Biography
Constantine John Phipps (1744-1792), later second Baron Mulgrave, was an officer of the Royal Navy and a British parliamentarian. In 1773, at the proposal of the Royal Society, he took command of the Racehorse to attempt, with the Carcass of Skeffington Lutwidge, the first official expedition of the British Crown towards the North Pole in a century and a half. Blocked by the pack ice at the Seven Islands, north of Spitsbergen, he brought back charts, soundings and previously unpublished scientific observations, as well as a young midshipman of fourteen, Horatio Nelson, the future victor of Trafalgar. His journal, published in London in 1774, remains a first-hand source on the polar exploration of the eighteenth century.
