managed the expedition was looking for someone else who could write it, and they asked Cherry, and he was delighted to be asked.

And was beginning to write something that was almost a manual for kind of feature polar explorers. And then in 1914, the first World War began and he went off to war.

But he was Invalided home in 1915 and from then he kind of decided that actually he didn't want to write that very formal kind of official report, and he wanted to write something a little bit different. His neighbor actually was George Bernard Shaw, the very famous author, and he really credits him with teaching him how to write essentially.

And so you can really feel that there's almost a more kind of fictional bent to the story. It's all true, but it's written in a way that reads like a novel, like some kind of thriller or something, or some kind of an amazing pacing story that kind of keeps you reading. And that is exactly how it was received.

It was received very, very well. Right from the very beginning. The London Evening Standard called it the most wonderful story in the world. And I think that it's this amazing book full of description and detail and emotion and those things are not necessarily standard in writing it this time.

It, you know, we talk about it as kind of an amazing travel book, a travel story, but he really kind of pioneered this way of writing about these expeditions.
Alok: So what happens to Cherry next?

How did he reflect on his experience in Antarctica?

Henrietta: It's a really sad thing because he definitely, as a man, had this anxious side to his personality.

And obviously that was not helped by this terrible journey. And then being sent off to war almost immediately upon his return.

He had crippling ulcerative colitis, which is still something that has no known cure today, and which is also linked to anxiety. So he had these really intense physical and mental health problems that kind of dogged him for the rest of his life. And that is the really sad thing about, particularly the way that he thought about his role in that expedition, because there wasn't necessarily the feeling that he could have done more when he was writing the worst journey in the world.

But as he began to reflect on it, and over the course of his life, he started to worry that maybe other people thought he could have done more. And you know, the friends that he had made, the best friends that he had made on that expedition were not there to comfort him and to share in the memories that he had.

And I think that meant that he was quite isolated in some ways because he was the only one who remembered some of these stories anyway. And then he also had the burden of being the person who found the bodies of his friends after they had died. And you know, I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be so abruptly brought home that your life really was in the balance and, and in fact your friends, you know, didn't make it without you.

And it was something that affected him for most of the rest of his life. In his final years, he had help from a couple of mental health professionals, and I think that did kind of help him to find peace. He died in 1959, so he was quite old by then and a lot of time had passed, but it was something that he kind of carried with him forever.

Alok:I don't think anyone listening to this would disagree that this is a sort of heroic tale. I mean, he's a heroic figure and we call that era of exploration. In fact, the 1910s when the British and the Norwegians and all these others were going to Antarctica, the heroic age, capital H, capital A, right? 'cause they're all heroes.

I just wonder what your work in this area tells us about that sort of labels We use these people, I mean they're clearly heroic, but do you see them as heroes?

Henrietta: Oh, that's a really good question. I think the thing that I have found in my research is that the idea of a hero, there's like two tracks to it.

So on the one hand, there are these things that we think about as always heroic, these heroic qualities that we always go back to. So you mentioned a lot of them, you know, people who are courageous, people who can do things that we don't feel that we can do ourselves. And in some senses those qualities kind of exist through time.

But on the other hand, also what it is to be heroic is very dependent on the people doing the looking at the heroes. And that's really clear sometimes in the way that we talk about Captain Scott. So he was really held up as an example of a kind of heroic patriot, particularly in the first World War. He was someone that people really looked to when they went off to war as someone they could kind of admire.

But over time, we've begun to question the way that he worked his leadership style, and we think of him as less and less heroic. So there's this kind of duality to the way that we think about heroes, which I think is really interesting. But that means that essentially, yeah, there is a kind of relationality in the way that you can't be a hero on your own.

You know, you need to have a connection to somebody else. And Cherry really has that through this book. He creates a connection with all of us in a way that makes it very easy for us to think of him as a heroic figure, because you really get an insight into what he's thinking

Alok: So heroic ness, if that's the word.Is it not just about the actions you do, but it's about your actions in relation to other people, but also I suppose, the projection that people like you and me listening to these stories have do we project heroic onto them because of what our own impressions of that sort of behavior are Basically.

Henrietta: Absolutely. And that really can change over time. And that is something, as I mentioned, that you know, we can see really well with Scott

Alok: and must change as the decades go on, right?

Henrietta: Yeah, completely. And the things that society finds valuable also shape the things that we are looking for when we're wanting to call somebody a hero.

So I think that we will see a bit of a revival for Scott in the not too distant future because of all of the scientific work that he did on his explorations. And now that's something that we as a society really value as we think about the way that our climate is changing and the world that we live in.

And how that is different to how it was, you know, when they were going on these expeditions in the 1910s.

Alok: Do you think Cherry's a hero?

Henrietta: I think… I don't know. It's difficult when you think about heroism, as much as I have to kind of call anyone a hero,

Alok: I only ask, I suppose, because the basic assumption is that he is right.

Hmm. I think that it's. Always hard to give heroism to someone that you know a lot about because you can always see flaws or things that you might change.

And in some ways I think that the fact that you can know all of those things about Cherry and that he offers them up to you, makes him quite a heroic figure. You know, he doesn't pretend that he is some perfect kind of almighty polar explorer. He's very open in acknowledging where he feels that he has gone wrong, and I think that truthfulness is a heroic characteristic that is valuable. It's just as valuable as being kind of a courageous go-getter.

Alok: Why do you think Cherry's story is important for us to listen to today? What do you think his legacy is?

Henrietta: As well as it being this kind of gripping book and this fantastically well told story, I think it is that hopefulness that he gives us. These horrible, horrible things happened to him.

But in the end, he still wrote honestly and generously about his friends and the experiences that he had, and it makes you feel that things, even when they look terrible, can actually end up, you know, better than you expected. The very last line of the book is ‘if you march your winter journeys, you will have your reward so long as all you want is a penguins egg.’

And it's such a small thing, but almost

Alok: there's a bit of humor in there as well.

Henrietta: Yeah, almost in that acknowledgement that actually, you know, maybe all you can hope for is small things. There is a hopefulness that is something we can all attain. I think he's a very hopeful and quietly positive writer, even though he himself seems to be enormously pessimistic.

Alok: This is a question we ask all our interviewees - I was wondering why does Antarctica matter to you?

Henrietta: I think that Antarctica matters to me because it challenges us to be the best version of ourselves and to work together. And as an anthropologist, the Antarctic is a slightly strange place to be interested in because there is no indigenous population of people in the Antarctic.

But it always feels like a very peopled place to me, and it is that kind of working together that seems possible in the Antarctic that maybe doesn't always seem possible elsewhere, and that ability to do things that you may not think that you are capable of doing, but actually with the help of others, you can achieve much more than you were expecting.

But to do that, you have to be yourself, honestly, like Cherry did, kind of put out all of your characteristics, not only your, your positive ones.

Henrietta, that's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you very much for having me.