The Worst Journey in the World is a 1922 memoir by Apsley Cherry-Garrard of Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in 1910–1913.

It has earned wide praise for its frank treatment of the difficulties of the expedition, the causes of its disastrous outcome, and the meaning of human suffering under extreme conditions.

In 1910, Cherry-Garrard and his fellow explorers travelled by sailing vessel, the Terra Nova, from Cardiff to McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

Wilson chose Cherry-Garrard to accompany him and Henry R. Bowers across the Ross Ice Shelf under conditions of complete darkness and temperatures of −40 °C (−40 °F) and below.

[12] In his book, Cherry-Garrard extensively defends his actions and non-actions, and polar historian Roland Huntford has diagnosed the Worst Journey as "an immature but persuasive, highly charged apologia".

Although The Worst Journey in the World was published only nine years after the end of the Terra Nova expedition, that short length of time had made clear that new technology, particularly caterpillar-tread vehicles—proposed for snow travel by Scott in a 1908 memorandum and developed by his engineer, Reginald Skelton, for the 1910 expedition—and later aeroplanes, would revolutionise future work in the Antarctic and make much of the suffering endured by Scott and his men unnecessary.

The Worst Journey in the World asks, but does not answer, the question of whether this suffering was futile, or whether it would inspire future human beings facing very different challenges.

[5] As the survivors of the Terra Nova returned to England several years later, recapitulation theory had begun to be discredited.

Cherry-Garrard turned over the egg specimens to embryologists at London's Natural History Museum, who were largely uninterested in the donation.