Sir John Ross
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!
Sir John Ross, (born June 24, 1777, Balsarroch, Wigtownshire, Scot.—died Aug. 30, 1856, London, Eng.), British naval officer whose second Arctic expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, the North American waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, located the north magnetic pole.
On his second expedition, to what is now Canada’s Northwest Territories (1829–33), Ross discovered and surveyed Boothia Peninsula, King William Island, and the Gulf of Boothia. During a sledge journey in 1831, his nephew James Clark Ross located the magnetic pole. The following year the party’s ship was crushed in the ice. John Ross and his men were rescued by a whaler in the summer of 1833 and returned to England. In 1834 he was knighted. After serving as British consul at Stockholm from 1839 to 1846, in 1850 he undertook a third and unsuccessful voyage to the North American Arctic to find the lost explorer Sir John Franklin. Knighted in 1834, he became a rear admiral in 1851. He published a number of works, including Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage (1835).
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
Arctic: 19th-century attempts at the passage…first of them, under Captain John Ross in 1818, retraced almost exactly Baffin’s journey of two centuries earlier and repeated his error of mistaking the sounds for bays. Second in command to Ross was William (later Sir William) Parry. He was not convinced that no sound existed, and in 1819–20,…
London 1970s overviewAs Britain’s finances spiraled downward and the nation found itself suppliant to the International Monetary Fund, the seeming stolidity of 1970s London concealed various, often deeply opposed, radical trends. The entrepreneurial spirit of independent record labels anticipated the radical economic…
LondonLondon, city, capital of the United Kingdom. It is among the oldest of the world’s great cities—its history spanning nearly two millennia—and one of the most cosmopolitan. By far Britain’s largest metropolis, it is also the country’s economic, transportation, and cultural centre. London is situated…