Judaicarum;" "Three Decades of Divine Meditations;" "Four Books of Epigrams in Latin Elegiacs;" animadversions on Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World; on Hobbes' Leviathan; on Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici, &c., &c.—J. T.
ROSS, Alexander, a Scottish poet, was the son of a small farmer in the parish of Kincardine O'Neill in Aberdeenshire, where he was born in 1699. He was educated at Marischal college, Aberdeen, where he took the degree of A.M. He was for some time a tutor in the family of Sir William Forbes of Craigievar, and afterwards successively parish schoolmaster of Aboyne, of Laurencekirk, and finally of Lochee in Forfarshire, where he settled in 1734, and remained no less than fifty-two years. The emoluments of his office did not exceed £20 a year, exclusive of a small glebe; yet on this scanty income the worthy man contrived to support a wife and family in comfort and independence. Dr. Beattie, who knew Ross well, says he was "a good-humoured, social, happy old man, modest without clownishness, and lively without petulance." Dr. Irving also speaks of him as "a man of simple manners, of a religious deportment, and assiduous in discharging the duties of his station." He died in 1784. Ross had nearly reached the patriarchal age of threescore and ten before he became an author. In 1768 he published his "Helenore, or Fortunate Shepherdess"—a poem in the Scottish dialect, which has taken its place among the cottage classics in the north of Scotland. Ross was also the author of the clever and deservedly popular songs, "The Rock and the Wee Pickle Tow," and "Woo'd and Married and a'."—J. T.
ROSS, Sir James Clark, a distinguished officer of the royal navy of Britain, was born in 1800, and entered the navy at the age of twelve. After several years of active service under his uncle, Captain John Ross, in the Baltic and elsewhere, he commenced in 1818 his long and varied course of experience in polar navigation, sailing as admiralty midshipman in the Isabella, fitted out, in company with the Alexander, for the purpose of seeking the north-west passage.—(See Ross, John.) In the succeeding expeditions of 1819, 1821, and 1824, devoted to the same object, James Ross was on each occasion the companion of Parry, sailing in the first of that navigator's voyages in the Hecla (as midshipman), and in the second and third in the Fury, holding on the last occasion the rank of lieutenant. In 1827 he again accompanied Parry, in that officer's endeavours to reach the North Pole, and his name marks the furthest point of land (off the extreme north of Spitzbergen), which was seen by the expedition.—(See Parry, Edward.) On his return Ross was promoted to the rank of commander. A brief period of repose followed, succeeded by four years of arduous and terrible experience. In 1829 his uncle, Captain John Ross, having obtained through private munificence the means of making a further effort in pursuit of north-west discovery. Commander Ross sailed as chief officer under him, in the Victory, which vessel was ultimately abandoned in the ice. This expedition, absent from England for above four years, owed whatever of scientific value attached to its results to the talent and enterprise of James Ross, who succeeded in fixing the place of the North Magnetic Pole, and planted there with his own hands a staff bearing the British flag (lat. 70° 5´, long. 96° 46´ W.). Ross was rewarded with the rank of captain shortly after his return, and was actively employed in various duties during the next five or six years, one amongst them being the making a voyage to Baffin Bay in the winter of 1836, in the hope of carrying relief to some missing whale-ships. The chief part of his labours during this period, however, were devoted to magnetic observations on the coasts of Britain, under the orders of the admiralty. The distinguishing event of his career was now approaching. It was determined by the British government to send a scientific expedition to the antarctic seas, and James Ross was appointed to the command. The expedition, which left England in April, 1839, consisted of the Erebus and Terror (the same vessels with which, six years later, Franklin departed on his last and ill-fated voyage), Captain Ross himself sailing in the former. The enterprise was in the highest measure successful. During an absence of four years from England, Ross explored large portions of the antarctic seas, discovered and traced for above seven hundred miles an extensive line of coast, the South Victoria Land of our maps, between the 70th and 78th parallels, and penetrated to within less than twelve degrees of the South Pole (S. lat. 78° 10´). James Ross has thus had the unexampled good fortune to attain distinction alike within the neighbourhood of the northern and the southern poles, and has made the nearest approach attained by man in the direction of each. The place of the South Magnetic Pole was approximately determined by numerous observations. The gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London was awarded to Ross in 1841, and shortly after his return to England, in 1843, he received the honour of knighthood. A narrative of the expedition, from his own pen, appeared in 1847. One further experience of polar navigation remained. In 1848 Sir James Ross took the command of the earliest in date of the expeditions fitted out for the purpose of carrying aid to Franklin, then already absent three years from England.—(See Franklin.) It proved unsuccessful, as did so many of the like efforts made during subsequent years. Ross passed a winter (1848-49) at Port Leopold, in N. lat. 75° 50´, W. long. 90° 20´, and, with the aid of his officers, obtained many important accessions to geographical knowledge on the coasts of North Somerset and Boothia peninsula. His ships, the Enterprise and Investigator, were not released from the ice until near the end of August, and then only for an interval of a few days, when they became completely inclosed in the pack, drifting to the eastward through Barrow Strait, and were carried with it into the open waters of Baffin Bay, whence they ultimately returned to England, in November, 1849. He attained the rank of rear admiral in 1856, and died in 1862.—W. H.
ROSS, Sir John, uncle of the preceding, was born in 1777 at Balsarroch, in the county of Wigton, Scotland. He entered the royal navy of Britain when thirteen years of age, and thence to his death in 1856 was, with rare intervals, engaged in active duties, either afloat or on shore. Few officers, indeed, have gone through a more varied course of experience. Ross's earlier years on ship-board were passed alternately in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and North seas, on the shores of Holland and Spain, and the British coasts, several of them under the command of Sir James Saumarez. He was engaged in three different actions during the war. In 1818, then holding the rank of commander, Ross was intrusted with the earliest in date of that series of expeditions in search of the north-west passage which distinguish the naval records of Britain during the nineteenth century. It consisted of two ships, the Isabella and the Alexander, commanded respectively by Ross himself and Lieutenant Parry; conjointly with it the Dorothea and Trent, under Buchan and Franklin, sailed to the Northern seas.—(See Buchan.) The voyage of the Isabella and Alexander did little more than make the circuit of Baffin Bay, and verify the discoveries of Baffin made two centuries before. An imaginary barrier of mountains stayed the progress of the ships up Lancaster Sound, and they returned home in the autumn of the year. Ross was promoted to the rank of captain on his return. Above ten years elapsed before Ross had the opportunity of any further enterprise in the direction of arctic search. During the interval. Parry had made his series of memorable voyages, and Lancaster Sound, upon which Ross had in 1818 turned his back, had been proved to constitute the gateway to the seas that wash the northern shores of the American continent. Private munificence afforded Captain Ross the opportunity of retrieving his tarnished reputation.—(See Booth, Felix.) In 1829 he sailed in command of the Victory, in renewed search of the north-west passage, his nephew, James C. Ross, accompanying him. This enterprise forms the distinguishing event of Captain Ross's life. The voyagers were absent from England during upwards of four years (May, 1829, to October, 1833), the intervening period having been passed amidst experience of the perils and privations that belong to arctic research. Proceeding through Baffin Bay and Lancaster Sound, and down Prince Regent Inlet, the Victory had become frozen in upon the eastern shore of the tract of land named Boothia Felix by Ross (himself its discoverer), and the winter of 1829-30, was passed in Felix Harbour, lat. 70°. A second and a third winter—an interval of a few days alone separating, upon each occasion, the long and dreary seasons—were passed in the same vicinity, and at length, in the spring of 1832, it was necessary to abandon the ship. Dragging their boats over the ice, along the western shore of Boothia Gulf and Prince Regent Inlet, Ross and his companions reached Barrow Strait, but were ultimately compelled to pass a fourth winter upon the spot known as Fury Beach (on the shore of North Somerset), where the Fury had been abandoned by Parry during his third voyage. In August, 1833, the sea was again open, and they succeeded in reaching
