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companion Mount Terror, after his ships, before continuing for 200 miles (320 kilometres) along the vast ice shelf. No geographical feature like it had been seen before by man. Ross’s discoveries, including that of Cape Adare and the sheltered McMurdo Sound, which would play a major role in later expeditions, made his expedition perhaps the most significant of his time.
Above: The crews of Erebus and Terror celebrating New Year’s Day 1842 on an ice-floe, in another charming watercolour by John Edward Davis, which was later the basis for a popular print published in London in 1847.
Ross’s one regret was that that he was unable to lay claim to the Magnetic South Pole. Trying to remain positive, he wrote to Prince Albert: ‘… although our hopes of complete attainment have been thus defeated, it is some satisfaction to have approached the [Magnetic South] Pole more nearly by some hundred miles than any of our predecessors ….’ In his published account of the expedition he would continue: It was nevertheless painfully vexatious … to feel how nearly that chief object of our undertaking had been accomplished: and but few can understand the deep feelings of regret with which I felt myself compelled to abandon the perhaps too ambitious hope I had so long cherished of being permitted to plant the flag of my country on both the magnetic poles of our globe; but the obstacles
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