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Chapter 1
Overcoming the Odds

Not how you are, but what you make of things.
— Norwegian proverb

Churning through the frigid billowing waves, the battered Zodiac sped straight and true toward tiny Stonington Island in Antarctica. On board, her heart filled with trepidation and her eyes fixed on the approaching shore, was polar icon Jackie Ronne and daughter Karen. Almost fifty years previously, Jackie had been the first American woman to participate in an Antarctic expedition, and one of two daring women to overwinter on the continent. It was now February 1995 and this momentous trip to East Base on Stonington Island was her first visit back in decades. She had never intended to return, but fate had intervened. The thirteen months she had spent there in the company of her husband, famed polar explorer Finn Ronne, and the twenty-two-member expedition team had been challenging, fraught with tension — and the highlight of her life. Years later, her husband and most of the expedition members were dead and Jackie was beginning to receive the recognition she deserved.

Reaching the pebbled beach, the two excited women and their friend, photographer Ann Hawthorne, were assisted out of the bobbing boat and scrambled awkwardly onshore. The M/V Explorer, operated by luxury cruise specialist Abercrombie&Kent, was anchored a kilometer and a half away with ninety-two guests eager for their turn to visit the island. Thankfully, everyone waited respectfully for Jackie to have time there with Karen. It was a laborious, slow climb to East Base, with snowdrifts up to their waist in some areas, but nothing was going to stop them now. Hawthorne remembered how important it was to get Jackie to the base: “It was a walk of discovery back in time.” Finally, as skuas dived and careened about their heads, Jackie stood in the clearing of buildings that represented the most momentous part of her life — her time as a member of the 1946–1948 Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition.

The tiny 3.5 x 3.5–metre Ronne Hut in which she and Finn had lived and worked was still there, in a dilapidated state. Jackie had to climb on a pillar of stones to peer through the dirty, streaked window that Finn had installed for her. She was flooded with emotions — excitement at visiting this remote place from her past and sorrow because Finn was not there to share it with her. She and Karen wandered the few steps over to the wooden bunkhouse, with its plaque declaring East Base as a protected heritage site, and then surveyed the foundations of the machine shop, which had been demolished in the intervening years. Lastly, she and Karen entered the science building where the men had conducted their experiments. She was dismayed by the condition — the creeping mould on the wood and the missing panels on the roof. There was evidence of decay everywhere. So much had changed and most of the equipment and furnishings inside the buildings had been stolen, removed, or destroyed.

Karen knew all the exciting stories, but how wonderful to hear them again from her mother in situ, where the historic expedition had taken place. This was where Jackie Ronne’s lifelong obsession with Antarctica had come to life and where her role as a pioneer had originated. Karen later commented: “She didn’t see herself as a feminist icon who did unusual, difficult things. She thought she was caught up and swept along by events and ended up becoming famous for going to the Antarctic. She didn’t set out to be a rebel.”

While her friend Arctic explorer Louise Arner Boyd had yearned to visit the frozen wastelands of the polar pack ice since she was a child, Jackie Ronne (born Edith Maslin) had hardly even heard of Antarctica until she was a teen. History-making in Antarctica — the intense, international competition to be the first to reach the South Pole; the tragedy of the lost lives of desperate heroes; the stark beauty of this desolate continent — was of no real interest to her. It existed in a separate reality from her own. She grew up as an ordinary American girl with a normal, if rather dysfunctional, family. Despite her unremarkable beginnings, Jackie always felt in her bones that she was meant for something extraordinary. Her destiny, to be an Antarctic pioneer, would not be revealed for years to come.