Nelson (14 page)

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 the 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.

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
lieutenants, 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

On 19 August the ships put to sea again but the general situation had not improved. A barrier of ice extended through more than twenty degrees of longitude in the latitude of about eighty degrees north, and there was no way through it. Finally, on the 22nd, with the season rapidly closing, Phipps admitted defeat and headed for home.

Considering their privations the ships were still in respectable shape, although the
Carcass
was indisputably the less manageable of the two vessels, and the men of the
Racehorse
cursed her ‘dull sailing’. Lutwidge had occasionally to lower his boats to help her manoeuvre, and Nelson may have been in charge of the cutter when it helped tow the
Carcass
clear of its consort on 24 August. The boy may have assumed the worst of the voyage was over as the polar seas heaved astern, but he was roughly awakened by a tempest that enclosed them on the evening
of 10 September, some twenty leagues from the coast of Norway in latitude fifty-seven degrees and thirty-eight minutes. Indeed, it was as savage a storm as Horace had ever endured.

The winds strengthened after the ships passed the Shetland Islands and entered the North Sea on the last leg of their journey home. For a while they briskly blew the vessels forward, but 8 September was a gloomier day and the winds less dependable. When the storm broke two days later it was ferocious, sluicing the cleared decks and ripping at the ropes that secured the small boats. ‘It blew as hard almost as we thought it well could,’ remarked Floyd from the sea-tossed
Racehorse
, and the waves ‘tumbled in upon us exceedingly’, rising so high that the
Carcass
was blotted from sight. The people on both ships feared the other had gone to the bottom. The main deck of the
Carcass
continually rolled beneath sheets of water, and when the storm slackened in the earlier part of the 11th and the battered ships struggled to repair their wounds they were still separated.
²⁵

The respite was brief, however. Late that same day a sudden clap of thunder heralded a fresh attack, and by midnight ‘the sea [was] making a free passage’ over the
Carcass
. Provisions, casks lashed to the deck, spars and booms were taken over the side, and the launch was scuttled and shoved overboard to relieve the ship. Men laboured to take in sail aloft, tie themselves down or keep their feet on careering decks awash with sea water. The carpenter Abraham Purcell, who was trying to secure hatches and stores, was swept both out of and into the ship by different waves, and a mate and a foretopman also went overboard. The gale eased at ten o’clock on 12 September, and the sails were reset, but it had been a close thing. The
Carcass
was ‘almost waterlogged from the weight of water on her decks’.
²⁶

Meanwhile, the
Racehorse
too had survived the latest onslaught, though ‘everybody agreed that they had never been but once in so great a tempest’. Two guns were jettisoned, three boats lost and the ship was thrown upon its side several times. When the seas subsided and the winds fell on the 13th the sailors of both ships, weary and wasted from constant battle, looked for a haven.
²⁷