A fine expedition watercolour depicting teams of sailors from the crews of HMS Hecla and HMS Fury cutting a channel in the frozen sea in order to settle their icebound ships in the optimum spot to overwinter.
The artist, identified on the verso as Admiral Joseph Sherer, entered the navy in 1811 on board the Defiance. In 1821 he joined the crew of the bomb ship Hecla under the command of George Francis Lyon. Sherer was promoted to Lieutenant during the 1821-23 Arctic voyage on which this watercolour was painted, the second of Sir William Edward Parry’s expeditions to attempt the navigation of the Northwest Passage. Hecla was accompanied by her sister vessel Fury, and they passed through the Hudson Strait into Fox Basin, where they explored Repulse Bay, finding it to be landlocked. They subsequently charted the coast of the Melville Peninsula, in the hope of finding a navigable route through to the Behring Strait.
The picture dramatises a key moment in the expedition, when in October of 1821 the two ships found the thickening ice to be impassable, and the captains instructed their crews to reposition the ships as best they could to overwinter safely. This was achieved with the use of ice-saws, shovels, and hooks, with which they cut free-flowing channels through the freezing surface of the sea. Parry described the episode in his official account of the expedition, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific … (1824):
“When to the ordinary difficulties which the navigation of the polar seas presents were superadded the disadvantages of a temperature at or near zero, its necessary concomitant the young ice, and twelve hours of darkness daily, it was impossible any longer to entertain a doubt of the expediency of immediately placing the ships in the best security that could be found for them during the winter, rather than run the risk of being permanently detached from the land, by and endeavour to regain the continent. Captain Lyon being of the same opinion with myself, we proceeded on our return to the beach to sound the northeastern part of the bay, by making holes in the ice which was now strong enough to bear us. […] We now for the first time walked on board the ships; and before night had them moved into their places, by sawing a canal for 200 or 300 yards through the ice. The average thickness of the new floe was already three inches and a quarter, but being in some places much less, several officers and men fell in and, from the difficulty of getting a firm place to rest on, narrowly escaped a more serious inconvenience than a thorough wetting. The whole sheet of ice, even in those parts which easily bore a man’s weight, had a waving motion under the feet, like that of leather or any other tough flexible substance set afloat: a property which is I believe peculiar to saltwater ice.”
The published narrative includes an illustration of this scene, after a drawing by Captain Lyon. It is satisfyingly different to the present depiction, showing the ships passing through the newly cut channels, with the detritus of their construction on the ice in the foreground. Sherer’s drawing however is of a much earlier stage in the process, with the men actively cutting into the ice and the ships in the background still very much frozen fast.
Sherer would return to the Arctic with Parry again for the 1824 expedition during which Fury had to be abandoned in the ice. Sherer clearly proved himself on the earlier expedition, as he took a much more involved role under his new rank of Lieutenant. He appears frequently in Parry’s narrative of the third expedition, and his draftsmanship was put into good use surveying the coast. Parry named a flat-topped hill in the vicinity of Neill’s Harbour for Sherer. He would go on to hold command posts in the West India station, where he was engaged in anti-slaving patrols, seizing numerous vessels and releasing the enslaved captives onboard. In 1836 he received a Knighthood of the Order of the Guelphs.
We have been able to trace no other Arctic watercolours by Sherer, and any such first hand expedition artworks are increasingly scarce on the market.
Parry, W.E., Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific … (1824), pp.117-118.
