Yachting

The earliest evidence of Lord Dufferin’s attraction to water was Lady Wantage’s recollection of him in Venice in 1851, “when he and Lord Gifford appeared on the Grand Canal in a small India-rubber boat, or rather tub, which freak on the part of the two mad young Englishmen caused much excitement among the people, accustomed to the calm dignity of gondolas.”[1]

Three years later Dufferin’s bravado extended to a voyage in his yacht the ‘Foam’ to the Baltic, where the English and French fleets were bombarding the Russian fort at Bomarsund, in the Aalund Islands. His escapades under fire are legendary as, in the words of Lyall, his biographer: “Like many imaginative men, he was evidently anxious to try the effect of inoculation with the war-fever, to test himself in situations that string up human energies to their highest tone, to witness the reality of what everyone reads about, and to feel the sensation of being actually under fire.”[2]

The next year he cancelled a trip to the Crimea when he fell ill. However, he made up for lost time in 1856 by setting sail for Spitzbergen, just 10 degrees short of the North Pole. His first landfall after Stornoway was Iceland, where he visited the Geysers, partied with Prince Napoleon, and captivated the Icelandic ladies.

From Reykjavik he sailed in search of the mountainous dot on the chart called Jan Mayen Island. He was beset in an icy still calm by fog and ice, but eventually “the roof of grey suddenly split asunder, and I beheld the gap – thousands of feet overhead, as if suspended in the crystal sky- a cone of illuminated snow.”[3] After much maneuvering through the ice they finally reached the shore where they landed, carrying their discarded figure head, which he had replaced with Marochetti’s bronze of the Duchess of Argyll whilst in Stornoway, a white ensign, a flag-staff and a tin biscuit box containing a list of the crew and the name of the yacht. These they hauled up the mountainside where “having tied the tin box round her neck, and duly planted the white ensign of St George beside her, we left the superseded damsel, somewhat grimly smiling across the frozen ocean at her feet, until some Bacchus of a bear should come to relieve the loneliness of my wooden Ariadne.”[4]

Dufferin’s book ‘Letters from High Latitudes’, from which this passage was quoted, was a best seller. It is still in print and a joy to read. He even presented the queen with a copy, bound in driftwood from Spitzbergen.[5]

[1] Sir Alfred Lyall, The life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1905), 75. [2] Lyall, The life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 87. [3] Lord Dufferin, Letters from high latitudes, ed. John Murray (1856), 121. [4] Dufferin, Letters from high latitudes, 126. [5] PRONI D1071/H/V/1/14 (27 August 1857)