James Clark Ross (1800–1862) was an explorer who served in the Royal Navy and made his first Arctic trip in 1818 on an unsuccessful mission to find the North-West Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On the basis of his polar experience, he was appointed to lead further expeditions, and by 1839 he found himself on the opposite side of the world in the Antarctic, with Joseph Dalton Hooker as his on-board naturalist. This two-volume account of the voyage was published in 1847. Ross' findings led him to the conclusion that there was life on the sea floor to at least 730 metres, which challenged the prevailing 'azoic hypothesis' that nothing could live beneath 550 metres. The work, which includes oceanic and climatic observations, is an important contribution to the development of oceanography and scientific knowledge about the Antarctic.