Antarctic Conquest : the Story of the Ronne Expedition, 1946-1948 / Finn Ronne, Commander, U.S.N.R. New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949, xx, 299 pp.

This is a fine book on one of the last private expeditions to Antarctica before the International Geophysical Year and the wholesale takeover of research there by governments. But it was published seventy years ago. What reason would anyone have for reading it today?

Well, as I noted, it’s a fine book, and provides a window on times gone and places vastly changed from what they have since become. When we read of the post-World War II era these days we’re generally looking at politicians or cultural figures and the unfolding of the Cold War, not at working scientists, and definitely not at Antarctica. Which is a shame.

It was an era of can-do people and a hands-on world, of slow, meticulous organization and, at need, rapid improvisation. It was, by and large, a world of men, in which women were secondary or marginalized, and yet one of gusto, verve and optimism. We often think the period after the advent of the atomic bomb one of unrelieved fear and gloom. Yet people could put such concerns aside and match themselves against nature in the pursuit of knowledge. It was a time recognizably still akin to our own, though rendered curiously remote by advances of technology. It was a machine age, a mass production age, but by our standards still a do-it-yourself one, not the online, automated, globalized one we live in now. With a certain nostalgia, we can recognize it as the world of our parents or grandparents. All this comes through in this book.

And there’s more, notably a rather ill-kept secret that led me to seek it out in the first place. It is not, as it appears on the surface, the engaging memoir of chipper, indefatigable explorer Finn Ronne. Oh, it’s certainly his story, and that he was all that, of that I’ve no doubt. What he wasn’t, evidently, was a very good writer. His book, however, is very well written. How can this be?

He had help. Specifically, help from one of my favorite authors, science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp, who was then struggling to restart a literary career sidelined by the war. His role in distilling Ronne’s reminiscences into a readable narrative is recognized ... nowhere in the book.

Here’s how it came about, per de Camp:

“Another hack job was ghosting a book for the polar explorer Finn Ronne. A Norwegian-American, Ronne had returned from an Antarctic expedition to try to settle the question of whether Antarctica, beneath its mantle of snow and ice, was a single continent or an archipelago; and he wanted to make a book of it. Finding a mere transcript of his log unsalable, he appealed to his agent, who recruited me.

“One time in New York, early in 1949, Finn, his wife, and I were walking up Broadway in a light snowfall. Jackie Ronne said: ‘We struggled so hard over that manuscript, and you make it seem easy!’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘if, having read your manuscript, I bought a fur coat and a pair of snowshoes and started out for the South Pole, you’d think I was a damned fool, now wouldn’t you? But I’ve been at the writing trade for fifteen years, learning it; and I’m still learning.’

“In ghosting the book, my job was to get Finn to relax while I asked him: ‘Now, Finn, when McClary fell off the ice cliff, who first noticed that he was getting near it? Who said what?’

“Finn would close his eyes, reliving the scene. ‘It vas Nichols and McLean who saw him. One of them yelled: ‘Yesus Christ, Mac, stop! Vatch out!’ But now, you vouldn’t vant to say ‘Yesus Christ’ in the book, vould you? That vouldn’t be nice!’ ... Finn was a man of austere standards.”

“I finished Antarctic Conquest in May 1949, and Putnam brought out the book late that year. It got excellent reviews but sold badly; people were not interested in polar exploration just then.

“The original agreement was that my name should appear in the book as Ronne’s collaborator. But I was offered more money if my name were omitted; and being pinched, I accepted the offer. So you will just have to take my word that I did ghost this book.”

——L. Sprague de Camp, Time & Chance, 1996, pp. 206-207
(slightly condensed and rearranged for clarity).

We don’t entirely have to take de Camp’s word for it. One thing I was curious about going into the book was whether de Camp’s own voice had wholly been subsumed into Ronne’s persona, or if on the other hand any of his unique style would shine through. It does. In fact, he manages the nice feat of projecting what I take to be Ronne’s actual personality while simultaneously enriching the story with his own characteristic humor, instruction and breezy erudition.

Antarctic Conquest thus engaged me on two levels, first as a straightforward autobiographical account of Ronne’s Antarctic expedition, and second as a scavenger hunt to uncover various Easter Eggs from his “ghost.” It was a fun ride.

But more than that, it’s is a fascinating read. It’s crisp and to the point, with little excess verbiage devoted to scene-setting; we get the context as we move along. Everything that’s said helps paint the picture of the era in which the expedition took place and was written. The mores, the culture, the physicality of the time all come through.

Ronne and de Camp take us methodically through the preparations for the expedition with all the attendant snafus, complications, and bureaucratic entanglements. We chug with it down the coasts of the Americas to the Antarctic and experience with its participants the awe of their encounter with the frozen and unforgiving southern continent. We set up camp and experiment stations with them, dogsled and fly mapping planes with them as they penetrate and record pristine territory, suffer through weather that often upsets the most carefully laid plans, and worry over injured colleagues and lost scouting parties. We wonder at the sheer difficulty of life in Antarctica, how its climate makes the simplest things difficult, and how by pluck, ingenuity and perseverance such hazards are overcome.

A host of little things remind as we are in a world history has left behind; the touchiness of Chileans and Britons in regard to their Antarctic land claims, for instance, which leads to objections from the latter to the Americans reoccupying an old American-built base and re-raising the flag there. Or the casual references to the recent privations of the war years, the taken-for-granted second class status of women, or the fact that almost everybody is a problem-solving, enthusiastic jack-of-all-trades. The evocations of time and place and descriptions of the Antarctic weather, sights and conditions are vivid and convincing.

We find out as we go along what the state of knowledge was on the region, and how much remained to be discovered, explored, or even corrected. Places had been mapped so poorly the Ronne Expedition had to re-chart locations previously deemed known. A major goal was determining whether the Palmer Peninsula was part of the main continent or a separate subcontinent. Weather, tides, geophysical activity, and cosmic rays had barely been measured or investigated previously; the yearlong timeframe of the expedition allowed it to accumulate fundamental baseline data on all of these. There were various firsts. For instance, two women were included among the participants, providing valuable contributions to the joint effort. (They were wives of two of the male personnel, including Ronne himself, but you have to start somewhere.)

There’s an authenticity of contemporary accounts by people who lived what they wrote that is missing from historical recreations. Antarctic Conquest has it. It comes from people of the time, writing for readers of the time. It is fresh, unselfconscious and unapologetic. These past voices aren’t attempting to justify their era to ours, but straight-forwardly presenting the mysteries of their own world to their own contemporaries.

That said, observations made at that time on occasion disturbingly in the present day. In one striking instance, we recognize that even in the late 1940s the effects of global warming in Antarctica were apparent to Ronne. On page 67 he compares landscapes observed in 1947-48 to the same locales as he had known them in 1939-41, on his previous Antarctic expedition, and likens the situation to the opposite hemisphere:

“The retreat of the ice that they noticed, and which I had already observed in our local glacier, we found characteristic wherever we went. A similar shrinkage of glaciers and ice barriers has been noted in the Arctic, which points to a gradual warming of the earth’s climate. If this process ever gets to the point of melting the Greenland and Antarctic icecaps completely, the water thus released will so raise the sea level that all the world’s seaports will have to move miles inland. However, since such a change would take hundreds of thousands of years, it’s nothing for us to worry about.”

From our perspective, we can see that Ronne’s confidence about timing was misplaced. But it’s unrealistic to expect of him the prescience to recognize the warming he perceived as an accelerating trend, much less anticipate the speed and magnitude at which it would develop.

Moving on to the “Easter Eggs,” there are plenty of typically de Campian asides, such as a discussion on the history of the search for Terra Austalis Incognita before the actual, more circumscribed island continents of Australia and Antarctica were discovered. There are also some rather obtrusive footnotes clarifying this or that aspect of nautical or boreal terminology that the moderately well-educated reader may find annoying, and one better versed in such things exasperating. I’m not certain if de Camp or Ronne perpetrated these. Either might have assumed such cluelessness on the part of the intended audience that it would need to be told “topped off” means “filled to capacity,” a fathom is six feet, “calved off” means “broke off,” or “belayed” is “held down.” Fortunately, these taper off the further you get in the book.

My only real gripe is the story feels unfinished. In contrast to the detailed relation of the preparations for the expedition and the journey south, the end is truncated, coming to a close as soon as the ship carrying it north from the Antarctic reaches Puntas Arenas in southern Chile. What becomes of these people we have just spent a year with on the southern continent, and come to care about? We don’t know.

Fortunately, there are appendices—lists of accomplishments, publications and expedition members, with more information. Some of what the narrative denies us we find out there. But these don’t really counter the abrupt conclusion.

So, in conclusion, how is the book? I can only repeat what I said initially. Ronne has a great story, and de Camp does a good job with it. It’s a shame it didn’t get as big an audience as it should have, and (in my view) that the de Camp name didn’t get on it. But that makes for plenty of second-hand copies available online for reasonable prices.

It’s instructive to trace the effect de Camp’s peripheral and after-the-fact involvement in Ronne’s adventure had on his work. Other than a textbook and articles of varying length, this was his first extended venture into nonfiction. He carries it off with aplomb. Writing first person in Ronne’s voice suits de Camp quite well, and the personal touch carries over into much of his subsequent non-fiction. It’s rarer in his fiction aside from a few instances, as in “Aristotle and the Gun,” “Judgment Day,” and the Reginald Rivers tales, but he uses it effectively there as well.

The project itself also had an afterlife in his writings. Finn Ronne as a person seems to have made quite an impression on him—de Camp notes that Ronne was the basis of the Ivar Heggstad character in his novels of the planet Krishna. The professional relationship between Ronne and de Camp (as adventurer and hired ghost writer) is reflected in that of Igor Shtain and Dirk Barnevelt in the novel The Hand of Zei, and de Camp made use of the setting in the Krishna series too. In the same novel, Barnevelt and George Tangaloa assume the aliases of two famous personages from Krishna’s own Antarctic region, and the region itself is used in the short story “Calories,” the only Krishna tale set outside the Triple Seas region.

So Antarctic Conquest is not just enjoyable in its own right, as a narrative of adventure and polar exploration, but for its influence in de Camp’s literary career.

Need I add that I heartily recommend this book, old as it is, for your own perusal?

Five out of five stars.

—Brian.