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Ross (1818-1819)Ross, Sir John (1777-1856). A Voyage of Discovery Made [...] for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin's Bay, and Enquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage. London: J. Murray, 1819.
Shortly after the Napoleonic wars, the British Admiralty became interested again in the search for the Northwest Passage. In 1818 it organized an expedition with the mission to look for that passage starting from Davis Strait and Baffin Bay; John Ross was made leader of the expedition, with William Edward Parry as his second in command. John Ross was born in Scotland in 1777 and enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1786. For the next 30 years he navigated almost without interruption and was very successful as an officer, which is why he was chosen by the Admiralty to command the 1818 Arctic expedition. Ross left London in April with two ships and entered Lancaster Strait on August 31. After a few hours of exploration, he thought he saw the crest of a mountain range blocking access to the west; he named it the Crocker range and decided to retrace his steps, against the advice of his subordinate officers including Parry. Soon after his return to England, at the beginning of 1819, Ross published the account of his voyage of exploration. The disagreement between him and Parry about the existence of the Crocker mountains came out into the open, and the secretary of the Admiralty himself cast serious doubts on their existence. However, some ten years later, Ross recognized his errors, while adding that "in reality, the whole history of navigation is full of such errors and false conclusions." Ross did, however, have an opportunity to restore his prestige as an explorer. He managed to convince his rich friend Felix Booth, the distiller of Booth gin, to finance an expedition into the Arctic using a steamship, the Victory. Ross took on his nephew, John Clark Ross, as his second in command and set out in May 1829. But the following September the Victory got trapped in ice floes, and its crew stayed four years in the Arctic. After their return to London in October 1833, the explorers became famous: they had not only set an amazing record of survival in the Arctic, but their forced stay had also enabled James Clark Ross to determine the position of the magnetic pole on the west coast of the Boothia Peninsula. In later years, from 1839 to 1846, John Ross served as British consul in Stockholm. In 1850, at the age of 72, he led a search party which tried without success to find the explorer John Franklin who had disappeared in the Arctic. John Ross died in London in 1856.
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