This is the story of three intrepid men and an Antarctic journey that they should never have survived so that they could find something that was lost to history.

It is difficult to imagine a tougher, or luckier, man than British adventurer Apsley Cherry-Garrard. At the tender age of 23 he finagled his way onto Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica and was among 12 original members of the team that set out to race Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s party to the South Pole in 1911-1912.  Only Cherry-Garrard survived.

That alone would have cemented his reputation as a man of daring, but the winter before that near death experience, he survived an even more harrowing ordeal in the Antarctic that today remains one of the most astounding and dangerous adventures ever. It was so bad that he described it to his neighbor, the great playwright George Bernard Shaw, upon his return to England as “the worst journey in the world”. Nine years later that became the title of the book he wrote that chronicled the experience. In 1996 National Geographic rated the book the best true adventure story ever written, topping a list of 100 stories that included William Clark’s and Meriweather Lewis’ Journal and Marco Polo’s Travels.

The adventure happened because the expedition’s chief scientist Dr. Edward “Bill” Wilson had a mission he wanted to complete. Wilson had it in his head to gather the unhatched eggs of Emperor Penguins (themselves later made famous in the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins). Scientific theory at the time held that the embryos of the flightless, and therefore primitive, birds would provide valuable insights into the evolutionary links  between modern birds and dinosaurs.

Scott was opposed to the trip, but Wilson finally convinced him that a small expedition could be mounted before the whole team set off for the South Pole the following spring. So when Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, set sail from Cardiff, Wales for Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound June 15, 1910, Wilson had his plan in place.  It would call for three men to haul 757 pounds of supplies and equipment on two 9 foot sledges 60 miles from the expedition’s base camp at Cape Evans to the far side of Ross Island across the Ross Ice Shelf past Mount Terror to Cape Crozier, all of it in the dead of the Antarctic winter. That was the only time emperor penguin fathers were known to wait out the frigid winds and weather at the edge of the sea, and protect the unhatched eggs penguin mothers left in their care in the fall. This in itself is one of the more stunning examples of paternal devotion in nature.

Cherry-Garrard idolized Wilson, but it was too bad for him that the scientist had taken him under his wing and made him an assistant Zoologist on the expedition. That, and his youth, were likely the reasons he was chosen to accompany the scientist along with Lieutenant Henry 'Birdie' Bowers.

On June 22, 1911 (the shortest day of the winter) the three set off from camp hauling their sledges without the help of dogs or ponies in almost total darkness to face gale force winds and withstand temperatures that some nights plummeted to 77 degrees F below zero. (That’s a wind chill factor of −140º F. ) Some days the men hauled the sledges no more than a mile, often having to pull one ahead, then walk back to haul the other so that for every mile advanced, three had to be covered.

The unearthly cold made doing the most routine jobs nearly impossible. There was no warm place to go. Tying ropes, striking matches, handling gear and preparing meals, all necessary for setting up and breaking down camp, took a total of nine hours each day. If hands were exposed for even a few seconds, frostbite set in. The moisture of their bodies and breathing didn’t evaporate as it normally does, but instead froze on their faces and beards and inside their clothing, encasing them in a kind of hardened exoskeleton if they stopped moving for very long. Their state-of-the-art reindeer sleeping bags would thaw and grow mushy at night as they slept in them, but then, having absorbed the moisture of their bodies, would rapidly freeze once they crawled out in the morning, making them more like sarcophaguses than bedding. Touching bare skin to any kind of metal was like applying a blowtorch to it, instantly freezing and blistering it. Every day was a battle to save their toes, feet and hands from the triple threat of wind, moisture and cold.

And then there was the darkness. Day and night were essentially indistinguishable, and time tended to slide this way and that without regard to the actual hour of the day. When they awoke they undertook their marches in blackness. Around noon the sun would rise close enough to the horizon to shed a thin halo of light, and then quickly disappear. Cloudless nights with a full-moon (extremely rare) provided more illumination than the noon day sun.

“I don’t believe minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight,” Cherry-Garrard wrote in his book, “when you could see where you were going…; could read your watch to see if the blissful moment of getting out of your bag was come without groping in the snow all about; when it would not take five minutes to lash up the door of the tent, and five hours to get started in the morning …” “We slept,” he later wrote, “as men sleep on the rack.”

Through all of this they subsisted on butter, pemmican, tea, hot water and specially made “Antarctic” biscuits designed to provide maximum calories and nutrition.

More than once the men were sure they wouldn’t make it, but after 19 days of frigid hell they managed to haul the sledges through the foothills of Mount Terror to the edge of Crozier Bay where they beheld thousands of emperor penguins standing resolutely in the Antarctic night, their unhatched offspring tucked snugly between their feet, feathers and their enveloping stomachs. The storms came, the winds howled, the temperatures plummeted, yet the birds stood against it all, taut, unflagging and indomitable.  Looking out over the scene Cherry-Garrard wrote in a kind of awe that the land, “Seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding place of wind and drift and darkness. God! What a place.”

The worst came after they arrived.

The men built a small hut, fitted it with a wooden roof and lashed their tent to it on the leeward side of a small outcropping of rock above Crozier Bay. The idea was that this would provide them something better than the tent they had been huddling within for the past three weeks. Before they completed it, they visited the rookery, retrieved several eggs (three eventually made it to England), and completed drawings of the amazing site under the thin noon sun. Then a winter storm closed on them and smashed the little outpost like a hammer.

The men huddled in the igloo as the winds topped force 11, 75 miles an hour. The wind roared, “As though the earth was torn to pieces.” And then their worst nightmare. First their tent was ripped from its moorings and disappeared in the wall of snow the blizzard had become, and then the block and canvas roof of their igloo tore apart. They were left entirely exposed at −12 Fahrenheit in a black storm whose winds were approaching hurricane force. They may as well have been on Mars. For 36 black hours they huddled in their sleeping bags as the snow drifted around them, shivering, waiting.

Amazingly when the storm had passed all three were still alive and frostbite had failed to take any of their digits, toes or limbs. Even more amazing was their discovery, a half mile from their shattered hut, of the tent that was the key to their continued survival. Without it they could never hope to make it the 60 miles back to base camp. Now they had a chance.

With their eggs safely stowed among their gear, they began the slog back to Cape Evans with their broken tent, crippled cook stove and battered bodies. Growing weaker each day, they marched through the night-day, pummeled by more unrelenting snow and wind.

“The day’s march was bliss compared to the night’s rest,” wrote Cherry-Garrard, “and both were awful.”

At one point two of them fell into a crevasse nearly pulling the sledge and their third companion with them into the abyss. But somehow they managed to crawl out and five days later, drawing on reserves of human courage and perseverance most of us couldn’t even imagine, they made it back to camp. No one even saw them coming, until one of the team opened the door of their warm winter hut and said, “Good God! Here is the Crozier Party!”

Their clothes had to be cut off they were so hardened, and when at last they could sleep, they did, on and off for days, in between luscious meals and gallons of hot chocolate and tea. Said Cherry-Garrard, “…our beds are the height of all our pleasures.”

The experience had bonded the Cherry-Garrard, Birdie, and Bill Wilson as few men could possibly be joined. But within a year Wilson, along with the apparently indestructible Birdie Bowers and Scott himself would all be dead, victims of the expedition’s failed race to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard, who had been ordered to return to base because of a food shortage, later found their bodies in what was left of their tent, 11 miles short of their next cache of food.   

Scott was the last to die and closed out his diary with these words, “We are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.” And then one last sentence, a plea: “For God’s sake look after our people.”

And what came of the three eggs that in Cherry-Garrard’s words, three humans “had strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance” to bring out of the Antarctic night? The British Museum of Natural History accepted them without fanfare, unceremoniously really. Cherry-Garrard had to wait all day cooling his heels outside the office of the Chief Custodian to receive a receipt for their delivery. Eventually the scientific verdict was that while the effort to retrieve the eggs was admirable, they did not really shed any new light on the evolution of birds, or their connection to dinosaurs.

Cherry-Garrard managed to live another 46 years after his return to England. His book, published in 1922, is universally considered a classic. Later in life he developed what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. He spent many years bed ridden as the result of his Antarctic adventures. He married late in life, in his fifties, and chose not to have any children because he feared he might pass along the mental illnesses from which he believed he suffered. He said that writing his story down, helped him deal with his demons.

The Worst Journey in the World, the book that inspired this article, is available for $1.99 as an e-book here.