Although Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Antarctic classic, The Worst Journey in the World, tells the whole story of Captain Scott’s final and fatal expedition, its title specifically relates to the infamous Winter Journey to Cape Crozier in 1911, the purpose of which was to gather Emperor penguin eggs at the right stage of development for embryological research.

Cherry used the phrase when describing that awful journey to his neighbour, George Bernard Shaw, who retorted, “Well, there’s the title for your book”.

Part of our Be inspired series spotlighting fascinating research on our Collections.

Please note: The views of our speakers do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society.

Note on captions

The Society aims to provide automatically-generated captions for all event recordings. The captions appear as text at the bottom of the video which you can toggle on and off.

The accuracy of automatically-generated captions varies depending on the audio quality, any specialist language used and the speaker. They are therefore are unlikely to be 100% accurate and the Society does not edit or correct automatically-generated captions.

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