THE LIFE OF DR. SCORESBY. * THIS Life very nearly approaches
the nature of an autobiography, for its materials have been gathered chiefly from the voluminous writings of its subject, and the language is as much as possible his own. Dr. Scoresby's personal history may be traced to a great extent year by year, by means of his ninety-one published works and papers, the earliest of which, Meteorological Journals kept in the Greenland Seas, was begun in 1807, in his eighteenth year : and the latest, the Journal of his Voyage to Australia, was published after his death. But, besides these printed records, he left in manuscript a valuable autobiographical sketch of his early days, written in the Greenland Seas, between the years 1821 and 1823. The story gathered from these, and a few supplemen- tary sources, is that of a lifetime abounding in adventure, as full as it could well have been of professional labour, first asa seaman, afterwards as a working clergyman, and yet signally rich in con- tributions to abstract and applied science. William Scoresby, the son of the most successful whaling cap- tain of Whitby in his day, was born in that town in 1789. His boyhood gave little indication of his aptitude for the toils and hazards of Arctic navigation, to which the first half of his active life was devoted with such brilliant results. Nature seemed rather to have designed him for the more tranquil sphere of duty to which he ultimately transferred himself, for "physically, he was tall, weak, and delicate in constitution ; mentally, he was timid, anxious, and scrupulously conscientious." The first schoolmaster under whom this puny and over-sensitive boy was placed, was a ruffian as cruel as Squeers, who, not content with a merciless use of the ordinary means of punishment, was in the daily habit of subjecting his pupils to actual torture, such as sus- pending them by a cord round their thumbs, with only their toes on the ground. Madness or idiotcy must have been young Scoresby's fate if he had remained long under the terror of this inhuman discipline, but a happy impulse prompted him to escape from it in rather a singular manner. When he was only ten years old, he hid himself on board his father's vessel just as it was clearing out of Whitby Roads, and the pilot was about to re- turn to shore ; and, fortunately for the boy, Captain Scoresby allowed him to proceed on the voyage. During the next three years' he was almost constantly at school ; but, in 1803, he shipped with his father as an apprentice, and in 1806, thou,gh not more than sixteen years of age, he was able to fill the place of chief officer. The voyage of that year was amono.b the most remarkable on record ; for the approach to the ordinary fishing-grounds being occupied by ice of unusual thickness, Captain Scoresby con- ceived and executed the daring project of pushing his ship through the compact and apparently impenetrable harrier which reached from 78° 46' to 89' N. There they entered upon open water, which "has not before or since been navigated," and se* ed in it as far as 19° E. 81° 30' N.
After this voyage, Mr. Scoresby entered the university of Edin- burgh in the autumn of the same year, and diligently profited by the lectures of Hope and Playfair until two months before the close of the session, when his sea duties withdrew him from sudies to which he was not able to return until November, 1809. Meanwhile, he engaged in temporary service of a new kind,by which he enlarged the range of his nautical experience. After the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, our Government called upon all seamen, especially those engaged in the Greenland trade, to aid in bring- ing the fleet captured from the Danes into a British port. The Whitby sailors all believed that this was a scheme for impressing them, and not one of them volunteered until Mr. Scoresby set the example, when they immediately came forward, to the number of fifty-four in one day. The vessel in which he sailed, having anchored in Copenhagen Roads, in the midst of a fleet of nearly a thousand sail of ships of war and transports, Mr. Scoresby was, much to his disappointment, put in command of one of the enemy's gunboats, with a crew of six men. His expectation of learning the discipline and management of the navy seemed frustrated by this event ; besides, he was satisfied that the Danish gunboats, adapted only for plying in the shallows, could not be • The Are 91 William Scareaby, F.B.S.. &e. By his Nephew, B. E. Seorestiy-Jackson, M.D. Published by Nelson and Sons. made seaworthy. Eventually, they were abandoned, btit not until Mr. Scoresby and his crew had been all but dragged under water and swamped by the tow of Captain Bligh's ship, the Alfred. During the eight days he spent on board this ship, Mr. Scoresby fully enjoyed the instructive opportunity of which he had been for awhile deprived by his appointment to the gun- boat. The order and comfort in the internal arrangements of the ship were highly pleasing to him, but not so were "the horrid blasphemies and general wickedness of the crew, and the daily instances of punishment." Captain Bligh, as was afterwards too notorious, was a very severe disciplinarian, but always just ac- cording to his conception of naval discipline ; but, when Mr. Scoresby was transferred in Yarmouth Roads to a prize ship under the first lieutenant, he had ample experience of what naval life must have been in many a ship in the good old times. The lieutenant was a drunken savage, who nearly wrecked his ship, and flogged his men, in violation of every principle of justice and humanity. "One man received three dozen lashes, because a rope in his hand ran foul—another, two dozen, because he could not lie out on the topsail yard without being thrown off by the topsail, which was not properly secured—and a third was flogged in three successive weeks, because the men under his charge, but over whom he could exercise no control, were not active in their duty." Under such a commander, the unfortunate crew naturally be- came desperate and reckless. They would take a lighted candle to the door of the magazine' which was unguarded, and on being cautioned of the danger, they would reply, "What matter ? They eared not if the ship were blown up, and all on board were destroyed together." After fifty days spent on board this floating hell, Mr. Scoresby was paid off at Portsmouth, and received 11/. 19s. 2d., as bounty, travelling money, and wages, for three months' service, plus the warm commendations of the port admi- ral for his patriotic zeal. "Thus," he says "ended an adven- turous and trying voyage—a voyage in which I voluntarily sub- mitted to every service and privation of the commonest sailors, though being furnished with introductory letters, from naval offi- cers of some consideration, I might probably have fared better had I made use of them ; but I was wishful to take my chance in the ordinary way, that I might have a better opportunity, by personal experience' of learning the discipline of the navy, and the duties expected from a seaman in that service." He had en- tered upon the experiment with the belief that, for many branches of seamanship, the navy must be the best school in the world ; but his final conviction was, that practical navigation could ad- where be better learned than in the Greenland trade.
In 1810, Mr. Scoresby received his first scientific diploma, being elected a member of the Wernerian Society; and, on his twenty- first birthday in the same year, he was promoted to the command of the Resolution, on the retirement of his father. The voyage was exceedingly prosperous' the cargo consisting of thirty whales, which produced about 220 tuns of oil, the largest quantity that had ever been taken into the port in one vessel. During the ten years in which this ship was commanded by the Scoresbys (eight by the father, and two by the son), she never met with any acci- dent, or suffered the least damage, or failed to exceed the other seven or eight ships in the port in her catch of whales. In these ten voyages, she obtained no less than 249 whales, yielding 2034 tuns of oil, which, with the whalebone, &c., produced 70,000/., leaving a clear profit to her owners of 20,718/., for an original advance of 8000/. In 1811, Captain Scoresby junior married his first wife, Miss Lockwood ; and, in 1813, he left the Resolution for the Esk, a fine newly-built vessel, of the same port. His first voyage in her realized about 10,000/., more than half of which was profit ; the second was also prosperous ; but, during the three following years, fortune deserted him ; and, in 1816, it was with extreme difficulty he brought home his rent and disabled ship. His reasoning powers, which served him so well in matters of physical science, being apt to play him false on other grounds, he regarded these misfortunes as Divine warnings against the sin- fulness of a life devoted to the pursuit of gain. He began to think of abandoning the sea ; but the loss of nearly all the little property he had saved, through the bankruptcy of a friend, com- pelled him to postpone his design. Meanwhile, amidst his reli- gious delusions, he had prosecuted his scientific researches with his usual acuteness. It was while sailing in the Esk that he made a curious series of experiments on the temperature of the sea at various depths, by means of a beautiful and accurate in- strument of his own invention, which he called a marine diver. It was these experiments which first established the unexpected fact that the temperature of the Arctic Seas always increases from the surface downwards, whereas in warmer regions it is the re- verse. This apparent anomaly is the result of a beautiful arrange- ment in nature. When salt water is cooled down to 390 5' F., it expands in volume, and, consequently, becomes specifically lighter, until it reaches its freezing point, 280 5' F.; and thus it is insured that the sea shall freeze only on the surface, instead of being converted into a solid mass to the very bottom.
A paper on the Polar Ice, comprising a project for reaching the North Pole by travelling over, the ice, was read before the Wer- nerian Society in the winter of 1814, and caused a good deal of excitement in the philosophical world. Von Bach spoke of the paper and its author in terms of the strongest commendation in a letter to Gay Lussac. It is also incontestable that one of Captain Scoresby's letters to Sir Joseph Banks, dated the 2d of October 1817, did, as M. de la Roquette has stated in his memoir of Sir John Franklin, "awaken. in England the long dormant projects for .attaining; the North Pole, and for opening up the North-West Passage.' Captain Scoresby would gladly have been employed in such a service ; but, though the Admiralty resolved to act upon the information given by the Greenland captain, they would not give him the command of a discovery vessel, and he was not disposed to accompany any of their expeditions in a subordinate capacity. Accordingly, he resumed his whaling voyages, which he continued for six years, with the exception of one season spent in Liverpool, while superintending the building of the Baffin, and preparing for press his Account of the Arctic Regions, which was received, says Basil Hall, with " thirsty interest.' Captain Manby, the inven- tor of the mortar apparatus for saving the lives of shipwrecked men accompanied Captain Scoresby to Greenland in 1821, and published an account of the voyage, in which he speaks thus of its commander—" Captain Scoresby appears to me to be one of the most extraordinary men that ever came under my attention, and when I look at his age (being only twenty-nine), I may say the most extraordinary man of his age. I feel in his society as if I knew nothing ; but I feel also that advantages and information may be derived from his experience and judgment not to be met with from any other source. To look at him with the eye of scrutiny, there is no particular clue to discover his great mind and vast scientific acquirements. The habits and conduct of his life possess uncommon evenness, and in the truest sense of the word he is a real good man, most religious, and extremely amiable." Captain Manby's purpose in visiting the Greenland fisheries was to prove the utility of a harpoon-gun, an explosive shell, and several harpoons of a new construction. Their utility was fatal to them, for it was held to be inimical to vested interests, the argu- ment being that if the new apparatus came into general use, every man who could point a gun could act as a harpooner.
In his last whaling voyage but one, that of 1822, the unusually open state of the water enabled Captain Scoresby to land on the Eastern coast of Greenland, which had been blocked up with im- passable ice ever since the fourteenth century, and to survey it to the extent of four hundred miles, from 69° 30' to 720 30' N. He saw no inhabitants, but the traces of them he met with, not being entirely those of an uncivilized race, seemed to him to indicate that the descendants of the long lost Norwegian colonists were still in existence. It was on the day he first landed in Greenland, the 24th of July, that Captain Scoresby beheld what must have been to him the most exquisitely delightful of rare optical pheno- mena. Often as his description of it has been quoted, it will bear repetition.
' On my return to the ship, about eleven o'clock, the night was beauti- fully fine, and the air quite mild. The atmosphere, in consequence of the warmth, being in a highly refractive state, a great many curious appear- ances were presented by the land and icebergs. The most extraordinary effect of this state of the atmosphere, however, was the distinct inverted image of a ship in the clear sky, over the middle of the large bay or inlet, the ship itself being entirely beyond the horizon. Appearances of this kind I have before noticed, but the peculiarities of this were the perfection of the image, and the great distance of the vessel that it represented. It was so extremely well defined that, when examined with a telescope, by Dolland, I could distinguish every sail, the general rig of the ship, and its parti- cular character ; insomuch, that I confidently pronounced it to be my father's ship, the Fame, which it afterwards proved to be, though, on com- paring notes with my father, I found that our relative position at the time gave our distance from one another very nearly thirty miles, being about seventeen miles beyond the horizon, and some leagues beyond the limit of direct vision."
The death of his wife, during his absence in 1822, probably confirmed the thought Captain Scoresby had long entertained of "taking his land tacks on board." The voyage of 1823 brought his adventures in the Arctic region to a close, and began his pre- parations for the priestly office. Entering Queen's College, Cam- bridge, as a "ten years man," being too old to be received in the usual way, he boarded with a country clergyman, who " coached " him so well in the classics that he was able to pass a respectable examination previous to his ordination as curate of Bessingby. This appointment he left within a year for the very appropriate one of chaplain to the Mariner's Church in Liverpool. In 1839, he took his degree of D.D. and was soon afterwards installed vicar of Bradford. Overworked in this charge, and "irreparably injured by the ill-usage "he had received at the hands of his parish- ioners, he resigned it in 1846, after a six month's tour in Canada and the States, the chief fruit of which was a proposal to the Bradford manufacturers to improve the condition of the female operatives by means suggested by his visit to Lowell. His wife, who had suffered with him, died during his second visit to the States in 1847 ; and in 1849, he married a third time, and fixed his home at Torquay. There he acted gratuitously as curate of Upton, and continued to write papers for the British Association and to make mag,netical investigations, especially with reference to iron ships. Deeply convinced of the practical importance of his views on this subject, he undertook, at the age of sixty-five, to confirm by a voyage to Australia, in an iron ship, the truth of what he had taught respecting the dangerous mutability of the magnetism in such vessels, and the necessity of using a compass fixed at the mast-head, as the only sure means of correcting the aberrations of the compass on deck. Leaving Plymouth on board the Royal Charter, in February, 1855, he returned to Liverpool in the August following, having fully accomplished the object of the last of his labours. For the particulars of the voyage we must refer our readers to his posthumous journal, in which they are fully set forth, contenting ourselves with the following summary of its results, given in a lecture, delivered by Dr. Scoresby, at Whitby, soon after his return to England— "I have stated that a ship at Melbourne would have her magnetic con- ,dition, according to my theory, turned upside down. The upper part of the ship which in England always has southern polarity, and attracts the North pole of the compass, would, in Melbourne, have northern polarity, and repel it. When the Royal Charter left Liverpool, and when she returned, her state might be thus represented- C,4 Deck
Southern magnetism.
r-
2iorthern magnetism. Keel. "The question is, Was the opposite the case in Melbourne) The first
opportunity of trying this was m entering Port Philip, when I found that the upper part of the ship had changed its polarity, and was now northern. On going down the vessel, I found the polarity diminished until, in the middle, there was no polarity. I subsequently found that the longitudinal line of non-polarity was not straight, but waved. Above this line the North Pole was repelled, below it was attracted. My theory was verified. Every- thing that in Liverpool was northern was now southern. This went so far that the pillars, anchor-stocks, and standards of the upper parts, instead of baying southern polarity, had in every case northern polarity. Every prin- ciple I had Owned was completely verified. The compasses were adjusted on the very ingenious principle of the Astronomer Royal, the errors being compensated by antagonistic magnets in England. Exactly as I had said before the British Association in 1846, these compasses not exactly ceased to be useful, but they actually went further wrong than any others on board. Every principle of a compass aloft, as the only means of a safe guidance, was fully established. If he cannot combat with an enemy, a vise general gets as far away from him as he can. In our compass aloft, we had our perfect guide and standard of reference at all times. We always knew what coarse the Royal Charter was steering, and never had the slight- est doubt, notwithstanding the changes going on in other parts of the ship."
Anxiety about the issue of his undertaking, too great fatigue and exposure of body throughout the voyage, and want of due re- pose after his return, probably accelerated the progress of the ma- lady which had taken hold of Dr. Scoresby before his departure. After delivering several lectures in Edinburgh in the winter of 1856, a sudden seizure of illness compelled him to return to Tor- quay, where he died of disease of the heart on the 21st of March, 1857. He had exhausted the frail remnant of a well-spent life in the service of humanity. F.
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