#the worst journey in the world
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
The Millennials' Polar Expedition
A year ago today (23 Nov 2022), I launched Worst Journey Vol.1 at the Scott Polar Research Institute. This is the text of the speech I gave to the lovely people who turned up to celebrate.
As many of you know, my interest in the Terra Nova Expedition was sparked by Radio 4âs dramatisation of The Worst Journey in the World, now 14 years ago.  The story is an incredible story, and it got its claws into me, but what kept me coming back again and again were the people.  I couldnât believe anyone so wonderful had ever really existed.  So when I finally succumbed to obsession and started reading all the books, it was the expedition membersâ own words which I most cherished.  These were not always easy to come by, though, so plenty of popular histories were consumed as well.  Reading both in tandem, it soon became clear that, while there were some good books out there, there was a lot of sloppy research in the polar echo chamber as well.
I also discovered that no adaptation had attempted to get across the full scope of the expedition.  There has never been a full and fair dramatic retelling, all having been limited by time, budget, or ideology from telling the whole story truthfully.  I was determined that my adaptation would be both complete and accurate, and be as accountable as possible to those precious primary documents and the people who wrote them.
So the years of research began.  I moved to Cambridge to be able to drop in at SPRI and make the most of the archives.  Getting to Antarctica seemed impossible, but I went to New Zealand to get at least that much right, and on the way back stayed with relatives in Alberta, the most Antarctic place I could realistically visit.  I gathered reference for objects wherever I could.  Because Vol.1 takes place mainly on the Terra Nova, which is now a patch of sludge on the seabed off Greenland, I cobbled together a Franken-Nova in my mind, between the Discovery up in Dundee and the Star of India in San Diego.  I spent a week on a Jubilee Sailing Trust ship in order to depict tall-ship sailing correctly.  Iâm sure Iâve still got loads of things wrong, but I did all I could, to get as much as I could, right.
But still, everyone I met who had been to Antarctica said, âyou canât understand Antarctica until youâve been there, and you canât tell the story without understanding Antarctica; you have to go.â  So I applied to the USAPâs Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, with faint hope, as they do âAhrtâ and I draw cartoons.  But I must have blagged a good grant proposal, because a year after applying, I was stepping out of a C-17 onto the Ross Ice Shelf.  The whole trip would have been worth it just to stand there, turn in a circle, and see how all the familiar photographs fit together.  But the USAPâs generosity didnât stop there, and in the next month I saw Hut Point, Arrival Heights, the Beardmore Glacier (including the moraine on which the Polar Party stopped to âgeologiseâ), and Cape Crozier, and made three visits to the Cape Evans hut.  Three!  On top of the visual reference I got priceless qualitative data.  The hardness of the sound.  The surprising warmth of the sun. The sugary texture of the snow.  The keen edge on a slight breeze.  The way your fingertips and toes can start to go when the rest of you is perfectly warm.  The SHEER INSANITY of Cape Crozier.  The veterans were right â I couldnât have drawn it without having been there, but now I have, and can, and I am more grateful than I can ever adequately express.  With all these resources laid so copiously at my feet, all I had to do was sit down and draw the darn thing.  Luckily I have some very sound training to back me up on that.
Now, this is all very well for the how of making the book, and, I hope, interesting enough. But why?  Why am I putting so much effort into telling this story, and why now?
Well, it means a lot to me personally.  To begin to understand why, you need to know that I grew up in the 80s and 90s, at the height of individualist, goal-oriented, success-driven, dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost neoliberalism.  It was just assumed that humans, when you get right down to it, were basically self-interested jerks, and I saw plenty of them around so I had no reason to question this assumption.  The idea was that if you did everything right, and worked really hard, you could retire at 45 to a yacht in the Bahamas, and if you didnât retire to a yacht, well, you just hadnât tried hard enough.  Character, in the sense of rigorous personal virtue, was for schmucks.  What mattered was success.  Even as my politics evolved, I still took it as a given that this was how the world worked, and that was how people generally were â after all, there was no lack of corroborating evidence.  So: I worked really hard.  I single-mindedly pursued my self-interest.  I made sacrifices, and put in the time, and fought my way into my dream job and all the success I could have asked for.
And then I met the Terra Nova guys.
What struck me most about them was that even when everything was going wrong, when their expectations were shattered and they had to face the cruellest reality, they were still kind.  Not backbiting, recriminating, blame-throwing, defensive, or mean, as one would expect â they were lovely to each other, patient, supportive, self-sacrificing; in fact the worse things got, the better they were.  They still treated each other as friends even when it wasnât in their self-interest, was even contrary to their self-interest.  I didnât know people could be like that.  But there they were, in plain writing, being thoroughly, bafflingly, decent.  Not just the Polar Party â everyone had to face their own brutal realities at some point, and they all did so with a grace I never thought possible.
It presented a very important question:
When everything goes belly-up, and youâre facing the worst, what sort of person will you be?
Or perhaps more acutely: What sort of person would you rather be with?
It was so contrary to the world I lived in, to the reality I knew â it was a peek into an alternate dimension, populated entirely with lovely, lovely people, who really, genuinely believed that âitâs not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game,â and behaved accordingly.  It couldnât be real.  There had to be a deeper, unpleasant truth: that was how the world worked, after all.  I kept digging, expecting to hit bottom at some point, but I only found more gold, all the way down.  How could I not spend my life on this?
Mythology exists to pass on a cultureâs values, moral code, and survival information â how to face challenges and prevail.  Scottâs story entered the British mythology, and had staying power, because it exemplified those things so profoundly for the culture that created and received it.  But the culture changed, and there were new values; Scottâs legacy was first inverted and then cast aside.  The new culture needed a new epic hero.  Youâd think it would be Amundsen, the epitome of ruthless success, but âMake Plan â Execute Plan â Go Homeâ has no mythic value, so he didnât stick.  The hero needed challenges, he needed setbacks, and he needed to win, on our terms.
Shackleton!  Shackleton was a winner!  Shackleton told us what we knew to be true and wanted to hear at epic volume: that if you want something badly enough, and try really hard, you will succeed!  (Especially if you can control the narrative.)  Scott, on the other hand, tells us that if you want something badly enough, and try really hard . . . you may nevertheless die horribly in the snow.  Nobody wants to hear that!  What a downer!  I think itâs no coincidence that Shackleton exploded into popular culture in the late 90s and has dominated it ever since: he is the mythic hero of the zeitgeist. I am always being asked if Iâll be doing Shackleton next.  He has six graphic novels already!  That is plenty!  But people still want to tell and be told his story, because itâs a heroic myth that validates our worldview.
Thatâs why I am so determined to tell the Scott story, because Scott is who we donât realise we need right now â and Wilson, and Bowers, and Cherry, and Atch, and all the rest.  The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennialsâ polar expedition.  Weâve worked really hard, weâve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and weâre still losing.  Nothing in the mythology weâve been fed has prepared us for this.  No amount of positive attitude is going to change it.  We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon.  When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation?  What does that look like? Even if you canât fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you â or at the very least, not worse?  Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but donât give in to despair; and if youâre up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness.  We learn by imitation: itâs easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help.  And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairy-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.
My upbringing in the 80s milieu of selfishness, which set me up to receive the Scott story so gratefully, is hardly unique.  There are millions of us who are hungry for a counter-narrative.  My generation is desperate for demonstrations of caring, whether itâs activism or social justice or government policies that donât abandon the vulnerable.  Weâve seen selfishness poison the world, and we want an alternative.  The time for competition is past; we must cooperate or perish, but we donât know how to do it because our mythology is founded on competition.  The Scott story, if told properly, explodes the Just World Fallacy, and liberates us from the lie that has ruled our lives: that you make your own luck.  What happens, happens: what matters is how you respond to it.  My obsession with accuracy is in part to honour the men, and in part because Cherry was the ultimate stickler and heâd give me a hard time if I didnât, but also because, if Iâm telling the story to a new generation, Iâm damn well going to make sure we get that much RIGHT.  Itâs been really interesting to see, online, how my generation and the next have glommed onto polar exploration narratives, not as thrilling feats of derring-do, but as emotional explorations of found family and cooperative resilience.  We love them because they love each other, and loving each other helps get them through, and we want â we need â to see how thatâs done.  Itâs time to give them the Terra Nova story, and to tell it fully, fairly, and honestly, in all its complexity, because that is how their example is most useful to us.  Not as gods, and not as fools, but as real human beings who were excellent to each other in the face of disaster.  I only hope that I, a latecomer to their ways, can do them justice.
#scott expedition#terra nova expedition#the worst journey in the world#captain scott#polar party#robert falcon scott#birdie bowers#edward adrian wilson#bill wilson#character#millennials#polar exploration#heroic age#adventure#sociology#neoliberalism
204 notes
¡
View notes
Text
edward wilsons illustration of mcmurdo sound
#art#polar exploration#my post#edward wilson#the worst journey in the world#terra nova#terra nova expedition#whenever i see coloured images of the poles i get it completely
188 notes
¡
View notes
Text
280 notes
¡
View notes
Text
I have seen Fuji, the most dainty and graceful of all mountains; and also Kinchinjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal than the vertical. And so he is the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.
The Worst Journey in the World (Apsley Cherry-Garrard) / Image source
36 notes
¡
View notes
Text
Apsley Cherry-Garrard said marry your shipmates đ
#the worst journey in the world#cackling#he did not need to say that with his whole chest but he did#excited to read more and find out who exactly he wanted to wife on this expedition#antarctica
8 notes
¡
View notes
Text
You, a reasonable person who isnât going to mount a polar sledging trip: âWhy does Apsley Cherry-Garrard need to list all the items and their weights that he and the other chaps took on the titular Worst Journey in the World?â
Me, a silly person who also isnât going anywhere near the Antarctic but loves this book: âHe is building TENSION!â
#am reading#the worst journey in the world#apsley cherry garrard#terra nova expedition#the winter journey#polar exploration
4 notes
¡
View notes
Text
Did you miss my livestream interview with Ink@84 Books and wish you hadn't? Fear not, you can still catch it on demand! For a limited time a ticket purchase (ÂŁ5, worldwide) will get you access to the recording, which you can watch any darn time you please. I talk about making Worst Journey Vol.1 (including parts of the process you haven't seen elsewhere) and there's a generous Q&A section at the end. People have told me they like it -- maybe you will too!
#video#livestream#book event#the worst journey in the world#author event#indie bookshop#indie books#graphic novel#process#book chat#london#bookshop#interview#tealin#sarah airriess#on demand video#premium content#polar history#comic books#graphic novels#history comic#antarctic history#heroic age of polar exploration#antarctica#scott expedition#terra nova#cold boys
39 notes
¡
View notes
Text
Iâm reading The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. I have cried many times
This is based off of the time when Cherry, Bill, and Birdie laid down in the snow to watch the aurora. Knowing that Bill and Birdie described it all to Cherry when he couldnât see it makes me feel many unquantifiable emotions.
#terra nova expedition#apsley cherry garrard#bill wilson#birdie bowers#the winter journey#the worst journey in the world
28 notes
¡
View notes
Text
HAPPY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE!
#christmas#the worst journey in the world#terra nova expedition#terra nova#sailing ship#tall ship#penguins#antarctic#antarctica#antarctic history#illustration
222 notes
¡
View notes
Text
youvegotitintheneckstickitstickityouvegotitintheneckstickitstickit
#apsley cherry garrard#the worst journey in the world#twjitw#im deep into wojo now so im full of cherry feels#this is a Wilson painting I messed around with in canva
46 notes
¡
View notes
Text
94 notes
¡
View notes
Text
my other zine for the polar @zinebash, this time with public domain and stock images and using only the questions to extract text from various polar-related books.
#zines#polar exploration#zinebash01#zinebash#found poetry#sailing#i may be some time#the worst journey in the world#arctic dreams#id in alt#all right that's all the zines for a while#forgot i hadn't posted this one yet
49 notes
¡
View notes
Text
0__0
#my interpretation of that weird aside#xD#cos otherwise i would have gone fully into The Terror(tm) mode#but i think the idea of them convinced antarctica is haunted only for it to be just some norwegians is hysterical#twjitw#the worst journey in the world#rf scott#worst journey daily
15 notes
¡
View notes
Text
I'll be rereading the worst journey in the world soon. Be prepared for sadness and tragedy on my blog
#last time I read it was when I was 18 studying for my graduation! damn 6 years ago#the worst journey in the world#Personal
2 notes
¡
View notes
Text
reading wojo and listening to cherry go on for pages about how great a man scott was is making me unbelievably sad. rip con you mad lad
3 notes
¡
View notes
Photo
The Worst Journey In The World Graphic Novel (Vol. 1) is coming out 24 Nov! Preorder at indienovella.co.uk, hang tight for international distribution, and stay tuned for e-book news!
#the worst journey in the world#twjitw#graphic novel#classic#literature#memoir#adventure#exploration#antarctica#antarctic history
87 notes
¡
View notes