Nelson (13 page)

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 employed 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.

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

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.