3 Review(s)

Sir John Ross (1777-1856), the distinguished British naval officer and Arctic explorer, undertook three great voyages to the Arctic regions; accounts of his first and his second voyages are also reissued in this series. (During the latter, his ship was stranded in the unexplored area of Prince Regent Inlet, where Ross and his crew survived by living and eating as the local Inuit did.) In this volume, first published in 1855, the explorer describes his experiences during his third (privately funded) Arctic voyage, undertaken in 1850 as part of the effort to locate the missing expedition led by Sir John Franklin, his close friend. Ross also summarises in partisan style the previous efforts by the Royal Navy to find out what happened to the Erebus and Terror, and is scathing in his account of what he regards as the mismanagement and incompetence of the Admiralty.