John Ross 1818
The Northwest Passage 1
After the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, all seaways were all open to England. In the course of the setting up of the British Colonial Empire, the interest for polar research would extinguish for the following 200 years. It was not until 1818, only after the defeat of Napoleon, when Admiral Secretary John Barrows succeeded to reanimate an especially national motivated Polar research. John Ross commanded the first expedition to the North-West, which probably would have been successful if Ross had not been shrunk from a cloud bank in the Lancaster Sound – which he thought to be mountains.