Early life Ross was born in London, the son of George Ross and nephew of
John Ross, under whom the eleven-year-old entered the
Royal Navy on 5 April 1812. Ross was an active participant in the
Napoleonic Wars, being present at an action where
HMS Briseis, commanded by his uncle, captured
Le Petit Poucet (a French privateer) on 9 October 1812. Ross then served successively with his uncle on
HMS Actaeon and
HMS Driver.
Arctic exploration on the
Boothia Peninsula in 1831, from Robert Huish's 1835 book. Ross participated in John's unsuccessful first Arctic voyage in search of a
Northwest Passage in 1818 aboard
Isabella. Ross then served as supernumerary-commander of
HMS Victory in
Portsmouth for 12 months. On 28 October 1834 Ross was promoted to captain. In December 1835 he offered his services to the
Admiralty to resupply 11
whaling ships which had become trapped in
Baffin Bay. They accepted his offer, and he set sail in HMS
Cove in January 1836. The crossing was difficult, and by the time he had reached the last known position of the whalers in June, all but one had managed to return home. Ross found no trace of this last vessel,
William Torr, which was probably crushed in the ice in December 1835. He returned to Hull in September 1836 with all his crew in good health.
British Magnetic Survey From 1835 to 1839, except for his voyage with
Cove, he was one of the principal participants in the British Magnetic Survey, a magnetic survey of
Great Britain, with
Edward Sabine,
John Phillips and
Humphrey Lloyd. This also included some work on
geomagnetic measurements in
Ireland in 1834–1835, working with Sabine and Lloyd. In 1837, Ross assisted in T. C. Robinson's improvement of the
dip circle during the survey; anomalous results had been discovered by Ross in 1835 in
Westbourne Green. In 1838, Ross completed magnetic observations at 12 different stations throughout Ireland. The survey was completed in 1838; some supplementary measurements by
Robert Were Fox were also used.
Antarctic exploration On 8 April 1839, Ross was given orders to command an expedition to Antarctica for the purposes of 'magnetic research and geographical discovery'. Between September 1839 and September 1843, Ross commanded on
his own Antarctic expedition and charted much of the continent's coastline. Captain Francis Crozier was second-in-command of the expedition, commanding , with senior lieutenant
Archibald McMurdo. Support for the expedition had been arranged by
Francis Beaufort, hydrographer of the Navy and a member of several scientific societies. On the expedition was gunner
Thomas Abernethy and
ship's surgeon Robert McCormick, as well as
Joseph Dalton Hooker, who had been invited along as assistant ship's surgeon.
Erebus and
Terror were
bomb vessels—an unusual type of warship named after the mortar bombs they were designed to fire and constructed with extremely strong hulls, to withstand the recoil of the heavy weapons. The ships were selected for the Antarctic mission as being able to resist thick ice, as proved true in practice. En route to the
Southern Ocean, Ross established magnetic measurement stations in
Saint Helena,
Cape Town, and
Kerguelen before arriving in
Hobart in early 1840 and establishing a further permanent station with the help of governor
John Franklin before waiting for summer.). He then reached
Ross Island, later named after him by
Robert F. Scott, with the volcanoes
Mount Erebus and
Mount Terror, which were named for the expedition's vessels. They sailed for along the edge of the low, flat-topped ice shelf they called variously the Barrier or the Great Ice Barrier, later named the
Ross Ice Shelf in his honour. After being forced to overwinter in
Tasmania, Ross returned to the Ross Sea in December 1841 before travelling east past
Marie Byrd Land to the
Antarctic Peninsula. The next winter, the expedition overwintered in the
Falkland Islands before returning to survey the Antarctic Peninsula over the summer of 1842–1843. The expedition's main aim was to find the position of the
south magnetic pole. While Ross failed to reach the pole, he was able to determine its location. The expedition also produced the first accurate magnetic maps of the Antarctic. Ross's ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843. He was awarded the
Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations in 1843, knighted in 1844, and elected to the
Royal Society in 1848.
Search for Franklin's lost expedition in
Nunavut, Canada '' by
Stephen Pearce, 1851 On 31 January 1848, Ross was sent on one of three expeditions to find John Franklin. Franklin's second in command was Ross's close friend Francis Crozier. The other expeditions sent to find Franklin were the
Rae–Richardson Arctic expedition and the expedition aboard HMS
Plover and through the
Bering Strait. He was given command of , accompanied by . Because of heavy ice in
Baffin Bay he only reached the northeast tip of
Somerset Island where he was frozen in at
Port Leopold. In the spring, he and
Leopold McClintock explored the west coast of the island by sledge. He recognized
Peel Sound but thought it too ice-choked for Franklin to have used it. In fact, Franklin had used it in 1846 when the extent of sea ice had been atypically low. The next summer he tried to reach
Wellington Channel but was blocked by ice and returned to England. Ultimately every member of Franklin's expedition perished.
Personal life Ross married Ann Coulman in 1843. They had four children: James, Anne, Thomas and Andrew. A
blue plaque marks Ross's home in Eliot Place,
Blackheath, London. His closest friend was Francis Crozier, with whom he sailed many times. He also lived in the ancient
House of the Abbots of St. Albans in
Buckinghamshire. In the gardens of the Abbey there is a lake with two islands, named after the ships
Terror and
Erebus. Ross remained an officer in the Royal Navy for the rest of his life and was subsequently promoted several times, his final rank being
Rear-Admiral of the Red awarded in August 1861. Ross died at
Aston Abbotts on 3 April 1862, five years after his wife. They are buried together in the parish churchyard of St. James the Great.
In fiction Ross, played by British actor
Richard Sutton, is a secondary character in the 2018 AMC television series
The Terror, portrayed in a fictionalised version of his 1848 search for
Franklin's lost expedition, as well as in the 2007
Dan Simmons novel on which the series is based. Ross is also mentioned continually by
Jules Verne in his novel
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (for example, chapter XXV is entitled 'One of James Ross's foxes'). == Tributes ==