1773 Phipps Expedition Towards The North Pole

The 1773 Phipps expedition towards the North Pole was a British Royal Navy expedition in which two ships under the commands of Constantine John Phipps and Skeffington Lutwidge sailed towards the North Pole in the summer of 1773 and became stuck in ice near Svalbard.

Background

In January 1773, on the initiative of its vice president Daines Barrington, the Secretary of the Royal Society, Matthew Maty, sent a letter to Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting a voyage to the North Pole.
Barrington had been influenced by the writings of the Swiss geographer Samuel Engel, who had suggested in his 1765 book the existence of a vast empty sea near the North Pole. Engel's explanation for the sea ice found in the Arctic was that most of it came from rivers, and so would only be found close to land.
Sandwich, a friend of Daines Barrington, proposed the expedition to King George III, "which his Majesty was pleased to direct should be immediately undertaken".

Preparations

Constantine Phipps volunteered for the expedition and was appointed its commander. The bomb vessel was chosen as the expedition ship and modified at Deptford Dockyard in March and April 1773. The second bomb vessel, under the command of Skeffington Lutwidge, was refitted at Sheerness Dockyard, with both ships provided with additional protection against ice.

Ships

''Racehorse'' had originally been a French ship, the ''Marquis de Vaudreuil'' until she was captured by the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War and renamed HMS ''Racehorse'' on 5 May 1757. She had three masts and carried 18 guns, and was rated as a sloop. In 1759, ''Racehorse'' took part in the Siege of Quebec.

Crew members of the expedition

Members of the expedition included on ''Racehorse'', Henry Harvey as first lieutenant, Charles Irving as surgeon, Israel Lyons as astronomer, Philippe d'Auvergne as midshipman, and Olaudah Equiano as able seaman. On ''Carcass'', Horatio Nelson served as midshipman. Two Greenland whalers were hired as pilots for each of the ships.

Equipment

For navigation, ''Racehorse'' was equipped with a Larcum Kendall K2 chronometer and ''Carcass'' with a John Arnold chronometer. Other new technology on board included Pierre Bouguer's improved log and Irving's apparatus for distillation of seawater.

Journey

The Admiralty's instructions for Phipps from 25 May 1773 stated he should sail north from the Nore and then, " ..passing between Spitzbergen and Greenland, proceed up to the North Pole or as far towards it as you are able, carefully avoiding the errors of former navigators by keeping as much as possible in the open sea, and as nearly upon a meridian to the said Pole as the ice or other obstructions you meet with will admit of. If you arrive at the Pole and should even find the sea so open as to admit of a free navigation on the opposite meridian you are not to proceed any further but ..you are to return to the Nore ..

The ships sailed north from the Nore on 4 June 1773. Spitsbergen was sighted on 28 June, and the ships sailed further north while observing and surveying the coast. From Hakluyt's headland they continued northwest, starting to encounter ice. From 8 July, the ice made movement very difficult, and the ships had to be towed with smaller boats. As the ice was impenetrable, Phipps turned east to determine whether the ice was joined with Spitsbergen. The expedition made further attempts to sail north while going east along the coast and surveying and studying various islands. On 27 July they reached their furthest point to the north at 80°48'N. On 30 July, on one of the Seven Islands, Phipps and Lutwidge climbed a hill and could see that the sea was completely frozen over to the east. On their return, the ships were completely surrounded by ice. Over the next few days, Phipps was ready to abandon ships and the crew started hauling the boats over the ice. However, on 10 August, the ships broke free of the ice and into the open sea and returned west to Fairhaven. After a final attempt to sail northwest on 19 August, they started the journey home. The ships were separated by storms, and on 18 September, ''Carcass'' reached Yarmouth Roads and Lutwidge sent news of the expedition to the Admiralty. The ships reunited on 26 September and returned to docks on the Thames on 30 September.

Publications

An anonymous narrative of the journey appeared in February 1774, and Phipps' book, ''A voyage towards the North Pole'' containing 70 pages of narrative as well as a lengthy appendix with the scientific results of the journey, in the late summer of 1774. Phipps' book contained engravings depicting the ships in the ice that were made from watercolours by John Cleveley the Younger. These were in turn based on Philippe d'Auvergne's sketches. A French translation of the book appeared in 1775 and a German translation in 1777.
The journey also features in Olaudah Equiano's 1789 autobiography, ''The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano'', and another eyewitness account, that of midshipman Thomas Floyd, was compiled by his family and published in 1879.

Legacy

The failure of the expedition to get through the ice to the North Pole did not convince Barrington or Engel that this was impossible. Scientific results of the journey include the first scientific description of the polar bear and the ivory gull. Some islands of Sjuøyane are named after expedition members: Nelsonøya, Phippsøya, and Waldenøya.

Starting in 1800, a story about Horatio Nelson chasing a polar bear began to circulate, including Nelson's alleged response to a reprimand from Lutwidge, "I wished, Sir, to get the skin for my father." After Nelson's death, the story was expanded in his biographies, and included claims that Nelson had tried to attack the bear with his broken musket, wielding it like a club, a scene immortalised in a painting by Richard Westall.

The Norwegian professor of British literature, , described the Phipps expedition as "an Arctic expedition representing a watershed in polar exploration, adding to the discovery of land and natural resources a new dimension, namely that of scientific investigation".

References

Footnotes

Bibliography

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{{commonscat, A voyage towards the North Pole - undertaken by His Majesty's command, 1773 (1774)

Expeditions from Great Britain
Arctic expeditions
1773 in Great Britain
18th-century history of the Royal Navy