THE HON. COMMODORE CONSTANTINE JOHN PHIPPS,

M.P., AFTERWARDS BARON MULGRAVE.

"Come, Galatea, come; the seas forsake:

What pleasures can the tides with their hoarse murmurs make?
Come then, and leave the waves' tumultuous roar:

Let the wild surges vainly beat the shore."

DRYDEN'S VIRGIL.

THE HONORABLE CONSTANTINE JOHN PHIPPS was born May 9th, 1744. His father was Constantine Phipps, (grandson of Chancellor Phipps,) who, having obtained from the king a lease of the estates of Mulgrave, in Cleveland, was, August 15th, 1767, created Baron Mulgrave of New Ross, in the county of Wexford, in the peerage of Ireland. His mother was Lepel, daughter of John, Lord Hervey, son of John, first Earl of Bristol. "Living in sight of the German Ocean and its passing fleets," says the REV. GIDEON SMALES, "and having Sandsend as a scene for the gambols of childhood, he early imbibed a predeliction for the enterprising life of a sailor." His mother's brother, the Honorable Augustus John Hervey, being captain of the Dragon, a seventy-four gun ship in the royal navy, he at once became a midshipman therein whilst yet a stripling, according to that ancient system of privileged classes which discontented democrats are about to destroy. In 1768, he was elected member of parliament for Lincoln, after a severe contest with Mr. Vyner. "He does not appear to have distinguished himself in any particular manner in a subordinate situation," remarks the REV. JOHN GRAVES; "nor do the naval annals record anything material except the mere dates of his commissions, till the beginning of the year 1773, when he was appointed to the Racehorse, bombketch, as senior in command on the projected expedition to the North Pole."

For centuries the idea of a North-West Passage to India, by way of the Arctic regions, has haunted the minds of English navigators; and the attempts made previous to the voyage of Commodore Phipps, are thus pithily related by him, in the Introduction to his volume, A Voyage towards the North Pole undertaken by His Majesty's Command, 1773, by CONSTANTINE JOHN PHIPPS ;

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"The idea of a passage to the East Indies by the North Pole, was suggested as early as the year 1527, by Robert Thorne, merchant, of Bristol, as appears from two papers preserved by Hackluit, the one addressed to King Henry VIII; the other to Dr. Ley, the king's ambassador to Charles V. In that addressed to the king, he says, 'I know it to be my bounden duty to manifest this secret to your Grace, which hitherto, I suppose, has been hid.' This secret appears to be the honour and advantage which would be derived from the discovery of a passage by the North Pole. He represents, in the strongest terms, the glory which the kings of Spain and Portugal had obtained by their discoveries East and West, and exhorts the king to emulate their fame by undertaking discoveries towards the North. He states, in a very masterly style, the reputation that must attend the attempt, and the great benefits, should it be crowned with success, likely to accrue to the subjects of this country, from their advantageous situation; which, he observes, seems to make the exploring this, the only hitherto undiscovered part, the king's peculiar duty. To remove any objection to the undertaking, which might be drawn from the supposed danger, he insists upon the great advantages of constant daylight in seas that, men say, without great danger, difficulty, and peril, yea, rather, it is impossible to pass; for they being past this little way, which they named so dangerous, (which may be two or three leagues before they come to the Pole, and as much more after they pass the Pole,) it is clear from thenceforth the seas and lands are as temperate as in these parts.'

In the paper addressed to Dr. Ley, he enters more minutely into the advantages and practicability of the undertaking. Amongst many other arguments to prove the value of the discovery, he urges, that by sailing northward and passing the Pole, the navigation from England to the Spice Islands would be shorter, by more than two thousand leagues, than either from Spain by the Straits of Magellan, or Portugal by the Cape of Good Hope; and to show the likelihood of success in the enterprise, he says, it is as probable that the cosmographers should be mistaken in the opinion they entertain of the polar regions being impassable from extreme cold, as, it has been found, they were in supposing the countries under the line to be uninhabitable from excessive heat. With all the spirit of a man convinced of the glory to be gained, and the probability of success in the undertaking, he adds ;—' God knoweth, that though by it I should have no great interest, yet I have had, and still have, no little mind of this business: so that if I had faculty to my will, it should be the first thing that I would understand, even to attempt, if our seas Northward be navigable to the Pole or no.'

Notwithstanding the many good arguments with which he supported his proposition, and the offer of his own services, it does not appear that he prevailed so far as to procure an attempt to be made.

Borne, in his Regiment of the Sea, written about the year 1577, mentions this as one of the five ways to Cathay, and dwells chiefly on the mildness of

climate, which he imagines must be found near the Pole, from the constant presence of the sun during the summer. These arguments, however, were soon after controverted by Blundeville, in his Treatise on Universal Maps.

In 1578, George Best, a gentleman who had been with Sir Martin Frobisher in all his voyages for the discovery of the North-West passage, wrote a very ingenious discourse, to prove all parts of the world habitable.

No voyage, however, appears to have been undertaken to explore the circumpolar seas, till the year 1607, when 'Henry Hudson was set forth, at the charge of certain worshipful merchants of London, to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.' He sailed from Gravesend, on the first of May, in a ship called the Hopewell, having with him ten men and a boy. I have taken great pains to find his original journal, as well as those of some others of the adventurers who followed him; but without success: the only account I have seen is an imperfect abridgment in Purchas, by which it is not possible to lay down his track; from which, however, I have drawn the following particulars :-He fell in with the land to the Westward in latitude 73 degrees, on the twenty-first of June, which he named Hold-with-Hope. The twenty. seventh, he fell in with Spitsburgen, and met with much ice: he got to eighty degrees three minutes, which was the Northermost latitude he observed in. Giving an account of the conclusion of his discoveries, he says, 'On the sixteenth of August, I saw land, by reason of the clearness of the weather, stretching far into eighty-two degrees, and, by the bowing and showing of the sky, much farther; which when I first saw, I hoped to have had a free sea between the land and the ice, and meant to have compassed this land by the North; but now finding it was impossible, by means of the abundance of ice compassing us about by the North, and joining to the land; and seeing God did bless us with a wind, we returned, bearing up the helm.' He afterwards adds: And this I can assure at this present, that between seventy-eight degrees and a half, and eighty-two degrees, by this way there is no passage.'In consequence of this opinion, he was the next year employed on the North East discovery.

In March, 1609, old style, 'A voyage was set forth by the right worshipful Sir Thomas Smith, and the rest of the Muscovy Company, to Cherry Island, and for a further discovery to be made towards the North Pole, for the likeli hood of a trade or a passage that way, in the ship called the Amity, of burthen seventy tons, in which Jonas Poole was master, having fourteen men and one boy.'-He weighed from Blackwall, March the first, old style; and, after great severity of weather, and much difficulty from the ice, he made the South part of Spitsbergen on the sixteenth of May. He sailed along and sounded the coast, giving names to several places, and making many very accurate observations. On the twenty-sixth, being near Fair Foreland, he sent his mate on shore; and, speaking of the account he gave at his return, says, 'Moreover, I was certified that all the ponds and lakes were unfrozen, they being fresh water;

which putteth me in hope of a mild summer here, after so sharp a beginning as I have had; and my opinion is such, and I assure myself it is so, that a passage may be as soon attained this way by the Pole, as any unknown way whatsoever, by reason the sun doth give a great heat in this climate, and the ice (I mean that freezeth here) is nothing so huge as I have seen in seventythree degrees.'

These hopes, however, he was soon obliged to relinquish for that year, having twice attempted in vain to get beyond 79° 50'. On the twenty-first of June, he stood to the Southward, to get a loading of fish, and arrived in London the last of August. He was employed the following year (1611) in a small bark called the Elizabeth, of fifty tons. The instructions for this voyage, which may be found at length in Purchas, are excellently drawn up: they direct him, after having attended the fishery for some time, to attempt discoveries to the North Pole as long as the season will permit; with a discretionary clause, to act in unforseen cases as shall appear to him most for the advancement of the discovery, and interest of his employers. This, however, proved an unfortunate voyage: for having staid in Cross Road till the sixteenth of June, on account of the bad weather and great quantity of ice, he sailed from thence on that day, and steered West by North fourteen leagues, where he found a bank of ice he returned to Cross Road; from whence when he sailed, he found the ice to lie close to the land about the latitude of 80°, and that it was impossible to pass that way; and the strong tides making it dangerous to deal with the ice, he determined to stand along it to the Southward, to try if he could find the sea more open that way, and so get to the Westward, and proceed on his voyage. He found the ice to lie nearest SW and SW by S, and ran along it about an hundred and twenty leagues. He had no ground near the ice at 160, 180, or 200 fathoms: perceiving the ice still to trend to the Southward, he determined to return to Spitsbergen for the fishery, where he lost his ship.

In the year 1614, another voyage was undertaken, in which Baffin and Fotherby were employed. With much difficulty, and after repeated attempts in vain with the ship, they got with their boats to the firm ice, which joined to Red Beach; they walked over the ice to that place, in hopes of finding whale-fins, &c., in which they were disappointed. * * * Fotherby was again fitted out the next year in a pinnace of twenty tons, called the Richard, with ten men. In this voyage he was prevented by the ice from getting further than in his last. He refers to a chart, in which he had traced the ship's course on every traverse, to show how far the state of that sea was discovered between eighty and seventy-one degrees of latitude, and for twenty-six degrees of longitude from Hackluit's Headland."

The various expeditions commanded by these indomitable contemporaries of Shakspere, Frobisher, Best, Hudson, Poole, Baffin, and Fotherby, were, as COMMODORE PHIPPS expresses

it, "fitted out by private adventurers, for the double purpose of discovery and present advantage." And one is pleased to find him" doing justice to the memory of these men; which, without having traced their steps, and experienced their difficulties, it would have been impossible to have done. They appear to have encountered dangers," says he, "which at that period must have been particularly alarming from their novelty, with the greatest fortitude and perseverance; as well as to have shown a degree of diligence and skill, not only in the ordinary and practical, but more scientific parts of their profession, which might have done honour to modern seamen, with all their advantages of later improvements."

For more than a century and a half this important problem in geography was allowed to remain quietly unsolved; and our celebrated Clevelander, Capt. Cook, having already proved that neither New Zealand nor Australia was part of the supposed southern continent, was on his second voyage round the world, with instructions to circumnavigate the globe in high southern latitudes, and to prosecute his discoveries as near the South Pole as possible, when the Royal Society, about the beginning of February, 1773, made an application to King George the Third, to fit out an expedition to try how far navigation was practicable towards the North Pole. The Earl of Sandwich, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty, laid the proposal before the King, recommended its adoption, and was commanded to at once carry it into execution. "As soon as I heard of the design," says our author, "I offered myself, and had the honour of being entrusted with the conduct of this undertaking." So that the two government expeditions. to either Pole, were both commanded at the same time by Cleveland navigators,-a circumstance highly honorable to this then comparatively unimportant part of the country.

"The nature of the voyage requiring particular care in the choice and equipment of the ships," says COMMODORE PHIPPS, (for such he now became,) "the Race-horse and Carcass bombs were fixed upon as the strongest, and therefore properest, for the purpose. The probability that such an expedition could not be carried on without meeting with much ice, made some additional strengthening necessary: they were therefore