Most of us, I imagine, have been on a field trip at some point. How many of us have vaguely felt that "there should be a book in this" if we tread lightly over the booze and sex and bear down heavily on the taxonomy. Well, here are two classic accounts of field trips - one from hell (the title is a giveaway) and one from heaven.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was born in 1886 into a very wealthy English landowning family. He himself was visually impaired and apparently quite frail (although in the event he lived to 73) and his family thought he needed "toughening up". So they encouraged him to join Scott's 1911-13 Antarctic Expedition (they obviously didn't believe in half measures). In 1911, while awaiting the planned start of the main South Pole attempt, Cherry joined Edward Wilson and Birdie Bowers in a winter trip of some 60-70 miles across Cape Evans to the far side of Ross Island, to visit the rookery of the Emperor Penguins on Cape Crozier.

The rationale for the trip - it was Wilson's idea, not Scott's - at such a time of year was (a) to test the equipment and provisions in the most extreme conditions, in advance of the main journey (b) this was the only time to collect fertilized but unhatched Emperor eggs. Wilson (a medical doctor who had never practised, specialising in ornithological research instead) had a theory that the flightless Emperors were the most primitive birds on earth and that embryological studies would show up links between them and the dinosaurs; he called their trip "the weirdest bird-nesting expedition that has been or ever will be."

The round trip took 35 days, man-hauling on foot because they didn't feel confident enough to use sledge dogs or skis, in temperatures as low as -70°F; they experienced a blizzard fierce enough to blow their tent away one night (they found it nearby next day - "we were so thankful" said Cherry). Sometimes they managed less than 2 miles a day, especially on the return journey when they were exhausted and suffering from frostbite, malnutrition and (probably) incipient scurvy. The book contains unsparing accounts of the difficulties they and their relatively primitive equipment encountered. They collected 5 eggs, of which only 3 turned out to be suitable; these, on his return to Europe, Cherry donated to the London Natural History Museum. Who, as it turned out, weren't expecting them and didn't want them.

Scott, however, later used the data provided by the trip to formulate rations for the Polar trip and to modify some of his equipment. He also put it on record that it had been an error of judgement to sap the stamina of two of his Polar companions so severely. Wilson and Bowers died (starved and frozen) with Scott returning from the Pole in 1912. Cherry-Garrard forever blamed himself for not doing more to rescue the trio; the book was undertaken in 1922 on the advice of his friend George Bernard Shaw, as a kind of therapy for his consequent clinical depression and stress disorders.

As a field trip it was a bit of a shambles, if not as useless as the account by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen suggests, but Cherry never wavered in his belief that "if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore."

704pp paperback; freely available second-hand and also available on the web as e-text at Project Gutenberg.

Current Publication details: 2003 paperback; Pimlico (New Ed edition); ISBN 978-1844131037; price £8.99

In 1940, the novelist John Steinbeck financed a field trip for his friend Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, along the Pacific coast and up into the Gulf of California (aka the Sea of Cortez). Ricketts ran a small company supplying biological specimens to university and school laboratories and needed to re-stock; Steinbeck hoped to recoup his funding by writing a book about the expedition. They hired a four-man fishing vessel and set off along the coast of Baja California.

The book was originally published under their joint names as Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, and consisted of Ricketts's journal of the trip, edited and reworked by Steinbeck, plus an exhaustive list of observations and species. It didn't sell. After Ricketts's death in 1948, the narrative portion was republished in 1951 as we now have it, but without the Appendixes: a mixture of biological observations, biographical/travel narrative, and philosophy, the gap between science and faith, and affirmation of the holistic approach to ecology. Ricketts was an early exponent of ecology and holistic approaches to his subject and an enthusiastic opponent of teleological and sloppy thinking. (And for the record, to his credit, Steinbeck always insisted during his lifetime on giving Ricketts full co-author status, despite commercial considerations urged by his publishers.)

Steinbeck/Ricketts gives an exhaustive account of the practical preparations, preliminary research, supplies from technical library to formalin to outboard motor, the aptitudes of the crew (whom they trained up as specimen collectors en route), the weather, geographical features, marine organisms and the people they encountered. The whole account is in an easy, readable style, leavened with humour, whether dealing with fauna or ideas: "[on the limitations of in vitro studies] He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions; one or two have had a little trouble about it." "At the bar Chris told us of a native liquor called damiana....Chris said it was an aphrodisiac and told some interesting stories to prove it....We felt a scientific interest in his stories, and bought a bottle, intending to subject it to certain tests under laboratory conditions....we think we were going to use it on a white rat."

Ricketts is also the author of Between Pacific Tides, an authoritative account of the intertidal fauna of the Pacific Coast.

320pp. paperback; map; brief glossary of scientific terms. Freely available second-hand.

Publication details: 2001 Penguin Classics New Ed edition; ISBN: 978-0141186078; price £12.99