by John Sugden
By his own account Horace was the coxswain of Lutwidge’s gig, and it was probably he who steered the captain to an island where Phipps had set up some observation points on the morning of 15 July. Most likely he also accompanied watering parties, but on the 18th the ships quit the sound and renewed their reconnaissance of the ice pack, cruising along it eastwards for several days. On 25 July they reached Moffen Island, a low, flat, round piece of stone and sand, with a frozen pond at its centre, and the two-year-old grave of a Dutch sailor. Captain Lutwidge sent the master, James Allen, ashore with ten men.
There, for the first time, they encountered polar bears, although what exactly happened is open to dispute. Allen’s log merely records that they ‘saw three white bears, one of which we shot, but it got off’, but the diarist of the Carcass, who disliked ‘Major Buz’, turned the incident to the master’s disadvantage. According to him, two of the three bears were shot and killed, although not before one of the wounded animals had pursued its tormentors. Allen fell behind his more agile companions. His hair ‘stood on end’, he dropped his gun, fell headlong into a goose nest, and ‘filled his breeches’ before the rest of the crew rescued him, but once the bear had been downed the master recovered his spirit and stabbed the unfortunate creature in the belly. This account was published anonymously before the end of the year, but it is doubtful that Allen himself ever saw it. Before its appearance he had been sent to the Falkland Islands and was washed overboard and drowned on the return journey in 1774. 13
Another sad reflection on the eighteenth-century attitude to wildlife occurred the following day, when one of the boats of the Carcass encountered a walrus while exploring drift ice to the northeast. The ‘sea horse’ measured eleven feet in length and ‘made a desperate defence’ before it was killed with the aid of a boat’s crew from the Racehorse. The animal was hauled aboard Lutwidge’s ship for inspection, but probably little if any of it was eaten.14
With whales, dolphins, and ‘fin fish’ for company, the ships made another attempt to make their way northeastward on the 27th and 28th, reaching latitude eighty degrees forty-eight minutes north. On 29 July they were at the entrance to the Hinlopen Strait, which passes between Spitsbergen in the southwest and North East Land, and one of the Racehorse’s boats was sent to examine an island. Ashore they noted some uprooted fir trees and whale bones scattered about, shot a reindeer and commented upon the presence of Arctic foxes, ermines, snipe, ducks and geese. Returning in the small hours of the 30th, they attacked a walrus found sleeping on the ice. Wounded, the animal plunged into the water, stirring other walruses that were lurking there unseen. If we may believe the accounts of the expedition, the animals attacked the boat ‘with great ferocity’, and wrested an oar from one of the seamen. Indeed, the craft was in danger of being upset before the walruses were dispersed by the arrival of another boat from the Carcass. Some biographers have given young Nelson the dubious credit of having commanded the Carcass boat, following a rash statement in the early biography by James Harrison. There is no evidence for the assumption. None of the primary accounts mentions Nelson in connection with the incident, and by Horace’s own account he was coxswain of the captain’s gig at this time. It was extremely unlikely that the small gig would have been risked in such an encounter, and it was probably the cutter or the longboat, under the command of a more senior officer, that went to the relief of their companions.15
In contrast it would have been Horace’s job to take Captain Lutwidge and the master of the Racehorse to visit one of the Seven Islands off the north coast of North East Land, five or six miles north of the ships, on the evening of 30 July. They strode through the driftwood and deer horns on the beach and scaled a modest eminence to find out if there were any passages through the ice to the east and northeast. The mainland was only less spectacular here, with its far mountain slopes gentler than those of Prince Charles Island or north Spitsbergen, but the faces of the cliffs fell sheer to the sea and seemed to have been gouged by the successive strokes of some giant being. Nor did the vista north and east bring any hope, for the sea was ‘entirely frozen over, not like the ice we had hitherto coasted, but a flat even surface, as far as the eye could reach, which was undoubtedly ten leagues at least’. The weather was clear but cold, and Horace’s gig, if such it was, faced a hard return trip. The ice was closing the narrow watercourses and sometimes the men had to haul the boat from one to the other.16
In fact, it was at this time that the ships became locked fast between the Seven Islands and North East Land, about latitude eighty degrees and thirty-seven minutes. They sat motionless, imprisoned at their moorings by the thickening pack ice, the Racehorse some two ship lengths in front of the Carcass, while all around them stretched a forbidding, low, flat, empty landscape broken by the small mounds of ice being pushed up by the relentless pressure from below. Sometimes the boats struggled along briefly navigable channels, but more often they were dragged over the ice in watering expeditions, when the men dug pits in the snow and waited for them to fill. At other times the best the crews could do was to exercise on the ice, forming lines to play leapfrog.
There were unwelcome visitors, too. About the morning of 1 August a large polar bear approached the ships across the ice, attracted by the smell of cooking, but it fell to musket fire from the Racehorse. A more wanton incident occurred four days later. For no better reason than apparent sport, a boat crew under Lieutenant Pennington of the Carcass had slaughtered a walrus and burned its body on the ice not far from the ships. Early on 5 August a female bear and two partly grown cubs arrived, attempting to salvage something from the remains. All three were shot dead by men on the Carcass, and the skin of the parent was found to measure six feet nine inches from head to tail.
By far the most famous such episode had occurred the previous morning. At the time it was considered a minor incident, and earned far less attention than the other encounters with polar bears; in fact, only one of ten logs or diaries of the expedition refers to it at all, and that only briefly. But legend would magnify the event in literature and art until it became the most famous of all the stories about the young Nelson. In the years that followed the admiral’s death the publishers of popular prints eagerly pounced upon it. As early as February 1806 a plate, graphically depicting a confrontation between a boy, armed with a musket and cutlass, and a bear, was issued under the title, ‘Youthful Intrepidity/Young Nelson’s Attack and Chase After a Bear’. A rival print appeared two years later, and in 1809 Clarke and McArthur’s official biography reproduced, and consequently endorsed, the most familiar representation of them all by Richard Westall. And that was how the story was remembered, dramatic but grossly distorted: a diminutive but grim-faced youngster, standing toe to toe with a ferocious polar bear, and wielding the butt of his useless musket in an effort to down the beast. Even today the altercation between Midshipman Nelson and the bear is repeatedly presented as indisputable proof of sterling courage and enterprise.17
But what really happened on that 4 August? If the popular perception of the incident was an accurate one, why did Horace himself, always willing to advertise his bravery, make no reference to it, either in the brief memorandum of his services written in about 1796 or in the much longer ‘Sketch of My Life’ produced three years later? As far as we know, Nelson gave no account of the skirmish, and our knowledge of it depends upon two stories told long afterwards by Captain Lutwidge, one version somewhat different than the other.
The one contemporary allusion to Nelson’s brush with the bear occurs in a log written by Master James Allen of the Carcass. From it we can deduce that the encounter took place south of the largest of the Seven Islands, where the ships were held by the ice and fanned by light, pleasant breezes. At about six in the morning ‘a bear came close to the ship on the ice, but on the people’s going towards him he went away’. There seems to have been nothing particularly heroic to record. The bear simply fled at the approach of members of the crew and no more was said about t
he incident. Neither Nelson nor anyone else was named.18
What seems to have been Lutwidge’s first account of the incident was published in a sketch of Nelson in 1800. It illuminates the beggarly reference in the Allen log, but remains entirely compatible with it:
As a proof of that cool intrepidity which our young mariner possessed . . . the following anecdote is preserved by an officer [Lutwidge] who was present. In these high northern latitudes the nights are generally clear. During one of them, notwithstanding the extreme bitterness of the cold, young Nelson was missing. Every search that was instantly made in quest of him was in vain, and it was at length imagined he was lost. When lo! As the rays of the rising sun opened the distant horizon, to the great astonishment of his messmates, he was discerned at a considerable distance on the ice, armed with a single musket, in anxious pursuit of an immense bear. The lock of the musket being injured, the piece would not go off, and he had therefore pursued the animal in hopes of tiring him, and being at length able to effect his purpose with the butt end. On his return Captain Lutwidge reprimanded him for leaving the ship without leave, and in a severe tone demanded what motive could possibly induce him to undertake so rash an action. The young hero with great simplicity replied, ‘I wished, Sir, to get the skin for my father.’19
In this version, Horatio merely pursues the bear, which evidently ran away leaving the boy to return empty-handed. It exaggerated his intrepidity by implying that he pursued the bear alone, but even so Nelson unquestionably emerges from the incident as a youth of uncommon pluck and initiative. It was this version which Nelson’s earliest biographers, John Charnock, James Harrison and Francis William Blagdon, substantially reproduced, though Charnock changed the wording but not the meaning of the young midshipman’s reply to his captain, and Blagdon added fantasies of his own. His story of the boy slaughtering the bear with a gun butt and dirk exceeds all credibility.
However, the public waited until 1809, four years after the admiral’s death, for the most elaborate and famous account of the incident, furnished by Clarke and McArthur, the editors of the Naval Chronicle who had published the original version of the story. Revamping the episode for their biography of the naval hero, Clarke and McArthur apparently went back to Admiral Lutwidge for a fuller account of the incident, and he complied, looking, however, through a fading backward lens that flitted in and out of focus. ‘Among the gentlemen on the quarter-deck of the Carcass, who were not rated midshipmen, there was, besides young Nelson, a daring shipmate of his, to whom he had become attached’, ran the new narrative. But even that was wrong, for both Nelson and Hughes – if Hughes it was – had been midshipmen in the Carcass.
One night, during the middle watch, Lutwidge now said, Nelson and his companion stole off in the clear night, using the haze of an approaching fog to avoid being seen. Armed with a rusty musket, Nelson led the way, crossing ‘the frightful chasms in the ice’ and making towards a large polar bear he had seen from the ship.
By this time the audacious pair had been missed, and Lutwidge grew concerned lest they got lost in the thickening fog. However, between three and four in the morning the mist began to disperse, and the hunters were seen at a considerable distance from the ship attacking the bear. The signal gun to return was fired, and Nelson’s companion urged his leader to obey. However, the other tenaciously pursued his object. His musket flashed in the pan and his ammunition was spent, but he proclaimed, ‘Never mind, do but let me get a blow at this devil with the butt-end of my musket, and we shall have him!’ If it had not been for a fissure in the ice between Nelson and the bear, the boy would have been in difficulties. As it was, Nelson’s companion retreated to the ship and Lutwidge fired a cannon to frighten the bear away. Later the captain reprimanded the fretful youngster. Nelson began ‘pouting his lip, as he was wont to do when agitated’ and replied, ‘Sir, I wished to kill the bear that I might carry its skin to my father.’20
The problems of this account are obvious. One might ask how Lutwidge knew what Nelson had said to his companion when confronted by the bear, or whether he would even have remembered it after so long. But the principal weaknesses in the account are its implications that Nelson got close to his prey, that far from retiring the bear was ready to attack its assailant, and that it only fled at the sound of artillery fire from the ship. In short, this version magnified the danger faced by the young hero. And not even this was enough, for Westall’s painting, which accompanied Clarke and McArthur’s new account, went further still, removing the life-saving chasm in the ice that had divided the combatants and placing them merely inches apart. Such is the thirst for exaggeration.
4
Back in August 1773 there were real problems to face. If the ships could not be freed the alternatives were stark. The men might stay aboard, hoping for a change in conditions, but even if the ships were not crushed by the ice, provisions would run out and all would surely perish at the onset of winter. Alternatively, they could abandon the ships and haul the boats to clear water, but the prospect of surviving a journey in open boats through those climates was hardly strong.
On 3 August, Phipps suppressed such fears and set the men to cutting a passage for the ships, furiously hacking at the ice with axes and saws. It was too thick, twelve feet in places, and a day of strenuous effort yielded little result. Worse, although they worked the ships almost three hundred yards westwards, the ice was moving with the current and carrying them in the opposite direction, east and northeast towards Spitsbergen. Phipps sombrely pondered the possibility that his ships might be drawn inshore and broken on the rocks even before their timbers caved in before the pressure of the ice. Soundings were already indicating that the water below was becoming shallower.
Phipps knew that the short summer season was ending, and whatever decision he made needed to be taken quickly. On 6 August pilots whom Phipps had sent to reconnoitre westwards reported clear water five leagues away. The commodore made up his mind. He would abandon the ships, haul the launches to the open water and try to get to Hakluyt’s Headland at the northeastern extremity of Spitsbergen, where they might be lucky enough to encounter Dutch ships leaving the whaling grounds for the winter. At a grim meeting with his officers Phipps gave his orders. The boats would have to be hoisted on the ice, and coverings fitted above the gunnels of the launches to combat wet and cold. Some provisions had to be boiled for storage in the boats and each man was to fill a canvas bag with twenty-five to thirty pounds of bread. No inessentials were permitted and the only clothes allowed were those the men stood up in.
Feverish activity ensued as the crews of the ships readied themselves for what was transparently a desperate measure. On the Racehorse, Midshipman Floyd put on two shirts, two waistcoats, two pairs of breeches, four pairs of stockings, boots, and a woollen cap beneath his hat, and packed a comb, razor, pocket book, pistol and precious journal, along with the musket and cartouche box allowed each man. Aboard the Carcass the youngest member of the expedition was at similar work, but even at this pass, Horace was awake to every opportunity. ‘When the boats were fitted out to quit the two ships blocked up in the ice,’ he recalled, ‘I exerted myself to have command of a four-oared cutter . . . which was given me, with twelve men; and I prided myself in fancying I could navigate her better than any other boat in the ship.’21
The hauling started on 7 August. Fifty men from each ship were harnessed in long lines to their launches, which they heaved westwards over the jagged field of ice, one line competing lustily with the other. Phipps himself sweated with the Racehorse’s men, while Lutwidge remained aboard his ship, attempting to move the vessels forward as best he could, just in case the conditions swung in their favour. Horace might have struggled in the Carcass line, but it is unlikely. Physically, he was the weakest member of the crew, hardly suited to exhausting man-hauling, and as we have seen he had been given a special responsibility for the ship’s cutter. The master, James Allen, recorded that the Carcass line consisted of the second and third l
ieutenants, two master’s mates (Joshua Mulock and James Gee Burges), four midshipmen and forty-two men, and it seems highly probable that young Nelson was the missing midshipman employed elsewhere.22
Six hard hours and a mile later the men returned to the ships to eat and rest, but they were back with the launches early the following morning, sucking a thick fog into their lungs with every cruel breath. But then their luck changed. Aboard the ships, some four miles behind the launches, movements in the ice were detected. ‘Rending and cracking with a tremendous noise’, it changed direction with the current and started moving the ships westwards, towards the launches and open water. Once again, the deliverance seemed Heaven sent. ‘Every officer and every idler on board laboured now for life,’ wrote one diarist. Sails were spread, and anchors, poles, axes and saws joined the battle to push the ships through the shattering ice pack. Soon those men out ahead, straining with the launches, abandoned their task and streamed back to the ships, overwhelmed by their sudden reprieve. ‘It is impossible to conceive the joy which, like wildfire, spread throughout the ship at this news,’ Floyd wrote.23
In a day or two the vessels had bulldozed their way through the ice, overtaken and reclaimed their launches and got underway, liberating themselves with relatively little damage. They made Smeerenberg harbour on 11 August, where they sat recuperating with four Dutch whalers. During his few days there, Horace took his cutter out to make soundings but found time to admire the huge three hundred-foot-high glacier at Fair Haven, shining ‘light green’ in the sunlight, and sparkling with the water cascading down its face.24