Campbell's Kingdom
Read Campbell's Kingdom Online
Authors: Hammond Innes
Contents
Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller,
The Doppelganger
, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four-book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War.
Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience â his 1940s novels
The Blue Ice
and
The White South
were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while
The Lonely Skier
came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the
Mary Deare
, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang.
Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10 June 1998.
Air Bridge
Atlantic Fury
Attack Alarm
Dead and Alive
Delta Connection
Golden Soak
High Stand
Isvik
Killer Mine
Levkas Man
Maddon's Rock
Medusa
North Star
Solomons Seal
Target Antarctica
The Angry Mountain
The Big Footprints
The Black Tide
The Blue Ice
The Doomed Oasis
The Land God Gave to Cain
The Last Voyage
The Lonely Skier
The Strange Land
The Strode Venturer
The Trojan Horse
The White South
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
Wreckers Must Breathe
To Friends in Canada
I was three months getting the background material for this book and from the cities to the ranchlands and up into the high Rockies I received nothing but kindness and much help.
Of the companies that were so willing to give me every facility I would like to thank, in particular, Trans-Canada Airlines and Canadian Pacific for making it possible for me to travel at will regardless of currency difficulties and Imperial Oil for giving me the freedom of the big new oilfields of Alberta and going to endless trouble in taking me round their rigs and introducing me to the whole process of drilling.
Two friends I would like to mention by name. One was Bruce Bohane, a ranch hand, who for three weeks was my guide and mentor as we rode trail in the Rockies. The other was Bob Douglas, leader of a Government survey party, who made me welcome at his camp near the United States border and gave me a hard week of it among the peaks of the Rockies.
For the rest I would like to say this: If in this story I have managed to pass on something of the atmosphere of energy and friendliness of this great new country it is very largely due to the people I met there.
Hammond Innes
With an Introduction by
Andy McNab
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In the acknowledgements to
Campbell's Kingdom
, Hammond Innes thanks âfriends in Canada' for helping him in the âthree months' he spent researching the book: time he spent trail riding in the Rockies, touring and learning about oil rigs, even taking drilling instruction. These comprehensive background checks were typical of the way Innes approached his writing. His sense of adventure was instinctive â he said that he wrote âby the seat of [his] pants', never knowing where the plot would take him â but the plot was always based on personal experience or careful research undertaken before he put pen to paper. This authenticity shines through in his writing, making the icy cold of a Canadian winter or the stinging lash of waves during a storm at sea come alive for his readers; and making the suspenseful thrills of his novels all the more enjoyable.
Perhaps Innes learned this attention to detail from his stint working as a journalist at the
Financial Times
, soon after leaving school. But even at that age, he wanted to be a novelist, and he wrote his first book before he was seventeen. When he needed money to get married in 1936, he signed a four-book deal and wrote
The Doppelganger
, which was published the following year. Several more books followed, but he still had a lot to learn as a novelist and these early books didn't gain too much attention.
The war barely interrupted Innes's writing career; in fact it gave him more exciting material to base his plots on. He served in the Royal Artillery, and managed to write
Attack Alarm
while on night watch, drawing on his surroundings to create a fast-paced story set in an aerodrome during the Battle of Britain. He witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 1944 and recreated the dramatic scenes of destruction for
The Angry Mountain
several years later. He turned his experiences of tough wartime ski-training in the Italian Dolomites into the first-rate thriller
The Lonely Skier
in 1947.
That novel, the tale of the hunt for Nazi gold hidden among Italy's snowy peaks, was one of the first of Innes's stories to be filmed. It was adapted for screen in 1949, renamed
Snowbound
, and from that moment on scriptwriters often looked to his novels as a consistent source of gripping plotlines and appealing heroes. When the time came for
Campbell's Kingdom
to be filmed, it was none other than Dirk Bogarde who played Bruce with perfect enunciation as the tragic hero.
Meanwhile, Innes's productive novel-writing clearly did not harm his abilities as a soldier, and he rose to the rank of major before the end of the war.
His major successes came in the 1950s, when he devoted himself to writing, and adventuring, full-time. He was drawn to ancient civilisations, remote islands and perilous situations where men pitted themselves against the elements. He continued to be inspired by first-hand experience gathered on his travels. Fascinated by the Berlin airlift, he begged a space aboard an RAF flight to blockaded Berlin in order to write
Air Bridge
(1951). He experienced dangerous and back-breaking work as a crew member of a Norwegian whaling ship in order to understand the hardship endured by the men and the gruesome realities of their trade, before writing
The Blue Ice
(1948) and
The White South
(1949). Sailing was a lifelong obsession, and his best books are set at sea â the most famous being
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
, published in 1956. This was Innes's first major best-seller and it was turned into a Hollywood film, starring Charlton Heston and a weather-beaten Gary Cooper, just three years after publication. Innes used his earnings to buy a new yacht, which he named the
Mary Deare.
By this point Innes had a large and loyal fan base of readers who relied on him for action-packed stories flavoured with plenty of suspense, drama, rollercoaster plotlines and that trademark authenticity. I think his books were particular popular because of their leading men. These were usually seemingly unremarkable characters, accustomed to a quiet life, who found themselves in impossible situations. Many people could identify with or aspire to the sense of honour and determination these unlikely heroes show when fighting their corner. Bruce Wetheral is a quintessential Innes hero. At the start of the book he is a pale, quiet and nondescript insurance man, with nobody to care for, and nobody (beyond his landlady) caring for him. But within just a few pages we learn this lonely man has a mysterious past, an improbable inheritance, a death sentence hanging over him and an unsuspected fire in his belly. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hopelessness of his case, Bruce decides to travel to the wilds of Canada and prove to everyone that his crazy grand
-
father was right: there is oil in the Rocky Mountains.
In order to clear his grandfather's name, Bruce must stand up to bullying from Trevedian and Fergus. The villains of
Campbell's Kingdom
display a vice that Innes clearly despised: greed. Money is the cause of the town's ruin and the bitterness of its inhabitants; it causes Fergus and Trevedian to kill an old man âthrough his hopes', and risk the lives of a hundred more by using faulty material to build their dam. In this story, as in
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
, the shadowy dealings of big business, motivated by the pursuit of fortune, ruin reputations, fortunes, even the land itself.
Innes's writing is never better than when he is describing the power of nature, whether it is waves that pitch and hurl huge freighters, the terrifying rumble of an avalanche or the crushing might of Antarctic icebergs. And as he seemed to have a healthy disregard for wealth, he put the earnings from his book sales towards something better: conservation â preserving the landscapes he loved. During his time spent in the Rockies researching
Campbell's Kingdom
, Innes developed a passion for forestry. From this time onwards he bought up acres of land, in Britain and Australia as well as Canada, where he planted dense new woodland. Some suggested this was perhaps in compensation for the many trees felled in order to satisfy demand for his best-selling books! After his experiences of whaling Innes funded development of a more humane method of killing the whales, and
The Black Tide
was his way of drawing attention to the devastating effects of oil spills on maritime environments. He was also committed to passing on his love of sailing and the sea. The best expression of this was his contribution to the Association of Sail Training Organisations, a charity which promotes adventure at sea for young people, often from disadvantaged backgrounds. Innes both served on the board of ASTO, and made it his chief beneficiary in his will â proceeds from the book you're holding go towards this charity.