John Ross: His Artistic Side

John Ross (1777 – 1856)
British Navy, Arctic explorer, artist, writer.

Due to space restrictions aboard ship, many officers doubled as sketch artists. Their work was later developed into engravings. Sir Sir John Ross painted and sketched on his voyages to the Arctic.
He also wrote and edited the memoirs of Admiral Sir James Saumerez, Lord Nelson’s second in command.
Ross, was a Scottish rear admiral and Arctic explorer.
In 1786, aged only nine, he joined the Royal Navy as an apprentice. He served in the Mediterranean until 1789. In 1808, he acted as a captain in the Swedish Navy and in 1812 became a Commander.
Six years later, in 1818, he received the command of an Arctic expedition organized by the British Admiralty, the first of a new series of attempts to solve the question of a Northwest Passage. This entailed going around the extreme northeast coast of America and sailing to the Bering Strait. He was also to note the currents, tides, the state of ice and magnetism and to collect specimens he found on the way. In April of that year, Ross left London with two ships, and in August reached Lancaster Sound, in Canada.

There he re-examined the observations William Baffin, a previous British explorer, had made two hundred years before. But Ross went no further, He mistook mirages that appeared as mountains at the end of the strait. He named them "Crocker Hills," and returned to England despite the protests of several of his officers, including First Mate William Edward Parry and Edward Sabine. The account of his voyage, published a year later, brought to light their disagreement, and the ensuing controversy over the existence of Crocker Hills ruined his reputation.
This expedition failed to discover much that was new, and somewhat prejudiced the Arctic reputation of its leader, who attained the rank of captain on his return.

In 1829, Ross admitted he may have been wrong, and convinced one of his friends, Sir Felix Booth, (Booth’s Gin), to finance a second expedition. He left in May of that year, this time on the Victory, a side-wheel steam ship. They sailed past Lancaster Sound to a previously unexplored area, where their ship became stuck in the ice. The crew was stranded for four years, during which time they explored the regions to the west and north, with the help of local Inuit. On one of these explorations, Ross found the Magnetic North Pole.

In 1832, Ross and his crew abandoned their ship and walked to another shipwreck that had been abandoned by a different expedition many years earlier. A year went by before a break in the ice allowed them to leave, on that ship's longboats. They were eventually picked up by a British vessel and taken home. This impressive experience, as well as the scientific and ethnological information gathered by Ross's team, brought him the renown that he had long sought.

In 1850, he undertook a third voyage to the Arctic regions, this time in search of the missing expedition party of Sir John Franklin. He did not find them. Upon returning, he settled in Scotland, and died in London in 1856.