1774, in company with three smaller vessels recommended to his care. 2. Next day they made Gravesend steeple, in the Hague; but while they were steering for their port, a French privateer, that lay concealed among the Dutch fishing boats, suddenly came against them, singling out the Isabella, as the object of attack, while the rest dispersed and escaped. 3. The strength of the two ships was most unequal; for the Isabella mounted only four carriage guns and two swivels, and her crew consisted of only five men, three boys, besides the captain; while the privateer, commanded by Capt. Andre, had ten carriage guns and eight swivels, with seventy-five men, and three hundred small arms. Yet Capt. Hornby was nothing daunted. 4. Having animated his little crew by an appropriate address, and obtained their promise of standing by him to the last, he hoisted the British colours, and with his two swivel guns returned the fire of the enemy's chase guns. The Frenchman, in abusive terms, commanded him to strike. 5. Hornby coolly returned an answer of defiance, on which the privateer advanced, and poured such showers of bullets into the Isabella, that the captain found it prudent to order his brave fellows into close quarters. While he lay thus sheltered, the enemy twice attempted to board him on the larboard quarter; but by the dexterous turn of the helm, he frustrated both attempts, though the Frenchman kept firing upon him both with guns and small arms. 6. At two o'clock, when the action had lasted an hour, the privateer, running furiously in upon the larboard of the Isabella, entangled her bowsprit among the main shrouds, and was lashed fast to her.-Captain Andre now bawled out in a menacing tone, You English dog, strike.' Captain Hornby challenged him to come on board and strike his colours if he dared. 7. The exasperated Frenchman instantly threw in twenty men on the Isabella, who began to hack and hew into close quarters; but a general discharge of blunderbusses forced the assailants to retreat as fast as their wounds would permit. The privateer, being now disengaged from the Isabella, turned about, and made another attempt on the starboard side, when the valiant Hornby, and his mate, shot each his man, as the enemy were again lashing the ships together. 8. The Frenchman once more commanded him to strike; and the brave Englishman returning another refusal, twenty fresh men entered, and made a fierce attack on the close quarters with hatchets and pole axes, with which they had nearly cut their way through in three places, when the constant fire kept up by Captain Hornby and his crew, obliged them a second time to retreat, carrying their wounded with them, and hauling their dead after them with boat hooks. 9. The Isabella continued still lashed to the enemy, the latter with small arms, firing repeated volleys into her close quarters; but the fire was returned with such spirit and effect, the Frenchman repeatedly gave way. 10. At length Captain Hornby, seeing them crowding behind their mainmast for shelter, aimed a blunderbuss at them, which, being by mistake doubly loaded, containing twice twelve balls, burst in the firing, and threw him down, to the great consternation of his little crew, who supposed him dead. 11. In an instant, however, he started up again, though greatly bruised, while the enemy, among whom the blunderbuss had made dreadful havoc, disengaged themselves from the Isabella, to which they had been lashed an hour and a quarter, and sheered off with precipitation, leaving their grapplings, and a quantity of pole-axes, pistols, and cutlasses behind them. 12. The gallant Hornby now exultingly fired his two starboard guns into the enemy's stern. The indignant Frenchman immediately returned and renewed the conflict, which was carried on, yard-arm and yard-arm, with great fury for two hours together. 13. The Isabella was shot through her hull several times, her sails and rigging were torn to pieces, her ensign was dismounted, and every mast and yard damaged ; yet she still bravely maintained the conflict, and at last, by a fortunate shot which struck the Brancas between wind and water, obliged her to sheer off and careen. 14. While the enemy were retiring, Hornby and his little crew sallied out from their fastness, and, erecting their fallen ensign, gave three cheers. By this time, both vessels had driven so near the English shore, that immense crowds had assembled to be spectators of the action. 15. The Frenchman, having stopped his leak, returned to the combat, and poured a dreadful fire into the stern of the Isabella, when Captain Hornby was wounded by a ball in the temple, and bled profusely. The sight of their brave commander, streaming with blood, somewhat disconcerted his gallant companions, but he called to them briskly to keep their courage and stand to their arms, for his wound was not dangerous. 16. On this their spirits revived, and again taking post in their close quarters, they sustained the shock of three more tremendous broadsides, in returning which, they forced the Brancas, by another well aimed shot, to sheer off. The huzzas of the Isabella's crew were renewed, and they again set up their shattered ensign, which was shot through and through into honourable rags. 17. Andre, who was not deficient in bravery, soon returned to the fight, and, having disabled the Isabella, by five terrible broadsides, once more summoned Hornby to strike his colours. Captain Hornby turned to his gallant comrades. 'You see yonder, my lads,' pointing to the shore, 'the witnesses of your valour.' 18. It was unnecessary to say more; they one and all assuring him of their resolution to stand by him to the last; and finding them thus invincibly determined, he hurled his final defiance at the enemy. 19. Andre immediately run his ship upon the Isabella's starboard, and lashed close along side; but his crew murmured, and refused to renew the dangerous task of boarding, so that he was obliged to cut the lashings, and again retreat. 20. Capt. Hornby resolved to salute the privateer with a parting gun; and his last shot, fired into the stern of the Brancas, happening to reach the magazine, it blew up with a terrible explosion, and the vessel instantly went to the bottom. Out of seventy-five men, thirty-six were killed or wounded in the action, and all the rest, together with the wounded, perished in the deep, except three, who were picked up by the Dutch fishing boats. 21. This horrible catastrophe excited the compassion of the brave Hornby and his men; but they could, unfortunately, render no assistance to their ill-fated enemies, the Isabella having become unmanageable, and her boat being shattered to pieces. 22. Captain Hornby afterwards received from his sove reign, a large gold medal, in commemoration of his heroic conduct on this occasion; conduct, perhaps, not surpassed by any thing in the annals of British naval prowess. ICE ISLANDS. 1. THIS name is bestowed by seamen on the huge solid masses of ice which float on the sea near or within the polar circles. Many of these fluctuating islands are met with on the coast of Spitzbergen, to the great danger of the vessels employed in the Greenland fishery. 2. In the midst of these tremendous masses, navigators have been arrested and frozen to death. In this manner, the brave Sir Hugh Willoughby perished with all his crew in 1553; and in the year 1773, Lord Mulgrave, after every effort which the most accomplished seaman could make, to reach the termination of his voyage, was caught in the ice, and nearly experienced the same fate. 3. The scene he describes, divested of the horrors attendant on the eventful expectation of change, was most beautiful and picturesque. Two large ships becalmed in a vast basin, surrounded on all sides by ice islands of various forms; the weather clear; the sun gilding the circumambient ice, which was smooth, low, even, and covered with snow, except where pools of water, on a portion of the surface, shot forth new icy crystals and the smooth surface of the comparatively small space of sea in which they were hemmed. 4. Such is the picture drawn by our navigator amid the perils by which he was surrounded. After fruitless attempts to force their way through the fields of ice, the limits of these became at length so contracted, the ships were immoveably fixed. The smooth extent of surface was soon lost; the pressure of the pieces of ice, by the violence of the swell, caused them to pack; and fragment rose upon fragment, until they were in many places higher than the main yard. 5. The movements of the ships were tremendous and involuntary, in conjunction with the surrounding ice actuated by the current. The water having shoaled to fourteen fathoms, great apprehensions were entertained, as the grounding of the ice, or of the ships, would have been equally fatal: the force of the ice might have crushed them to atoms, or have lifted them out of the water, and have overset them: 6. Or, again have left them suspended on the summits of the pieces of ice at a tremendous height, exposed to the fury of the winds, or to the risk of being dashed to pieces by the failure of their frozen dock. An attempt was made to cut a passage through the ice; but after perseverance truly worthy of Britons, it proved ineffectual. 7. The commander, who was at all times master of himself, directed the boats to be made ready to be hauled over the ice, till they should reach navigable waters, proposing in them to make the voyage to England; but after they had thus been drawn over the ice for three progressive days, a wind having sprung up, the ice separated sufficiently to yield to the pressure of the ships in full sail. 8. After having laboured against the resisting fields of ice, they at length reached the harbour of Smeeringberg, at the west end of Spitzbergen. The vast islands of floating ice which abound in the high southern latitudes, are a proof that they are visited by a much severer degree of cold than equal latitudes towards the north pole. Captain Cook, in his second voyage, fell in with one of these islands in latitude 50° south. 9. It was about 50 feet high, and half a mile in circuit, being flat on the top, while its sides, against which the sea broke exceedingly high, rose in a perpendicular direction. In the afternoon of the same dav, the 10th of December, 1773, he fell in with another large, cubical mass of ice, about two thousand feet in length, four hundred feet in breadth, and in height two hundred feet. 10. Mr. Foster, the naturalist of the voyage, remarks, that according to the experiments of Boyle and Marian, the volume of ice is to that of sea water as 10 to 9: consequently by the known rules of hydrostatics, the volume of ice which rises above the surface of the water, is to that which sinks below it as 1 to 9. 11. Supposing, therefore, this mass of ice to have been of a regular figure, its depth under water must have been 1800 feet, and its whole height 2000, and its breadth at 400 feet, the entire mass must have contained 1600 mil |
