This Ain't an Egg-Shop

In the winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard walked 130 miles across Antarctica in total darkness to fetch a penguin egg.

The point was science. Dr. Edward Wilson believed emperor-penguin embryos would prove that birds descended from reptiles, a Victorian theory that was already quietly being abandoned back in London. Cherry-Garrard, aged twenty-five and so nearsighted he could not wear his spectacles while sledging, went anyway. He was that sort of man.

The temperature dropped to seventy-seven below. His teeth, he wrote, "split to pieces." Their reindeer-hide sleeping bags absorbed sweat, refroze into forty-five-pound coffins, and had to be squirmed into for an hour each night. Stepping out of the tent one morning, he raised his head to look around and could not lower it. He pulled the sledge for four hours with his head frozen upright, which is the sort of detail you'd assume was invented by someone who had never met the Antarctic. Then a Force 11 blizzard tore the roof off their igloo and they lay under drifting snow for forty-eight hours, waiting to die. They didn't. They walked home with three eggs.

Some years later, Cherry-Garrard carried the eggs into the Natural History Museum in London and presented them to the First Custodian, who looked at him and said:

"This ain't an egg-shop."