Nelson

by John Sugden

  IV

  NORTHWARD HO!

  From earliest youth, to ev’ry worth allied,

  In ev’ry danger prov’d, and peril tried.

  Lines Written by an Officer of the Royal Navy, 1805

  1

  MEN had dreamed of it for at least two centuries. Finding a northeast passage through the polar seas – a short cut to the riches of the East that would spare ships the laborious voyages through the Mediterranean, by the Cape of Good Hope, or westwards around the globe. In Tudor times sailors perished in the Arctic wastes trying to find the passage, but even two centuries later little was known about the area north of eighty degrees. Spitsbergen had been discovered, but only whalers went there. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century drew to its close, it was inevitable that new attempts would be made to probe the mysteries of the north. It was a period of growing intellectual and scientific enquiry. The month young Horatio Nelson sailed from the Thames in the Mary Ann, Captain James Cook returned from his first great voyage of exploration, in which he had observed the transit of Venus in Tahiti, charted much of New Zealand and Australia and brought back innumerable examples of fascinating flora and fauna. A year later, as the fourteen-year-old boy returned to his guard ship, the Yorkshire navigator set out again, poised to bring Antarctica to the attention of the ‘civilised’ world and to explode the myth of Terra Australis Incognita, the great southern continent.

  It was probably a Swiss scholar, Samuel Engel, who nudged the hoary old question of the Northeast Passage back into focus. In 1765 he published a book in Lausanne suggesting that ice gathered mainly around land masses, and owed its existence to the fresh water discharged into the seas from rivers. Out in the deeps, he hypothesised, the polar seas might be open and navigable. In 1772 the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville proposed an expedition to explore the region north of Spitsbergen, but his government declined to back the plan.

  The next year the Honourable Daines Barrington, vice president of the Royal Society in London, and Lord Sandwich of the Admiralty, put a similar proposal to George III with greater success. Soon a couple of ships were being fitted out, the Racehorse bomb vessel, under Commodore the Honourable Constantine John Phipps, who commanded the expedition, and the Carcass bomb, captained by Skeffington Lutwidge. Phipps’s final instructions were dated 25 May 1773. They ordered him to pass between Spitsbergen and Greenland, keeping as far out to sea and as close to the meridian as possible, and to attempt to reach the North Pole. But the dangers were recognised, and even if Phipps found a free passage he was told to go no further, but to return before the winter closed in.1

  To increase his chance of success Phipps was ordered to recruit only ‘effective men’ for the venture; they should all be volunteers, entitled to bounties of three pounds apiece, and little more than ninety men would be required for each of the two vessels. On the face of it, there seemed little prospect of Midshipman Nelson finding a place.2

  Yet the arm of Captain Suckling was long. He, like Phipps, was a trusted crony of Lord Sandwich. Moreover, Captain Lutwidge of the Carcass knew Suckling well, and had occasionally acted under his orders, for example when cruising against smugglers in 1771. The two officers were on good terms. Years later Horace described Lutwidge as ‘that good man’, which suggests the benevolence with which he had been received. Be that as it may, the boy used ‘every interest’ with Captain Lutwidge, ‘and as I fancied I was to fill a man’s place, I begged I might be his coxswain, which, finding my ardent desire for going with him, Captain L[utwidge] complied with; and has continued the strictest friendship to this moment’.3

  The upshot was that Nelson was discharged from the Triumph on 6 May 1773 and joined the Carcass at Sheerness the following day as a midshipman. Lutwidge was committed to the boy, and kept him on on 27 May, when he shed six of his eight six-pounder guns and accordingly scaled his company down to eighty men. Most of the ten discarded were able seamen, who might have been expected to give a better account of themselves than a mere boy. Horace was fourteen – the youngest person with the expedition – and the muster added two years to his age to add credibility to his enrolment. Officially there were only three others of similar age on the Carcass: Robert Hughes, an eighteen-year-old midshipman from Greenwich who joined six days after Nelson; Richard Praper, an able seaman from London, also eighteen; and a seventeen-year-old clerk.4

  When Horace saw the Carcass at Sheerness he must have compared it unfavourably to the statelier ships of war on which he had already served. Moored beside the Success hulk, she was as old as he was and a stubby affair, some ninety-one and a half feet by twenty-seven and a half feet, with three masts and a powerful hull designed to withstand the recoil of heavy mortars. Bomb vessels had been chosen because they were small enough to handle restricted spaces and strong enough to break through ice, and both the Racehorse and the Carcass had been reinforced by additional oak sheathing and supports for the bows and hull.

  Nelson was one of five midshipmen on the Carcass. With him were Hughes; Charles Deane from Newhaven, Sussex, aged twenty-nine; and two Londoners, twenty-year-old John Creswell and twenty-four-year-old Edward Rushworth. Deane, Creswell and Rushworth had all been able seamen, and at the end of May another such, John Toms, was promoted to midshipman. Robert Hughes, closest in age to Horace, was probably the young officer whom Lutwidge later characterised as the ‘daring shipmate’ of Nelson, ‘to whom he’ became ‘attached’. Even less experienced than Nelson, Hughes was on his first ship and owed his place to a considerable manipulation of interest.

  Assisting Lutwidge and supervising the midshipmen were three lieutenants. First Lieutenant John Baird had carried a commission for sixteen years and served in numerous ships, and it was not long before the crew began to idolise him for his steadiness, rectitude and equanimity. It was noticed that he never swore, even in a crisis. The junior lieutenants were Joseph Pennington, whose life would be ended in a duel three years later, and George Wickham, who had been promoted only two years before. The master, James Allen, who instructed the midshipmen in navigation, was less inspiring. A portly, pompous individual with a windy disposition, he was nicknamed ‘Major Buz’. All in all, however, Lutwidge had chosen his men well. The Carcass was a hard-working but happy ship, and not a single flogging marred the voyage.

  Considerable thought went into supplying the expedition. The Admiralty provided special clothing, tools and foodstuffs: ice saws were included as well as portable soup (cakes of meat essence boiled with vegetables and oatmeal) and additional quantities of comestibles, wine, tea and sugar. Dr Charles Irving was shipped aboard with his apparatus for distilling salt from sea water, and two whalemen were assigned to each vessel as pilots. The Board of Longitude, which investigated navigational problems, supplied an astronomer, two Harrison chronometers proof against climatic change and the vicissitudes of ship life, and a new device named Bouguer’s log after the mathematician and hydrographer, designed to calculate the speed of a ship and the distance it had travelled. And Sir Joseph Banks, the celebrated botanist who had sailed with Cook, studiously drilled Commodore Phipps about the natural phenomena he was likely to encounter.

  Unfortunately, none of these extensive preparations, including discussions with Greenland whalemen, exposed the chimera upon which the expedition was based. There simply was no open water at the Pole, and the whalemen knew it. One hundred and fifty miles north of Spitsbergen the pack ice was permanent, and it swept south on the skirts of polar summers. Nevertheless, Phipps, who would later become Lord Mulgrave, was a hardy thirty-year-old northerner, prudent and intelligent as well as enterprising, and willing to pitch into anything he asked of his men, while Lutwidge was much respected by his crews.

  Given the impossibility of sailing to the Pole, and the extreme dangers awaiting any who tried to do so, it was fortunate indeed that the expedition had been put in capable hands.

  2

  On 30 May 1773 the Carcass left its moorings at Sheerness and joined the Raceho
rse at the Little Nore. They sailed at three in the afternoon of Thursday 3 June, and headed north, for the most part borne along by fresh or light breezes. Flamborough Head and Scarborough Castle passed by to larboard, and on 10 June the ships anchored in Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby Road. There was water and food to take aboard, and the next day the voyage continued, carving a wake towards the Shetlands, where the ships bought cheap fish from local boats that plied offshore.5

  It was also near the Shetlands, in about latitude sixty degrees, that on the afternoon of 15 June the two ships temporarily separated in the first of many all-enveloping fogs that were to trouble the expedition. A thick white veil blanketed off everything beyond the length of a ship. On this and subsequent such occasions Phipps fired guns on the half-hour, and sometimes used volleys of musketry, drums, bells, horns and trumpets to penetrate the murk. The Carcass replied, but Lutwidge was secure in the knowledge that if he lost the Racehorse he still had written instructions from Phipps detailing places of rendezvous.

  As the ships continued, everyone had their own preoccupations. Phipps was scientifically inclined. He tested the chronometers, his ‘watch machines’, comparing the one on the Carcass with his own, as well as with his independent calculations, and he studied the variation and dip of the compass. Amid daily decisions about course and speed, he also amused himself with Pierre Bouguer’s log, recorded the changing temperature of the water, and decided that the Irving distilling equipment answered his requirements. Another on board the Racehorse, eighteen-year-old Midshipman Philippe d’Auvergne, one of the youngest members of the expedition, was set to prove himself an accomplished artist, while on the Carcass Nelson himself enjoyed the curiosities of new seas as only young men of his age can, noting the eerily light nights; the sun seven degrees above the horizon at midnight as they approached the Arctic circle; the first whale, seen off the northeast quarter of the Carcass on 20 June; and the seals which occasionally peered and plunged around the vessels to remind him of the north Norfolk coast.6

  Less comforting was the increasingly inclement weather, the swiftly falling temperatures, persistent fogs, rain that froze as it fell, snow and variable winds. On 18 June Lutwidge issued the Admiralty’s special clothing, and Horace found himself with six ‘fearnought’ jackets, two milled caps, two pairs of ‘fearnought’ trousers, four pairs of milled stockings, a strong pair of boots, a dozen pairs of milled mittens, two cotton shirts and a couple of handkerchiefs. How much use a rather small fourteen-year-old could make of these must be left to the imagination, but during the voyage both Nelson and Hughes also obtained ‘slop clothes’ from John Parry, the purser, for which they were charged 1s. 8d.7

  As the ships pressed northwards through the Greenland Sea the signs of approaching land raised expectations. A redpoll alighted upon the Carcass on 27 June, and shortly before midnight the following day the west coast of Spitsbergen was sighted eighteen or twenty leagues to the east. The sea birds which had been shadowing the ships since they had passed the Shetlands suddenly abandoned them to head for land. On 29 June Horace was able to study the bleak shores of Prince Charles Island to starboard as the ships ran northwards offshore. Benefiting from the North Atlantic drift, the craggy coastline was in its short spring and summer, and the sun was surprisingly warm, but it was inhospitable and barren all the same. Huge sharp-pointed mountains of black, bare rock, their crests wreathed in cloud and snow and their valleys hidden beneath glaciers, slipped by. Fantastic sculptures, labyrinthine gullies and the pinnacles of distant ice castles fed the eye, captured for us in sketches made at the time. Thomas Floyd, a nineteen-year-old midshipman on the Racehorse, thought it ‘a most desolate appearance indeed’.8

  On the evening of the 30th as the ships steered northwards between Spitsbergen and Greenland they encountered a whaler, one of several British, Dutch and Danish whalers and sealers they had seen on their travels. This one had mortifying news.

  The ice was close by.

  According to what the master of the whaler told Phipps, it closed so quickly that three ships had recently been ‘crushed to pieces’. In the following few days other whalemen they encountered ‘sang the same song’. The number of whalers lost to the ice varied with each shuddering tale, but some put it as high as seven, and it was said that only the people of the British Springfield had been saved. More directly, notwithstanding the scientific theories, the whalemen insisted that the North Pole could not be reached, and that Phipps’s expedition was foolhardy.9

  Although the whalemen reported ice to the westward, the weather itself was disarming. The sun remained warm and nothing could be seen from the tops of the Racehorse and the Carcass. For a few days all seemed well, and some reassured themselves with hopes that the whalemen might have been scaremongering. The pathfinders passed to the north of Prince Charles Island to reach the mainland, where, on the evening of 4 July, Phipps and Lutwidge made a landfall in a small bay south of Magdalena Hook. The boats watered, Lutwidge noted the bleakness of the place and Phipps prepared to take bearings until an enveloping mist drove them back aboard and the ships stood out to sea firing signal guns. The next day the fog was almost impenetrable, and the Racehorse and Carcass groped their way forward like blind men on a precipice. It was then, as their senses stretched to the limit, that the ice came upon them.

  Just after noon, somewhere northwest of Dane’s Gat, an island at the northwestern extremity of Spitsbergen, an almost imperceptible but sinister sound was heard on board the ships: the sound of surf beating upon a shore where no shore should be. Phipps determined to proceed slowly north-northeast, convinced that if he lay too his ships would not be ‘ready and manageable’ enough to handle a sudden ‘emergency’. Blocks of ice, some three or four feet square, began floating past as if harbingers of danger. Every officer now knew the ice pack was near, but how near? On the Racehorse, which led the way and faced the greater danger, Phipps reckoned it was a quarter of a mile away, but most thought it less than half that, within the length of a single cable.

  It was a time for steady nerves. The ships had shortened sail, but on both, all hands were on deck, ready to haul up whenever necessary. As the signal guns rumbled like muffled thunder, eyes focused intently on the shifting fog ahead. Phipps thought he saw ‘something’ on the bow, a spectral whiteness, but he was not sure. Then, suddenly, just before two o’clock, the fog lifted, and there – dead ahead, at a distance of no more than four hundred and forty yards – a solid wall of ice rose from the sea, its hollows grey and black in the snowy white mass and the high surf lashing wildly at its foot. Instantly, the men fell to their business, and Phipps declared that he ‘never saw a ship worked more briskly, or with less noise and confusion’ than the Racehorse as it responded to that threat of imminent disaster. The helm was thrown to starboard, and Phipps tacked westwards, but he realised that he could not weather the ice that way and put the ship about, raising all sail east. It was not before time. Marvelling at their escape, Midshipman Floyd wrote, ‘Had the fog lasted but two minutes more, we must inevitably have been in the ice, and in all probability would have been cut to pieces.’10

  During the night the fog descended again, sometimes masking the ships from one another at a range of a half pistol shot, but Horace and his friends could hear the ice grinding and cracking and the surf driving against it. The sixth of July brought an improvement, however, and allowed the ships to range along the ice pack for several days, searching for a way through. Minds had to be concentrated, because the navigation was fiendishly tricky amid drifting bergs big enough to damage ship timbers and near an ice pack that could close, trap and crush with fearful speed. On one occasion Phipps summoned the pilots of the Carcass to the Racehorse for a conference, and their boat was barely able to return, so quickly did the ice mass around them.

  For days the ships tacked to and fro, using ice poles to stave off bergs and ice anchors thrown from each bow. The small boats were constantly out, hauling the ships this way and that. Nelson was probably emp
loyed on the boats of the Carcass, the longboat, launch and cutter. As the ship did not answer her helm efficiently, she was forever being towed to the Racehorse or away from looming obstacles. But try as they might, neither ship could entirely avoid colliding with chunks of ice, and the succession of severe shocks they received proved the worth of the additional strengths that had been built into the tough little vessels before sailing.

  Never did the Northeast Passage seem a greater illusion, for there was simply no way through that frozen wilderness. From the masthead of the Carcass it appeared that an ‘immense mass of ice extended northeast as far as they could see’. Progress was impossible, the crews were wet, exhausted and cold, despite the issue of extra spirits, and the numbing, bone-chilling fog returned. On the nights of the 9th and 10th Horace and his companions fought the ice without eyes, lost the Racehorse twice, and ‘steered a hundred different courses to follow the channels’.11

  The next day Phipps abandoned the theory that the ice was thinner in deep water, and stood east to discover whether he could find an opening nearer Spitsbergen. But that too proved unavailing, for the shallow coastal seas were iced solid. Whatever faith the commodore had ever had in the Arctic waterway must have been ebbing fast, but he was not a man to retreat prematurely. He decided he would rest his men before trying again.

  3

  On 13 July the ships put into Smeerenberg Sound, at the extreme northwest of Spitsbergen, a mile from where a bare and lonely rock known as Cloven Cliff broke above the ice-grey sea. Several Dutch whalers were sheltering in the intersecting passages that wove around the islands that formed the sound, and the remains of an old whaling station were still to be seen ashore. Stark it was, but the place had a rare beauty. The mountains, when not enveloped in cloud, were sometimes dark and sometimes veined in ‘red, white and yellow’, while on their southern and western slopes they supported precarious colonies of brown lichen or brilliant green moss. The glaciers shone sapphire-blue in the sun, or flashed like prisms, ‘exceeding in luster the richest gems in the world, [and] disposed in shapes wonderful to behold’. Looking at them, a diarist on the Carcass mused that ‘a stranger may fancy a thousand different shapes of trees, castles, churches, ruins, ships, whales, monsters and all the various forms that fill the universe’.12