Nelson in the Arctic. Polar bears, geese, and filled breeches.

The air is never free from isicles… myriads of shining particles that sparkle like diamonds.

In 1773, aged fifteen, Nelson went to the Arctic. Boys weren’t usually allowed to go on such expeditions, “as of no use”. The expedition leader Captain Luttwidge knew uncle Maurice, and Nelson “begged”. Nothing could prevent him from “using every interest”. Seeing Nelson’s “ardent desire for going”, Luttwidge agreed.¹ Patronage wasn’t merely for helping relatives, but finding and encouraging future leaders with the right qualities. This seems like an interlude in Nelson’s early life, but it gets far more space in his brief autobiography than many other events. He remained friendly with Luttwidge for decades and clearly saw the expedition as an important step in his career.

Two ships, Racehorse and Carcass were set to sail across the polar regions to make scientific observations, and to try and find a navigable route over the pole which would reduce the length of trading journeys. We know very little of what happened to Nelson on this voyage—no-one knew he would turn out to be Horatio Nelson, after all—but we do have several first-hand accounts of the journey, including one from the ship Nelson was on (Carcass).

The ships departed on 21st April and went to Woolwich to get supplies. They then sailed north to Shetland. As they went north, the fog got so thick the two crews couldn’t see each other: they had to “fire guns, volleys of small cannon, beat drums, sound horns and trumpets, and frequently toll our bell” to avoid the ships colliding. In Shetland the locals came aboard and got drunk, astonished at these huge man-of-war ships, the likes of which they had never seen before. For one shilling, midshipman Thomas Floyd wrote, you could buy as much fish there as would cost ten guineas in London.² As they left, the fog was so thick it “approached total darkness.”³

At Spitzbergen, now known as Svalbard, the Arctic island, members of that other ship rode over, also having not seen a man-of-war up there before. On being told they were heading for the North Pole, the captain “shook his head, and told us no such thing was possible… He likewise told us that the ice was worse, and had done more damage, this year than he ever knew before.” A few weeks earlier, a whaler had been crushed. In the six weeks his ship had been sailing, only six days had been without fog. The expedition carried on, seals bobbing beside their ships, three whales spotted further off.⁴ As they went north the nights were cold and the days were cloudy. It was “piercing cold” and the rain froze as it fell. The weather changed constantly, even in a single day: “cold, variable, thick fog, fresh breezes, clear, squally, calm with sleet and snow.”⁵

That was the end of June. Ice began floating past the ship. A roaring noise, like “a large surf beating on the shore” came from up ahead. Two hours later, the fog cleared and two hundred yards away they saw the ice “like a huge continent of land covered with snow.” They turned as quickly as they could. Another two minutes of fog and they would have sailed into the ice and been cut to pieces “as there was more than a little swell.” As soon as they were clear of the ice, the fog descended again.⁶

The pieces of ice they struck got larger. Floyd’s ship Racehorse was struck so hard it nearly collided with Carcass. Soon the ice “jammed us all round.” As it broke, the ice sounded like thunder, but the ship avoided being crushed. It took until one a.m. for them to clear the ice enough to allow a breeze to carry them away.⁷

At Dutch Vogel Sound, the ship’s astronomer Dr. Irvine walked up to the top of a hill with his barometer. They later learned that a Dutchmen who had walked up there had “sunk in the snow and perished!” Cracks and cavities extended beneath the white cover, sudden drops from which no man would return. As they left the sound, all they could see to the north was ice. The weather was sleet and thick snow. By July 25th they reached Deer-field. It was so foggy the ships couldn’t see each other. By the time it cleared, two days later, they were well into the ice. Seeing sea-horses (seals), some men, including Floyd, took a row-boat to go and look at them. A large one was spotted and “approaching cautiously, we fired.” The seal was wounded and slipped into the sea. Moments later, the animal resurfaced with several other seals and they all began attacking the boat. One of them took an oar. Had the Carcass not sent a boat to assist them, the men would likely have been capsized. Back on land, they shot a reindeer for food. Their all-night absence caused much anxiety on Racehorse.⁸

In early August, both ships were surrounded by ice. They had been told by some experienced seamen that “the ice rises out of the sea sometimes as high as mountains.”⁹ They tried to break through, but failed, and had to anchor to a piece of ice eight yards thick. The ice kept closing in, squeezing together and rising up. They tried to cut a passage through the ice, but in places it was twelve feet deep. An expedition was sent to look for water, but after walking eight and a half miles, they still had miles to go before they could reach water.¹⁰

As the ice was rising, so was the risk of being crushed or running aground as the drift carried them towards rocks. There was talk of unloading both ships. Bags of bread and beef were prepared. A sail was cut into belts so the men could drag the supplies. Fatigued, they worked day and night. Another exploration set out.

The next day the ice closed in hard on the ship and they were getting closer to the rocks. Men could only take with them a musket, a food bag, and the clothes they wore. They started layering up. That night, the wind changed; the sails were put up: the fog had lifted and they could see the ice was driving not towards the rocks, but in the right direction for them to escape; a new energy animated the crew. Although “every rope by the addition of frozen snow, was as thick again as its natural size”, there was now real hope of escaping the bitter cold. On 10th August, the ice began to crack. As the ship moved out, a great chunk of ice collided with the anchor and snapped the chain. Clear water came into view. A long, under-provisioned Arctic journey, full of certain death, had been avoided, thanks, they thought, to Providence.¹¹

It was during this period, when they were trapped in the ice, that we get a glimpse of young Nelson. The story was told in 1800, some twenty-seven years after the event.

… in this dreadful state they continued for near five days, during which Mr. Nelson, after much solicitation, obtained the command of a four-oared cutter raised upon, with twelve men, constructed for the purpose of exploring channels, and breaking the ice: thus did his mind at this early period glow with fresh energy at the sight of danger.¹²

That makes a lovely turn of phrase and it would certainly be true for the rest of Nelson’s career—his mind would sometimes glow too much at the sight of danger. Nelson himself said that “I prided myself in fancying I could navigate her better than any other boat in the ship.”¹³ This catches something essential about Nelson’s personality: he was impatient, congenitally unable to be passive in a dramatic moment. His absence from the contemporary accounts is natural: who thinks it worth reporting that an impetuous fifteen year old pushed himself forward? The fact that Nelson got himself onto this voyage in the first place is another sign of his pushing ambition. As the writer of this anecdote says, “Nature had given him an uncommon quickness of perception, with a ready fund of resource: nor did he suffer talents of so much value to be bestowed in vain.”¹⁴

Throughout his career, Nelson wouldn’t suffer that of himself or of those who worked for him. As the historian Roger Knight says, Nelson’s was a hard-working generation. All the major figures of government and war were raised to be assiduous and indefatigable. Victory over Napoleon was the result of great efficiency in commerce, politics, bureaucracy, agriculture, and war. It was a time of modernisation and reform. That relied on ceaseless hard work. At all levels, from the field to the mast, from the captain’s cabin to the cabinet table, it was human energy that won the war. Patronage was used in all spheres of life, not just the navy, and it was used to find these dogged, inexhaustible people. When future prime minister Robert Peel began his career he was helped by the Dean of Christ Church Cyril Jackson who told him not to be afraid of working himself to death. Work like a tiger or a dragon, Jackson wrote to the twenty-two year old Peel, and “woe be to you if you fail me!” Nelson was, like Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, and the other leading figures, an immensely hard working man. As he rode into battle at Trafalgar, aged forty-seven, his hair had been white for five years and he was missing his top teeth, and he was thin.¹⁵ He had given all he had. It is quite believable that the captain of the Carcass spotted Nelson’s stamina and ambition. Finding people whose minds glowed with fresh energy at the sight of danger was an essential part of the British system of patronage.¹⁶ Without this potent dynamism of the leading class, and the ability to spot and nurture those with the deepest funds of resource, history might have been different.

Although it was perilous and arduous, the Arctic voyage was also beautiful. One member of the crew said, “The air at Spitzbergen is never free from isicles. If you look through sunbeams transversely as you sit in the shade… you see myriads of shining particles that sparkle like diamonds.”¹⁷ And there were moments of light relief amidst the great dangers. At Muffins Island a group went off to examine the island in row boats. After they landed, they realised two white bears were heading towards them, one on land, one in the water.

Major Buz, for that was their officer’s travelling title, like Falstaff, was always the boldest man in company over a cup of sack, and minded killing a bear no more than killing a gnat; but seeing the bears approach very fast, especially that which came in the water, he ordered his men to fire while yet the enemy was at a distance, as he did not think it prudent to hazard the lives of his little company in close fight. All of them pointed their muskets, and some of them obeyed orders; but the greater part judging it safer to depend upon a reserved fire, when they had seemingly discharged their pieces, pretended to retreat. The Major, a full fathom in the belly, endeavoured to waddle after his companions; but being soon out of breath, and seeing the bear that came in the water had just reached the shore, thought nothing now but falling the first sacrifice. His hair already stood on end; and looking behind him he saw the bear at no great distance, with his nose in the air, sniffing the scent. He had all the reason he could to believe it was him that he scented, and he had scarce breath enough to call his men to halt. In this critical situation he unfortunately dropped his gun and in stooping to retrieve it stumbled against a goose nest, fell squash upon his belly into it, and had very nigh smothered the dam upon her eggs. The old saying is, misfortunes seldom come alone. Before he could well rise, the enraged gander came flying to the assistance of his half-smothered consort, and making a dart at the eye of the assailant, very narrowly missed his neck, but discharged his fury plump upon his nose. The danger now being pressing, and the battle serious, the bear near, and the gander ready for a second attack, the men, who had not fled far, thought it high time to return to the relief of their leader. Overjoyed to see them about him, but frightened at the bear just behind him, he had forgot the gander was over his head, against which one of them having levelled his piece, fired and he fell dead at the Major’s feet. Animated now by the death of one enemy, he recovered his gun, and faced about to assist in the attack on the second. By this time the bear was scarce ten yards away from him, and beginning to growl, the Major just in the instant was seized with a looseness, dropt his accoutrements, and fell back, that he might not be in the way of his party, to impede the engagement. In the hurry he was in, for in a man of valour we must not say the fright, he entangled his buttons, and not being able to hold any longer, he filled his breeches.¹⁸

The crew shot the bear and killed it, at which point the major took nine swift strides forward and speared the beast in its belly, “full four feet deep.” He boasted that he killed the bear and the sailors pointed out there was another one to kill. “My lads,” he replied, “as I have been the death of one bear, sure six of you may kill the other.” So six men were dispatched to kill the other bear and the major was rowed back to the ship with his full breeches.¹⁹

Some bear encounters were cruel and bloody. At one point the crew of Carcass was burning the days old remains of a seal on the ice and the smell of the blubber attracted a bear and her two cubs. Seeing the mother pull uncooked lumps of sea-lion away, the men threw hunks of fresh meat to her on the ice. She took them and divided them for her two cubs, “reserving but a small portion to herself.” While she took away the last two pieces of meat, the men raised their muskets and shot the two cubs, killing them; they also wounded the mother. When she put the meat down in front of the cubs and they didn’t move, the mother pawed them, trying to lift them up. “All this while,” the writer of the journal says, “it was pitiful to hear her moan. Three times she walked away, moaning at her cubs to follow, and three times she came back to them.

Finding at last that they were cold and lifeless, she raised her head towards the ship, and, like Caliban in the tempest, growled a curse upon the murderers, which they returned with a volley of musket-balls. She fell between her cubs, and died licking their wounds.²⁰

Young Nelson had his own encounter with a bear, which was slowly exaggerated over the years until it became a ludicrously heroic account of a chase across chasms and a fight at close quarters. The truth seems to be that one morning Nelson was found to be missing, which, after a certain amount of time, began to agitate and worry the crew. It was a bitterly cold day. As the sun rose, Nelson was sighted, “armed with a single musket, in anxious pursuit of an immense bear.” The musket wouldn’t fire and so Nelson seemed to be trying to exhaust the bear so he could kill it with the butt-end. The bear ran off and Nelson came back empty-handed to find the captain was very cross with his foolish audacity. His only excuse (one that shows his adeptness of thinking of his feet) was that “I wished, Sir, to get the skin for my father.” John Sugden, the most thoughtful, thorough, and impartial of Nelson biographers says that even this account “exaggerated his intrepidity by implying he pursued the bear alone”, but that Nelson still emerges as “a youth of uncommon pluck and initiative”, or, as the original account had it, he was possessed of “cool intrepidity.”²¹ That cool intrepidity was what took Nelson to the Arctic in the first place, and it was what ensured his meteoric rise in the navy over the next five years. Patronage helped him because he had had the temperament for success. When he returned, Nelson was given a silver pocket watch, inscribed “for strict attention to duty with H.M.S. Racehorse.”²²

1. D&L, p. 4

2. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative of a Polar Voyage—1773’, Thomas Floyd, in Northwood Ho! ed. by Captain Albert H. Markham (Macmillan, 1879), pp. 89, 99, 103, 111-112

3. ‘The Journal of a Voyage undertaken by order of His Present Majesty, For making Discoveries towards the North Pole’, p. 30

4. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 126-128

5. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, pp. 32, 33

6. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 133-135

7. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 138-140

8. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 151-152, 158, 173-174, 182, 183-184

9. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, p. 40

10. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 187, 189, 190

11. ‘A Midshipman’s Narrative’, pp. 192-93, 198, 201, 202-203

12. ‘Biographical Memoir of the Right Honourable Lord Nelson of the Nile, K.B.’ Naval Chronicle, vol. III, 1800, p. 161

13. D&L, p. 5

14. ‘Biographical Memoir’, p. 165

15. Coleman, p. 6

16. Roger Knight, Britain Against Napoleon. The Organisation of Victory 1793–1815 (Allen Lane, 2013), pp. xxii, xxxiii, xxix

17. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, p. 55

18. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, pp. 60-61

19. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, p. 62

20. ‘Journal of a Voyage’, pp. 74-75

21. Sudgen, vol. I, pp. 74-75

22. Sudgen, p. 80; the watch is at the National Maritime Museum.