As Worsley and his companions continued toward the Pole, they were no longer following in Shackleton’s steps. To their relief, they began descending in altitude, their sleds, lightened from the consumption of food, scooting easily behind them. After eight days, they had covered ninety-two nautical miles, a reminder of just how close Shackleton had been to realizing his dream. That night, Worsley went for his stroll, wobbling on bone-thin legs. He was not a religious man, but the landscape stirred him. As Adams put it, “Henry felt the spirituality of the Antarctic.”

The next morning, the men broke camp, and embarked on the remaining five nautical miles. In the distance, they could finally see a signpost: the smudged outline of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a U.S. scientific-research base. After a few hours, Worsley noticed that his skis were moving in tracks that had been etched by snowmobiles. Then he saw, dumped in a pile on the ice, a broken washing machine, a mattress, and crushed boxes. The scentless air became infused with the sharp odors of fried food and petroleum; occasionally, a military plane roared overhead. “We had been thrust back into the world we had left behind,” Worsley wrote.

In front of the research station, protruding from the ice, was a gleaming metal rod, about waist-high, topped with a brass globe. Scientists at the base used it as a marker of the South Pole—the place where all the lines of longitude converge, and where the Earth doesn’t rotate. Because the rod was planted on a shifting ice sheet, it had to be moved several feet each year, to return to the Pole’s precise location.

On January 18th, at 4:32 p.m. , after sixty-six days, Worsley and his companions—emaciated, with icicles dripping from their beards—reached out and grasped the rod. As the journey had approached its end, Worsley had felt tears freezing under his eyes: he had not experienced such joy and relief since he was a little boy. But now Worsley, whom Adams called an “absolute bang-on natural leader,” laughed and hollered and embraced the others. Only a few years earlier, they had been strangers, yet they had learned to trust one another with their lives. What’s more, Worsley believed, they had mastered the seemingly impossible by adhering to the lessons of Shackleton; they had conquered through endurance. In a broadcast, Worsley announced, “I’m calling you from ninety degrees south, the South Pole!” Then he took out Shackleton’s compass, lifted the lid, and let the needle spin to a stop.

VI. The Infinite Beyond

Worsley didn’t think that he would ever go back to Antarctica again. He happily returned to the Army and relished being with his family. But he gradually began to feel again the “lure of little voices.” In his commonplace book, he wrote down a quote, from the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, that seemed to address his own compulsion to subject himself to more suffering: “Why? On account of the great geographical discoveries, the important scientific results? Oh no; that will come later, for the few specialists. This is something all can understand. A victory of human mind and human strength over the dominion and powers of Nature; a deed that lifts us above the great monotony of daily life; a view over shining plains, with lofty mountains against the cold blue sky, and lands covered by ice-sheets of inconceivable extent . . . the triumph of the living over the stiffened realm of death.”

Listen to Henry Worsley’s dispatch, Day 66 Adams, Worsley, and Gow reached the South Pole in 2009, completing, in Gow’s words, “unfinished family business.” Photograph courtesy Joanna Worsley

In 2012, Worsley launched a new expedition, to mark the centennial of the race between Amundsen and Scott to the South Pole. Gow and Adams, who had married and settled down with families, declined to go, and so Worsley drew recruits from the military. He and a partner, Lou Rudd, followed the trail of Amundsen and raced against another party, which took the route of Scott. Once more, Worsley proved an extraordinary commander—Rudd called him a “true inspiration”—and they won the nine-hundred-mile contest, which raised nearly three hundred thousand dollars for a Royal British Legion fund that assists wounded soldiers.

Worsley had become the first person to trace the two classic routes to the South Pole. Outside hailed him as “one of the great polar explorers of our time,” and a reporter described him as a “pioneer of the possible.” Worsley, who had recently published “In Shackleton’s Footsteps,” gave lectures on exploration and leadership, becoming that rare apostle whose life seems to affirm his master’s teachings.

In 2013, he was stationed in Washington, D.C., as the British liaison to U.S. Special Operations Forces. It was his final military posting: in October of 2015, after more than three and a half decades of service, he would be fifty-five, at that time the mandatory retirement age. Joanna had accompanied him to the States, and she sensed his mind drifting. “Are you doing another expedition?” she asked.

He said that the centenary of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition would coincide with his retirement, and that he was considering an attempt of the trans-Antarctica crossing that Shackleton had planned before the sinking of his ship. What’s more, Worsley hoped to make the nine-hundred-nautical-mile journey by himself, and without assistance, something that had never been done. Paul Rose, a former base commander for the British Antarctic Survey, which conducts scientific research in the region, called such a trek “unheard of,” and another explorer deemed it an “almost inhuman challenge.” For Worsley, the expedition represented the culmination of all his energies. Not only would it be his longest, hardest, and most punishing quest; he would have to survive entirely on his own wits.


Henry, though, told Joanna that he would return to Antarctica only if she approved. He was sensitive to the toll that his expeditions had taken on their family. He often struggled to express his emotions—the tumult that he had kept masked, even as it drove him—and in his book he had included a passage that seemed intended for his family, a way to convey what he could not say directly. “Looking back now, I realize that I lost track of where my real priorities should lie,” he wrote. “I can see now that I was not dividing up the time sensibly and making my family feel important and special.” He went on, “Passion for something can so easily tip into obsession, which is a dangerous thing, especially when those affected are the very people who so loyally ‘stand and wait.’ ”

Joanna, who often joked that the Antarctic was her husband’s “mistress,” had expected that, upon his retirement, they would no longer be apart. But she had never tried to limit his aspirations—“He went with my blessings everywhere,” she once told a reporter—and she understood how much the proposed trip meant to him. And Henry wasn’t just doing it for himself—he hoped to raise a hundred thousand dollars for the Endeavour Fund, the other charity for injured soldiers. As he later put it, “I want to leave a financial legacy to assist my wounded mates.” And so she gave Worsley her backing. The children were equally supportive. Max, who would be twenty-one by the time of the expedition, and who was helping to build ships in the South of France, had come to terms with his father’s adventurist spirit, and even lionized him for it. They talked about eventually doing a polar journey together. “Everyone dreams, but Dad’s the guy who goes out and achieves them,” Max said.

In the fall of 2015, before Henry departed on the expedition, he and Joanna travelled to Greece. While visiting ancient sites and drinking wine at tavernas, they plotted out the things they would do when he returned. They would go to India and teach underprivileged children, and travel to Venice, where he could study art and she could do charity work. Max recalled, “Mom was waiting twenty-five years for the moment when he left the Army and they could do these things together.”

Worsley no longer journeyed in obscurity, and his plan received admiring news coverage. “ intrepid ex-army officer is set for antarctic trek, ” the Glasgow Herald announced. A Washington Post headline declared that Worsley would be “ all alone on the coldest continent .” Worsley was interviewed by National Geographic and by the BBC, whose announcer said, “You must be mad to do it.” Prince William invited Worsley to Kensington Palace and signed a Union Jack for him to carry with him on his trip, which was similar to the one that King George V had given to Shackleton before he departed.

On October 20th, Joanna drove him to Heathrow Airport. She was more worried about this expedition than any other, given his age and the lack of help. In a video that Worsley posted on his Web site, he had spoken of the risks of journeying solo. The biggest threat, he said, was falling into a crevasse: no one could pull him out or call for rescue. The other major threats, he said, were a “severe medical injury” and “severe weather.” But he believed that his meticulous preparations would mitigate the risks. While travelling alone, he noted, “there is no one there to compare thoughts with and seek their opinions on, but I want to do this on my own.” He later put the matter even more starkly: “Success or failure of this journey is completely up to me.”

At the terminal, Joanna broke down, and he repeated what he always told her: “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” Then he kissed her and said, “Onwards!”

This time, Worsley’s route was to begin on Berkner Island, an icebound chunk of rock off the Atlantic coast of Antarctica, south of Chile. From there, he would trek five hundred and seventy nautical miles to the South Pole. Then, heading in the reverse direction from the one he had followed with Gow and Adams, he would ascend the Titan Dome and make his way down to the rim of the Ross Ice Shelf, on the Pacific side. This second section would cover three hundred and thirty nautical miles, and he estimated that the expedition would take him nearly eighty days. He was determined to finish before February, when winter set in and the conditions became too perilous for a rescue plane to land; even A.L.E. shut down in winter. At that point, there would be no exit.

Worsley had hoped to fly to Antarctica shortly after arriving in Punta Arenas, on October 21st. But foul weather—“our lord and master at the moment,” as he called it—forced A.L.E. to delay his flight for a week, and then another. “Greetings from Patience Camp,” he reported on his broadcast. “Unfortunately, this is Patience Camp in Chile.”

By the time he reached Berkner Island, on November 13th, he was significantly behind schedule. He would need to arrive at the South Pole by January 1, 2016—a gruelling pace. Within moments of exiting the plane, he was packing his sled, which, because of the length of the journey, weighed three hundred and twenty-five pounds—even more than on his expedition with Gow and Adams. “Really worried about weight,” he had written earlier, in his diary. Noting that “anxiety builds,” he reminded himself that he needed to “banish negative thoughts.”

He pushed off, and heard a familiar symphony: the poles crunching on the ice, the sled creaking over ridges, the skis swishing back and forth. When he paused, he was greeted by that silence which seemed unlike any other. His doubts soon dissipated, and after a brief baptismal trek he made camp. The sun was shining and the temperature was a balmy nineteen degrees. “So, so happy to be back,” he wrote in his diary. “Many days of struggle ahead but a glorious start. My spirits lifted as soon as I got going. I thought, ‘I can do this.’ ” In his broadcast, he described Antarctica as the “best place on Earth right now.”


The next morning, he began what he called his “first full day in the saddle.” He trekked for eight hours, listening to tracks by David Bowie, Johnny Cash, and Meat Loaf and pondering what he might say, upon his return, in a lecture about the trip. He covered a good ten nautical miles, but it was a shock to his system. “First few days really are hell—never forget that,” he wrote. If he focussed on the length of his journey, he would never make it, and so he concentrated on immediate tasks. “It’s just chipping away at it, bit by bit, and dealing with the moment,” he later said on a broadcast. On the third day, after crossing the eighty-first degree of latitude, he convened a one-man meeting of the Malt Whiskey Appreciation Society, downing a shot of liquor, which he had cooled with snow. He knew that more and more people were following his broadcasts, including schoolchildren—“young explorers,” he called them—and, despite his exhaustion, he took time each evening to relay updates and respond to inquiries that had been sent to him. He answered questions about whether he had seen any animal life (“sadly not”), about his favorite freeze-dried meal (spaghetti Bolognese), about his least favorite time of day (preparing to set off in the morning) and his favorite (climbing into his tent after a long march). He was asked which actor should portray him in a movie about his adventures. Admitting that his answer offered a “strong exposé of my vanity,” he suggested Matt Damon for his younger self and Anthony Hopkins for his older self. He even replied to a question about how he went to the loo. “If you need to pee, throw your back to the wind, unzip, and have a pee,” he explained. “Really not a big deal about that. On the other hand, if you need to go No. 2, you need to be a little more organized, particularly if there’s a strong wind, which, generally, there is. This time, you face into the wind. You make sure that you’ve grabbed your outer trousers, your long johns, your pants, and you drop them as quickly as possible.” One evening, after answering several queries, he playfully signed off from “somewhere” in “a complete whiteout.”

Worsley was fifty-five when he returned to Antarctica in 2015, for a solo crossing of the continent. Joanna often joked that the Antarctic was her husband’s “mistress.” Photograph courtesy Joanna Worsley

By the end of the first week, he had travelled nearly seventy nautical miles. His body, he reported to listeners, was in remarkably good shape. He’d just enjoyed a hot meal of chicken cacciatore, with rice pudding for dessert. “I am now off to my sleeping bag,” he said.

Then, as on Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, everything began to go wrong. On November 22nd, a little more than a week into his journey, he was engulfed in a whiteout and was pinned down in his tent. “Proper Antarctic storm!” he wrote in his diary, noting that there was no chance of moving forward that day. The next morning, the gusts felt strong enough to hurl a small dog; one of the tent poles broke, and he had to repair it. “A salutary reminder just who is in control around here,” he said of the conditions. “Trespassers will be punished.”

He emerged on November 24th, and found himself plowing through a dust bowl of ice in which all he could see, hour after hour, was his compass strapped to his chest and his skis with their metronomic rhythm—an experience that he described as “miserable, mind-numbing, monochromatic monotony.” He was ascending a section of the Transantarctic Mountains, and on November 25th he came upon a steep slope of ice that rose hundreds of feet. He tried to climb with his crampons but the sled wouldn’t move. Again, he tried. Again, it wouldn’t budge.

If he didn’t keep moving, he would freeze. He decided to lighten his sled, and unloaded most of his bags of food and stored them on a flat part of the ice. Then he began to climb. When he reached the top of the ridge, gasping for air behind his face mask, he deposited what he’d dragged up. After a short rest, he scaled back down to retrieve the rest. He made trip after trip.

Once, in the poor visibility, he failed to notice the scar of a crevasse and his foot broke through the surface. He felt himself slipping into the hole, which was widening around him. He grabbed the edge and clung to it, dangling over an abyss, before he hauled himself up. When he peered into the chasm, he wrote in his diary, he “suddenly felt very alone, vulnerable and scared.”

His body was weakening more rapidly than on his previous expeditions. Not only was the sled heavier; he constantly had to break track, and he had to carry out alone the tiresome tasks of making camp each night and packing up in the morning.

On November 30th, after trekking for nearly three weeks and traversing a hundred and sixty-five nautical miles, he reported that he had “aching shoulders, lower-back pain, very snotty nose . . . and coughing due to breathing in cold air.” He developed a rash on his groin. His feet were covered in bruises and blisters, and he took a knife to his boots, hoping to smooth the lining and alleviate the pain. One day, he suffered from a mysterious stomach ache, which was aggravated by the sled harness yanking at his waist.

Though he usually maintained a buoyant tone in his broadcast, he was more despairing in his diary. “It was a real physical battle with fatigue,” he wrote, adding, “I was stopping literally every minute or so to catch my breath or just get ready for the next exertion required.” Two nights later, after another whiteout, he lamented that he hadn’t had enough strength “to pull the sledge through” the storm. His diary entries became a litany of suffering: “hard day”; “a very difficult day”; “a brutal day”; “awful day—floundering around in a complete whiteout”; “another awful day—worse than yesterday”; “swimming against a strong tide”; “still swimming against the tide”; “totally spent and demoralized.” Each morning, he unzipped the flap of his tent and peeked out, hoping for clear skies, only to behold what he called “more of the white darkness.” At times, he could not even discern the tips of his skis through the murk, which, he wrote, was as “thick as clotted cream.”

On December 1st, he marched into what he described as “the mother of all storms.” Trudging uphill, with his head bowed against a fusillade of ice pellets, he moved at less than a mile per hour. After many hours, he abruptly paused. “I sat huddled on my sledge, down jacket on, wondering whether to go or to stop,” he later recalled. It was so windy that he did not know if he could set up his tent, and so he resumed trekking. “My hands took a battering, and often I had to stop to give them some warmth,” he said. “And the light was so flat that on two occasions, immediately after stopping, I fell straight over, such is the disorienting effect it has on your senses.”

The next day, he blindly skied over a ridge, and the sled overtook him and pulled him down. His head and back and legs slammed against the ice. The sled flipped over twice, dragging him for twenty yards. He lay splattered on the ice, cursing. When he got to his feet, he nervously checked his fuel cannisters. One crack and he would be doomed, but there were none, and, conscious of time slipping away, he untangled his harness and set off again.

And incredibly, despite every obstacle and every calamity, he was on track to reach the South Pole around New Year’s Day. Nothing seemed to stop him. One morning, he forged on even when the conditions were so awful that he conceded that it was “crazy” to set off. Another time, he wrote in his diary, “I just can’t go further—I don’t have it in me.” And yet he rose the next day and marched onward. On December 18th, the thirty-sixth day, he walked more than seventeen nautical miles, a remarkable trek that took him fifteen hours. After another punishing day—which he described as a “combination of eating, bending, driving, tying, pushing, bracing, draining, swearing, pausing and despairing”—he told himself, “I just have to accept it and keep moving.”

His existence had been reduced to a single purpose: making his mileage. When approaching sastrugi, he commanded himself to “attack, attack, attack.” After one such battle, he wrote proudly in his diary that he had stormed “the ramparts of every piece that was unfortunate enough to get in my way.” He added, “The sledge, now a battering ram and not a burden, smashed through all in its path.” When he was asked by his radio listeners how he persevered, he said that it was less about physical prowess than about how “strong your mind and will are—hours at the gym cannot prepare you.”


Robert Swan, a British adventurer who had trekked to both poles, was monitoring Worsley’s journey, and expressed awe at his daily progress. In an audio message posted on Worsley’s Web site, on December 5th, Swan said, “His average is fantastic,” adding, “He’s facing some quite odd conditions, but, being Henry, he’s slugging it out.” In a second message, posted later that month, Swan described Worsley proceeding as if a traffic light were glowing in front of him: “Very, very rarely in your mind do you ever see the color green, for the simple reason if you’re in green you’re probably not pushing hard enough. . . . You’re thinking about your feet, your legs, your calves, your hips, your arms, your neck, your shoulders, and you’re constantly doing these checks to see whether everything’s O.K. . . . As Henry has said, as he moves towards those last few hours every day, you can feel that he’s pushing into the red zone. And the red zone is not a place to stay in, because in the red zone your body is starting to eat itself. You’re much more likely to get frostbite. So you live on the edge of the orange, occasionally push into the red, and then, very sensibly, he comes back off the red, back into the orange. And hopefully, when he’s into his sleeping bag and speaking to us, you know he’s back into the green.”

By Christmas Day, Worsley was nearly within a hundred nautical miles of the Pole. Prince William broadcast a message, saying, “We’re thinking of you at the Christmas period as you’re lugging all your kit up and down the slopes and the hills of the southern Atlantic in the Antarctic.” Worsley opened a package that Joanna and the children had given him. Inside were miniature versions of traditional Christmas sweets: a mincemeat pie and a fruitcake. Alicia had written him a note that quoted lyrics from “The Jungle Book”: “Look for the bare necessities / The simple bare necessities / Forget about your worries and your strife.” And Joanna had included a sample of Amouage Journey Man cologne. “I figured his tent would be so smelly by then,” she recalled.

On his broadcast, Worsley said, “Packages from home, especially at times like this, no matter where you are in the world, carry special meaning. And none more so for me this morning.”

Using his satellite phone, he called Joanna and Alicia, in London, and then Max, in France. Throughout the journey, Worsley had made a record in his diary of virtually every communication that he had had with them. Once, after speaking to Joanna, he wrote, “I do love her so much.” Another time, after he received a text from Alicia saying “I am thinking of you constantly, and love you more than ever,” he jotted down, “Sweet text from Shrimp”—his nickname for her. And he noted that a conversation one morning with Max had “lifted my spirits.” On Christmas Day, he wrote in his diary, “Lovely to hear their voices.”

Despite the holiday, Worsley marched twelve nautical miles. As he lay in his tent that night, he lit a cigar, the sweet smoke filling the air, and ate his Christmas treats. It was, he said, like a “little heaven.”

Soon, he was almost at nine thousand feet, the elevation of the South Pole. He was so tired that once, while sitting on his sled during a snack break, he nodded off, even though the wind-chill temperature was minus twenty-two. “I may be drained of all power and energy,” he reported on a broadcast. “But I still seem to have the will that says, to my heart and nerves and sinews, Hold on.” He kept telling himself, “Keep your eyes on the prize.”

On January 2nd, only a day behind schedule, he reached the Pole. He was greeted by a group of well-wishers from the scientific-research station. They were the first people he had seen in fifty-one days. But this was not the climax of his journey—it was only the end of the first phase—and, because he was making his trek unaided, he couldn’t go inside the base to receive a hot meal or even to take a bath. “It was weird arriving here and not stopping,” he wrote in his diary, adding, “Very tempting to stay at Pole—eat and sleep.” But he set up his camp as usual, maintaining his self-imposed exile.

During his broadcast, he told his listeners, “I owe so much to all of you for your support in getting me this far. I cannot emphasize too strongly just how much it has urged me on over the darker days, of which there have been many. But those I have to thank most are Joanna, Max, and Alicia.” His voice cracked. “They have been with me every step of the way, each with a warm hand in the small of my back, lifting me when I am down, strengthening me when I am weak, and filling me when I’m empty. I owe them everything.” He concluded, “At the southerly point where the world spins on—good night.”

In London, Joanna listened to his broadcasts each evening before falling asleep. Shortly before Christmas, she was interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Express, and she said, “Henry was away abroad a lot in his army days so we’ve been used to separations . . . but I miss him much more now. I do worry about him because I know how frail he is getting—he does lose a huge amount of weight and he has had a really rough time with the weather.” She went on, “He is so determined. In my head I know there’s no way he won’t succeed, even if he has to walk all day and night. He has enormous mental strength.” She was overcome: “He’s an amazing man—isn’t it wonderful to be married to someone like that?”

Worsley estimated that it would take him about three weeks to complete the rest of his journey, and he hoped that the hardest part was behind him. In his diary, he had written, “Just pray going North is that much easier.” Yet, as he climbed the Titan Dome, he found the ascent to be “a killer.” He had lost more than forty pounds, and his unwashed clothing hung on him heavily. “Still very weak—legs are stick thin and arms puny,” he noted in his diary. His eyes had sunk into shaded hollows. His fingers were becoming numb. His Achilles tendons were swollen. His hips were battered and scraped from the constantly jerking harness. He had broken his front tooth biting into a frozen protein bar, and told A.L.E. that he looked like a pirate. He was dizzy from the altitude, and he had bleeding hemorrhoids.


On January 7th, he woke in the middle of the night with another stomach ache. “I felt pretty awful,” he admitted on his broadcast. “The weakest I felt in the entire expedition.” The earbuds on his iPod had broken, leaving him in silence. “I feel alone,” he confessed on a broadcast, adding, “Occasionally, it would be nice to have somebody to talk to about the day.”

He kept thinking that he would soon reach the top of the Titan Dome. “I’ll be okay if the promised ‘downhill’ materializes,” he wrote in his diary. But the peak eluded him—he was trapped in an infinite beyond. On January 11th, he told his listeners, “I’m desperate to go down and into air thick enough to breathe.”

Listening to the broadcasts, Joanna was increasingly concerned. “I felt in his voice this exhaustion and sadness,” she recalled. He had no companion to tell him that he had remained too long in the red zone; nor was he held back by the worry that his actions might jeopardize the lives of others. And he was confident that he could do what he always had done: prevail through unbending will. In his commonplace book, he had once written down a quote, from the cyclist Lance Armstrong, that said, “Losing and dying: it’s the same thing.”

And so Worsley pressed on, muttering to himself a line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Once, he looked up in the sky and saw, through his frozen goggles, a dazzling sun halo. On the edge of the circle, there were intense bursts of light, as if the sun were being splintered into three fiery balls. He knew that the phenomenon was caused by sunlight being refracted through a scrim of ice particles. Yet, as he stumbled onward through the void, he wondered if the light was actually some guiding spirit, like the “fourth man” that Shackleton had spoken of. Perhaps Worsley, too, had pierced the “veneer of outside things”—or perhaps his mind was simply unravelling. His diary entries had become sparer and darker: “So breathless . . . I am fading . . . hands/fingers are forever shutting down . . . wonder how long they will last.”

On January 17th, he staggered through a whiteout, pulling his sled for sixteen hours. When he stopped, it was late evening, and he struggled to build his camp again—to plant the tent poles in the ice, to unload his food, to light the cooker, to melt snow for water. “It’s now one o’clock in the morning,” he said in his broadcast. “In sum, it’s been a punishing day.” He continued, “What little energy I have left . . .” His voice faded in and out.

Joanna panicked upon hearing the broadcast. She called many of Worsley’s close friends, asking if someone should ask A.L.E. to dispatch a rescue plane. They thought that Worsley would be O.K., given his experience and abilities, and that he should be the one to make such a call. Robert Swan, in one of his earlier broadcasts, had noted that Worsley had on his belt “a wonderful, unbelievable” Iridium satellite telephone, adding, “If he does have a problem, he can hit the button and get some support and rescue very, very quickly.”