"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised..." wrote Apsley Cherry-Gerrard in a deceptively jaunty introduction to this classic story of bravery amd fortitude first publsihed in 1922. The story he relates is of Scott's last expedition to the Antarctic from its departure from England in 1910 to its arrival in New Zealand in 1913; one of the most famous and tragic in the annals of exploration.