All posts tagged whaling

Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change @ the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.

But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.

Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition

So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:

‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’

A theme of our times

These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:

‘no world’ from ‘An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters’ by Kara Walker, Hon RA (2010) British Museum, London © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

Mixing ancient and modern

Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.

Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (around 1770) The Menil Collection, Houston Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston

So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.

Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by showing Yinka Shonibare (2023) Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Exhibition premise

The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.

So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:

  • portray rich slave owners and their plantations
  • portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
  • more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation

These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.

As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:

But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.

I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.

Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author

The videos

What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:

In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.

This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.

The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.

So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.

Responses

This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.

But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.

It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.

If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.

To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.

So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).

Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:

The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.

It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.

One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.

It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.

1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.

2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:

Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.

3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.

4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.

5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.

6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.

All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.

Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.

I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.

To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.

But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of  both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.

7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.

The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:

But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.

After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.

Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author

Labels or works?

As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.

Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.

Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.

Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.

Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.

And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)

And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.

The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.

The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.

All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.

Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.

Installation view of ‘Naming the Money’ by Lubaina Himid RA (2004) © Lubaina Himid. Photo by the author.

Warning

As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.

Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.

Tate did it very prominently in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:

This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.

And by the doorways into some of the individual rooms there are warnings that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.

Related links

Related reviews

Other posts about slavery and racism

Origins

The Islamic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade

The American civil war and slavery

Slave accounts

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by Simon on March 16, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/entangled-pasts-1768-to-now-art-colonialism-and-change-royal-academy/

The White South by Hammond Innes (1949)

The sky cleared about eleven that night. The sun was almost due south, a flaming yellow ball, its lower edge just above the horizon. A towering iceberg loomed up to starboard, catching the sunlight and flashing fire like an enormous pink diamond. Fragments of ice began to drift past us – tiny ‘growlers’, almost completely submerged. And ahead of us the loose pack ice stretched like an unending, broken plain of pink straight into the sun. It was an incredible sight. (p.112)

Summary

This is a longer, deeper and more successful novel than any of its predecessors.

Slowly and methodically it chronicles the tangled web of personal and business rivalries which lead to a major shipping disaster in the Antarctic. It is the story of the whaling ship Southern Star which, along with its flotilla of chaser and support ships, heads south in search of whales into Antarctic pack ice. Here some of the chaser ships, and then the master ship itself, become trapped, forcing their crews to abandon ship and decant nearly 500 men and a handful of women and boys onto the treacherous ice.

The novel tells in gruelling detail the story of the attempts of one of the chaser ships and its crew and English captain to survive the most inhospitable environment on earth.

Set-up

The story is topped and tailed by an omniscient narrator, briskly telling the facts of the case. After a few pages recalling the media storm surrounding the story ie lending the story an aura of factuality, including brief newspaper cuttings, the texts of telegrams, the original radio messages etc – the text then cuts to a long and detailed first-person narrative by young Duncan Craig. (This use of a narrative framed within an objective editor’s-eye-view recalls loads of late Victorian, Rider Haggard/Conan Doyle-style yarns.)

Like characters in the Innes previous novels, Craig had an exciting and responsible job in the War, in his case as captain of a corvette, which took him all over the world. The return to Civvy Street was a shock and a disappointment, the only post he could find was clerking at a tobacco import company. A friend of a friend mentions work in the mines in South Africa and on this flimsy pretext Craig hitches a lift on an airplane to Cape Town.

In those days it was a long trip with a number of stopovers which give Craig time to get to know the other passengers, who includehated the harassed and sick head of the South Antarctic Whaling Company, Colonel Bland, which owns the Southern Star, and his daughter-in-law, Judie. He learns that the owner’s son, Erik, is a spoilt brat who was put in charge of the Star as an opportunity but has quickly got at loggerheads with the master of the ship and co-owner of the company, Judie’s father, Nordahl. As they arrive in Cape Town the crisis deepens as all three learn that Judie’s father has gone missing from the ship. How? Did he jump or was he pushed?

Later the same night Bland makes Craig an offer: the captain of the towing ship, Tauer III, due to take Bland out to to the Star has been hurt in a car crash. Knowing of his wartime experience, Bland offers him the captaincy and the job of taking them from Cape Town out to the troubled ship. Craig hesitates then accepts. He is now thoroughly embroiled in the fate of the ship and the personalities who are central to the disaster which will follow…

Briefly

The vast Southern Star factory ship is surrounded by a small flotilla of whale catcher boats and fuel and refrigerator ships. The whole whaling operation is described in convincing detail and is clearly something Innes has observed himself.

As to the thriller story: Craig is reluctantly roped into an onboard inquiry which hears the contradictory evidence about whether Erik pushed Nordahl, who he hated and feared, overboard. Lots of murmuring among the crew which old man Bland defuses by demoting his son to captaincy of one of the corvettes, much to Erik’s seething anger. But then whales a-plenty appear and for a while everyone forgets their troubles in the exciting, dangerous work of chasing, catching, killing and gutting whales, which Innes describes with his usual energy and vividness.

A few days later one of the catchers follows whales into the pack ice then suddenly finds itself trapped. The catcher Craig has been given to captain immediately goes to its rescue. So far bad luck, but then, in the mist and fog Craig’s boat is suddenly rammed by the corvette captained by evil Erik, though not before the rather mad Dr Howe fires a whaling harpoon up through the bridge which penetrates the engine room and explodes. In a matter of minutes a problem has been changed into a disaster: Craig abandons ship onto the ice, then watches the corvette go up in flames and be abandoned onto ice further away.

Between them the three stricken boats have radioed the Southern Star but the small receiver Craig’s men rescue has no send facility. They listen with mounting horror to the radio broadcasts from Southern Star as it announces it is coming to rescue them, requests them to burn stuff to create smoke to find them, begins to say the ice is closing in, the pack appears to be being scrunched up by a set of giant icebergs being pushed in by a storm, the clear water by which it entered the pack is being closed behind it, now it is being itself crushed by ice, it is taking on water, they are sending SOS signals, they are abandoning ship. Silence. Horror. Death on the ice.

The men of the corvette rebel against Erik’s characteristic bad leadership, trudge over to Craig’s makeshift camp and he finds himself in charge of both crews. And the last 80 or so pages of the novel describe their nightmare on the ice: the deaths of the injured; the decision to try and mount a natural ledge on one of the approaching icebergs; civil war that breaks out between Bland’s followers and those who stay true to Craig; the slow diminution of rations until they take the desperate decision that a few volunteers should trek across the ice to try and find the camp which the survivors of the Southern Star must have made; and the gruelling trek across the ice in which more people die of exposure and exhaustion and Craig himself is on the edge of extinction when they finally do stumble across the survivors of the whaler complete with ample stocks of food and oil.

Even then it takes a major effort to bring all the survivors together in one place; and even then they have to make the difficult decision to select crew to set out in the little lifeboats to try to sail to South Georgia; and even then they have to persuade the authorities to commission ships to return in search of the iceberg, now floating freely in the south Atlantic, to pick up the last of the survivors. Exhausting.

Innes’ previous novels had been about handfuls of characters, 5 or 6 people. This is on a much larger scale: the awesome setting of the Antarctic seas, the dramatic descriptions of whale hunting which fill the middle of the book, and then the gruelling tale of starvation and survival – it is a much larger imaginative achievement than anything he’d done before.

Anticipation

As usual the first-person narrator is in a privileged position and has the ability of hindsight to drop throughout the text ominous hints of disasters yet to come…

I think it was then that I got the first premonition of trouble ahead. (p.48)

I didn’t know it then, but this was the morning of the fatal decision. (p.76)

Later I was to remember this story and wish she’d never told it to me. (p.114)

The Empire/the Commonwealth

In the later 1940s the British Empire began morphing into the British Commonwealth. The ‘jewel in the crown’, India, became independent in 1947, Palestine/Israel in 1948. The Commonwealth was formally constituted by the London Declaration in 1949, the year The White South was published, and was ready to receive the scores of nations which gained their independence in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Despite these changes one persistent thread of these books is the free and easy way the (white, male) characters seem to have been able to up sticks and live and work in other Empire/Commonwealth countries with wonderful ease.

Bill Ganster in The Blue Ice opened a nickel mine in Canada, having previously worked with the novel’s central character in southern Rhodesia. As the novel opens he and a few other Brits disgruntled by the lack of post-War opportunities in England are about to sail to the Mediterranean in search of new lives. In Killer Mine Jim Pryce has managed to live illegally in Italy for several years and now plans to start a new life in Canada.

In this novel the narrator, Duncan Craig, decides to emigrate to South Africa because someone he met in a bar tells him he can get him a job there. He blags a lift on a plane at London airport because a pilot he met at a party the night before tells him there are a couple of spare seats. And these aren’t especially well-off people.

The air of these books bespeaks a much free-er, more open world in which an enterprising man could travel the world, find work and make his fortune.

Style

Innes wrote these first ten or so novels very fast. You can watch his style being purified, becoming simpler and more effective. The key is not the fancy words, it’s the clarity of perception. It’s using simple language to convey things which are vividly felt and imagined. Maddon has wonderful descriptions of the wild sea and the barren Arctic island. Blue Ice eloquently describes the sea voyage to Norway and then the clear green water and soaring cliffs of the Norwegian fjords. In this book, again, Innes gives powerful descriptions of man-in-nature which are convincing because of their simplicity and precision of feeling.

I went up onto the bridge. The sea was a heaving mass in the dreary half-light. I stood there for a moment, watching the heavy weight of water surging white across the bow every time the little ship plunged. An albatross wheeled over the mast. Its huge wings were still as it planed into the wind. The air was bitterly cold. A thin film of ice was spreading on the windbreaker so that the canvas was stiff and smooth to the touch. I went into the wheelhouse and looked at the barometer. (p.56)

Sentimentality

I’d like to say the book was a masterpiece but it isn’t. Although the situations are described with startling power, the characterisation is weak and sterotypical. Old man Bland is a typical ageing patriarch, part bluster, part genuine authority. His son is a stereotypical spoilt son, sometimes weak and craven, at others surprisingly brave, but never to be trusted. The narrator, Craig, is a typically upright specimen of the Royal Navy who insists on behaving properly and refuses to do what absolutely everyone tells him to do ie either kill Erik or leave him behind with the entirely predictable result that Erik time after time sabotages their efforts to survive.

There is a highly sentimentalised love match between the physically feeble and drunk Dr Howe, who appears almost deranged with anger against Erik from his first appearance, and the ugly fat but immensely strong and likeable Gerda. Gerda accompanies Craig on their trek to find the other survivors and her slow wasting away and final death are meant to be moving, but Craig the narrator overdoes it, lamenting her death and going on about the love she had found with Howe at too much length.

If the practical, resourceful and jolly decent character of Craig sounds exactly like the practical, resourceful and jolly decent narrators of Blue Ice and Maddon’s Rock, so the love interest, Judie, bears a striking resemblance to the Jenny and Jill of those novels. Innes makes a token gesture to differentiate her by pointing out early on thjat she is not conventionally beautiful; but after that she shows herself every bit the practical sailor-type as her predecessors, and the whole process of being-brought-together-in-adversity-and-falling-in-love is basically the same. It’s a formula.

In the last lines we learn that Judie and Craig marry, buy a nice house overlooking Falmouth Harbour, have babies, and hang up a photo of the sainted Gerda in the hall. It is the superficiality of their entire relationship and the tweeness of this sentimental ending which limit the book, which limit it to its genre setting. Where the book triumphs is in its dazzling descriptions of exciting and exotic locations; where it fails is in its attempts at character and psychology.

Still, it’s the most ambitious and rewarding novel Innes had written to date.

Dramatic personae

  • Duncan Craig: narrator. Leads survivors out of the ice. Marries Judie.
  • Colonel Bland: chairman of the South Antarctic Whaling Company.
  • Erik Bland: his useless playboy son, conspiring to take complete control of the company, threatened by his father’s partner Nordahl. Erik orders  his corvette to ram Craig’s chase boat which leads Southern Star to enter the ice pack to rescue them but itself get stuck in ice and sunk. Ie Erik is responsible for the deaths of several hundred men.
  • Judie Bland née Nordahl: daughter of the Norwegian co-owner of the company, unhappy wife of Erik Bland. Falls in love with Craig.
  • Bernt Nordahl: Norwegian. Judie’s father, co-owner of the company, master of the Southern Star who goes mysteriously missing. Did he jump through stress, or was he pushed by Erik Bland because he had done finiancial deals to gain a controlling share in the company and was therefore a threat to the owner’s son?
  • McPhee: standard issue Scottish engineer of the Tauer III.
  • Dr Walter Howe: violently angry drunk marine biologist expert aboard the Tauer III, revealed to be Nordahl’s natural son ie Judie’s half-brother. Obsessed with killing Erik Bland.
  • Captain Eide: captain of the Southern Star.
  • Gerda Petersen: chunky, ugly, immensely competent female whaler. In many ways the best man there (p.179). Craig comes to really like and value her and her wasting away and death on the gruelling trek across the ice is meant to symbolise and sum up the entire tragedy, something – I think – it fails to do.
  • Aldo Bonomi: famous photographer who has the bad luck to be commissioned to take photos of whaling on this trip, merrily keeps on snapping no matter how bad things get, and ends up surviving and selling his photos to the world’s press.

Movie

The novel was made into a movie named Hell Below Zero (1954), starring American heart-throb, Alan Ladd, and rugged Brit, Stanley Baker. Here’s the opening titles, looks like a bad quality transfer from a VHS. I’d imagine it would have to simplify a lot of the plot and certainly tone down the fact the hero and heroine almost starve to death, and people around them actually do. I dare say they manage to retain a cinematically rosy glow.

Related links

Cover of the 1960s American Fontana edition of The White South

Cover of a 1960s American Fontana edition of The White South

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.

1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.

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by Simon on November 6, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 6, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/the-white-south-hammond-innes/

The Blue Ice by Hammond Innes (1948)

The bumf at the front of this book explains that when Innes’ previous novel, The Lonely Skier, was made into a movie, Snowbound (1948), the income from that film gave him the financial freedom to fulfil his dream of travelling, ideally by yacht. One of his first destinations was Norway, where he travelled much of the territory which features in this novel. His first-hand knowledge is evident in the very detailed descriptions: of the yacht they sail in, the whaling station they stop at, of the glacier and mountains they climb and ski across in the long snow-bound chase which is the climax of the book.

A mystery

This is another first-person narration: ‘Big’ Bill Gansert has been for eight years Base Metals and Industry (BM&I)’s production chief at their alloy plant in Birmingham. During that time he had opened a nickel mine in Canada, and helped BM&I develop a new lightweight alloy from thorite although sources in the States were so meagre, he’d been forced to abandon it. The story opens as he’s quit BM&I to go sailing in the Mediterranean in his yacht, Diviner. But at the last minute he is persuaded by BM&I’s chairman, Sir Clinton Mann, to change his plans and go to Norway because of a mystery.

The mystery is that Sir Clinton has been sent a great chunk of thorite from Norway, wrapped in whale blubber with a note apparently signed by one George Farnell. Everyone thought Farnell was dead. He was a leading metallurgist before the war but in 1939 was convicted of defrauding his business partner for £10,000 in order, he said, to fund mineralogical expeditions to Norway. Convicted and sent to prison, Farnell managed to escape his escort and flee the country.

Now, recent Norwegian newspapers reveal that he fled to Norway where he adopted a new identity and became a hero in the anti-Nazi resistance but that his dead body has just been found as if fallen from a notorious glacier in the central mountains. Gansert had known Farnell from a spell working together in Rhodesia, and he knew Farnell knew those mountains better than any Norwegian. Could his death have been foul play? Why?

Hooked by this mystery – and tempted by the apparent discovery of a new source of thorite – Gansert then discovers Sir Clinton had cheekily put an advert in the papers saying he was sailing to Norway, before the decision was even finalised, asking anyone with information about Farnell to come and see him at the yacht’s berth by the Tower of London.

With the result that a motley crew of four strangers arrives on his yacht, each in their way curious about Farnell. To sort it all out Gansert, in cavalier fashion, simply casts off and sets sail for Norway with them all aboard, with no warning. They are allowed to cable their companies or hotels but most accept it meekly and settle down to the three-day sail to Norway. And along the way we get to know more about each of the characters, their (sometimes poisonous) relations among each other, and with the deceased Farnell.

These characters are described in the Dramatis personae below.

There is some drama caused by poisonous enmities aboard such a small yacht, but the real action starts when Gansert arrives at the whaling station, Bovaagen Hval, where Farnell’s message and sample of thorite appear to have been sent from. How could it have been sent on the 9th and yet his body discovered on a glacier miles away on the 10th? Is he actually dead or faking it somehow? But why?

The Innes voice

To be honest, Gansert’s voice is pretty much the same as every Innes hero, tough, resourceful, mature, well-travelled, but also puzzled, blocked, feeling his way in the dark, trying to formulate a plan, solve the problem. But always indomitable. Fundamentally unsinkable. He never gives up. We are safe in his hands, in the tense but ultimately comforting cradle of the narrative. Not least because all these narratives start out by explaining that they are being written after the successful conclusion of the case. We know the author survives. Because of this no amount of jeopardy really scares us; all the novels carry this underlying reassurance.

The plot thickens

Once the crew arrive in Norway more characters join the chase, notably the fat, jolly, untrustworthy whaling captain Lovaas. He it is who captures a a man trying to hide under a false identity on his whaling boat and turns round to return him to the whaling station where the other characters are waiting. They think he is Hans Schreuder, supposed witness to Farnell’s death.

But Schreuder eludes them all by jumping overboard then disappearing in thick fog. As they steam back after failing to find him, they notice a crew of divers operating from a boat not so far away and suspicion falls on them. So much so that it becomes a chase to track down the main diver, Sunde, down, and our heroes grab him at gunpoint from Lovaas’s crew, and whisk him off in the yacht to interrogate him: Who was Schreuder? Why was he so scared he jumped into the freezing sea? Why is Sunde so nervous? Did he have some arrangement to pick up and hide Schreuder? Where is Schreuder now?

Finding the answers to these questions takes Gansert further into the Norwegian coastline, up the mountains to the glacier of blue ice, deep into the treacherous legacy of the Nazi occupation of Norway which still casts a long shadow, and finally into a long agonising chase across icy mountain heights to track down the man who has the key to all the questions.

Thrillers carry wartime mentality into peacetime

These first post-War novels are heavy with its legacy: blackmailed deserters in Killer Mine; Nazi gold in Lonely Skier; Russian silver in Maddon’s Rock; the bitterness between Nazi collaborators and resistors in Blue Ice. Tending to confirm the theory I developed in reading Alistair MacLean, that the modern thriller carries the violence, tension, excitement and absurdity of wartime into peacetime situations. Thrillers are like the outbreaks of miniature wars, accompanied by all their corollaries – sudden violence, desperate situations, strangers thrown together, horrible deaths.

After shooting the man who had them at gunpoint in the high mountain saeter, Sunde, the diver who turns out to be a veteran of the Norwegian resistance, comments:

‘Anybody’d fink we was at war again.’… To Sunde this was just one more man killed up in these mountains. This was the sort of thing he’d been doing all through the war. (p.176)

Quite.

In the end of The Blue Ice there isn’t a direct clash between goodies and baddies, between collaborators and resistance. In the end different parties all with something at stake converge on a skiing-climbing chase of the missing man, for hours and hours, climbing snowy  mountainsides, skiing down them, blundering across glaciers, with shoot-outs in isolated mountain huts. When the climax comes it is tragi-comic, accidental, absurd, and the narrator struggles at the end of the book to make sense of Farnell’s obsession and achievement.

Love interest

And all the time Gansert, exactly like Innes’ previous heroes, is slowly falling in love with the only nubile woman in the drama, 26 year-old Jill Somers, tall, active, a proficient sailor. She had had a brief fling with Farnell, but adversity brings her and Garsent conveniently closer together.

She looked cold and remote and delicately lovely in her navy blue ski suit and red socks and scarf. Red woollen gloves lay on the floor at her feet. She was the sort of girl that never let up once she had decided on something. (p.195)

There are some amusingly sexist moments which would give a modern feminist fits, like when he despatches her to the galley to fix the meals, something all the rest of the crew and she herself take for granted. But in among the lovey-dovey stuff, there’s an interesting exchange about the difference between men and women:

‘You, for instance. Have you never been in love?’
‘Many times,’ I answered.
‘But not really. Not so that it was more important than anything else.?’
‘No,’ I said.
Her hands suddenly tightened on mine so that I could feel her nails biting into my palm. ‘Why?’ she cried softly. ‘Why? Tell me why? What is there more important?’
I didn’t know how to answer her. ‘Excitement,’ I said. ‘The excitement of living, of pitting one’s wits against everyone else.’
‘Meaning a wife is an encumbrance?’
‘For some men – yes.’ (p.132)

‘The excitement of living’. That’s not a bad summary of Innes’ thrillers. Far-fetched though most of the plots are, and a bit too reliant on madmen to provide the narrative drive, nonetheless the books are filled with plenty of incidental moments which convey the beauty of the natural world and the sheer joy of being alive in it, of swimming, sailing, skiing, rejoicing in the wonder of existence.

Mad Innes baddies

  • The Trojan Horse  – Nazi spy Max Sedel
  • Wreckers Must Breathe – the frothing Gestapo man
  • The Killer Mine – old man Manack who kills almost everyone
  • The Lonely Skier – the maniac who stole Gilbert Mayne’s identity and tries to kill everyone
  • Maddon’s Rock – mad Captain Halsey kills one ship’s crew and most of another
  • The Blue Ice – obsessed mineralogist George Farnell
  • The White South – mad Erik Bland who rams our hero’s ship and mad Dr Howe who gets his revenge

In fact the women, the heroines of these stories, although clothed in 1940s/50s attitudes, stand out as pretty much as tough as the men (and a lot less bonkers). Maybe not physically as strong, but as skilled and brave and resolute.

Strong Innes women

  • The Trojan Horse – Freya Schmidt, sailor.
  • Wreckers Must Breathe – Maureen Craig, feisty journalist.
  • The Killer Mine – Kitty Manack, strong swimmer.
  • The Lonely Skier – the countess is a strong feisty woman, if not the love interest
  • Maddon’s Rock – Jenny Sorrell
  • The Blue Ice – Jill Somers

Jenny Sorrell in Maddon’s Rock and Jill Somers here are both very capable sailors (as is Freya Schmidt) and it is no accident that it is at sea, in the freedom of a boat on water, that these relationships blossom. Innes writes with tremendous gusto about physical activity. There is energy and vim in his descriptions of the natural world and especially of his favourite means of seeing it, from a sailing boat.

Sailing

Innes was a very experienced sailor and it shows. A large part of Maddon’s Rock describes in great detail the journey by yacht to the cursed rock. Here, about two-thirds of the text describe the journey of the Diviner from Tower Bridge, down the Thames and up the North Sea, along the Norwegian coast and then into the fjords.

Innes’ writing about sailing combines technical detail with poetic description. The combination of experience and deep feeling behind these passages goes a long way to help make the sometimes implausible plots seem much more realistic, urgent, convincing.

As soon as [Jill] had relieved Dick, I called to Carter and we got the mainsail up. The canvas cracked as the boom slatted to and fro in the weird red and green glow of the navigation lights on either side of the chartroom. As soon as peak and throat purchases were made fast and the weather back-stay set up I had the engine stopped and I ordered Jill Somers to steer up Barrow Deep on course north fifty-two east. The mainsail filled as the ship heeled and swung away. In an instant we had picked up way and the water was seething past the lee rail. By the time we had set jib, stays’l and mizzen the old boat was going like a train, rocking violently as she took the steep seas in a corkscrew movement that brought the water gurgling in the scuppers at each plunge. (p.36)

The machine of grab

Innes used this phrase in an earlier book and now again, here.

Nothing to Jorgensen was a man who had no power over other men. Power was what he loved more than anything. Power over men, possibly women, too. The sleek smoothness of the man! Even in borrowed clothes he achieved a kind of bourgeois respectability. And yet behind it all was this violent delight in power. It was there in his eyes, in the quick, down-drawn frown of his thick eyebrows. But never exposed, never revealed. The iron claw in the velvet gloves. I’d seen it all my life. This man belonged to the ranks of the controllers of the machine of grab. (p.65)

He is not a socialist as such: the world is full of corporations which his heroes work for with no qualms. He is not as overtly anti-Big Business as Ambler. But he dislikes the greed and power-lust which so often hide behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability.

And his heroes are regularly outsiders, lawbreakers. Jim Pryce in Killer Mine is a deserter; Jim Vardy in Maddon’s Rock is convicted of mutiny; George Farnell in this novel is an ‘ex-convict, swindler, forger, deserter, murderer’ and yet the hero of the story, a man whose artist’s passion for minerals redeems him.

Prolepsis/anticipation

As usual the text is sprinkled with ominous anticipations of doom, or at least bad events which the text foreshadows. To build tension and anticipation. To underpin the idea that this is a chronicle set down in peace and quiet after it is all over, ie the author knows what the final outcome will be.

The fat, jovial voice with the sing-song intonation of Eastern Norway had left me with the impression of a big man – a big man who enjoyed life and was also a rogue. I was to get to know that voice too well in the days that followed. But I was never to revise my first impression. (p.69)

These anticipations colour our perception – of the individuals or moments to which they’re attached – but also confirm the author’s authority as master of his narrative.

His air of command had taken me by surprise. Before the next few hours were out Alf Sunde was to give me several surprises. (p.160)

You English…

Most of Eric Ambler’s pre-War novels set, as they are, abroad and featuring, as they do, many foreign characters, also feature moments where the characters gently laugh at the Englishman’s political naiveté or emotional frigidity. This is also true of Innes’s novels. It happened at a couple of prominent moments in The Lonely Skier and happens in this novel, too. Does it reflect a general view the English held of themselves in the 1930s and 40s? Or is it a convention of the thriller genre that foreigners are allowed their little joke at our expense? Or is it simply inevitable that anyone concocting dialogue for foreigners will at some point slip in one or two jokes about us Brits?

‘You English – you are like bulldogs. You never let go. You can ignore anything and concentrate on the one thing that matters to you.’ [Dahler] (p.56)

Dramatis personae

  • ‘Big’ Bill Gansert: for eight years BM&I’s production chief at their alloy plant in Birmingham, developed a nickel mine in Canada, worked with Farnell in southern Rhodesia. Packs it in to go sailing in the Mediterranean but at the last minute is persuaded by
  • Sir Clinton Mann: Chairman of BM&I
  • George Farnell: aka Bernt Olsen: the missing man, the McGuffin, the motor for the plot. Dark and short and convicted for defrauding his business partner, before escaping and assuming a Norwegian identity and becoming a war hero. BM&I come into possession of a lump of thorite sent wrapped in whale blubber with a quote from Rupert Brooke’s farewell sonnet, The Soldier. What does it mean?
  • Bill’s crew
  • Dick Everard: 28, tall, freckled, talented Navy captain, demobbed and at a loose end.
  • Carter: the quintessential Scottish naval engineer, never happier than tinkering with the engines. ‘Ye dinna ha’ to fash yersel’ aboot the engine, Mr Gansert.’ (p.26)
  • Wilson: other crew member
  • Visitors
  • Jill Somers: 26, tall, active, competent sailor. Daughter of Walter Somers, partner in Petersen and Somers.
  • Major Curtis Wright: heavily built, red hair, regular Army. Farnell’s commander at the Malöy Raid, after which Farnell went deliberately awol.
  • Dahler: Norwegian, half-paralysed, once owned a fleet of coastal steamers, bitterly hating Jorgensen who he accuses of collaborating with the Nazis. But then Jorgensen accuses Dahler of collaborating with the Nazis.
  • Knut Jorgensen: powerful confident CEO of a Norwegian mining company, wants to do a deal with Gansert and BM&I.
  • Norwegians
  • Captain Lovaas: fat, jolly, untrustworthy whaling captain. Once he realises there’s big money involved he’s prepared to use his harpoon gun against the Diviner if he thinks it will gain advantage.
  • Sunde: weak and scared salvage diver, who transforms in the second half of the book into super-capable ex-Resistance fighter, skiier and tracker.
  • Kielland: manager of the Bovaagen Hval whaling station who gives our heroes an in-depth tour of the facilities and explanation of the whaling business.
  • Hans Schreuder: Austrian Jew who escapes to Norway, collaborates with the Nazis. He enrolled as crew on Lovaas’s boat but was recognised, locked up and escaped just as Gansert came alongside, jumped overboard and disappeared.

Related links

White Circle Pocket edition of The Blue Ice

White Circle Pocket edition of The Blue Ice

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.

1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.

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by Simon on November 4, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 4, 2014

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