Vice-Admiral Sir George Strong Nares was a Royal Navy officer and Arctic explorer.
22 Facts About George Nares
2.
George Nares commanded the Challenger Expedition, and the British Arctic Expedition.
3.
George Nares was highly thought of as a leader and scientific explorer.
4.
George Nares was born on 24 April 1831, the third son and sixth child of Commander William Henry Nares, a British naval officer, and Elizabeth Rebecca Gould, at Llansenseld, near Abergavenny in Monmouthshire.
5.
George Nares was baptised at the church of St Bridget, Llansanffraid on 22 May George Nares married Mary Grant, the eldest daughter of a Portsmouth banker, on 22 June 1858.
6.
George Nares was educated at the Royal Naval School in New Cross in south London, and in 1845 joined the Royal Navy aboard HMS Canopus, an old battleship captured from the French.
7.
In 1854 George Nares received his promotion to lieutenant and specialised as a gunnery officer.
8.
George Nares joined the new battleship Conqueror in 1854, including service in the Mediterranean during the Crimean War.
9.
George Nares served as a lieutenant in charge of training cadets in Illustrious, and from 1859, in her successor, Britannia.
10.
George Nares was promoted to commander in 1862 and took command of the training ship Boscawen in September 1863.
11.
George Nares's duties involved keeping the communications between Sydney and Cape York Peninsula in the furthest north point of Queensland open.
12.
In recognition of his work in the Gulf of Suez, George Nares was promoted to the rank of captain in 1869.
13.
George Nares commissioned Shearwater in 1871 for the Red Sea, and on the outward voyage the ship conducted studies of the water currents in the Straits of Gibraltar for William Benjamin Carpenter, a biologist who believed that density differences between water masses generated ocean currents.
14.
George Nares was given command of the Challenger Expedition, a recognition of his experience in this field, but of his scientific approach to surveying and exploration.
15.
George Nares's officers were all naval surveyors, and the team of civilian scientists, led by Charles Wyville Thomson.
16.
George Nares reached as far south as before reaching the ice pack.
17.
Up to this time, it had been a popular theory that this route would lead to the supposed Open Polar Sea, an ice-free region surrounding the pole, but George Nares found only a wasteland of ice.
18.
George Nares was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876, received the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1877 and was awarded the Gold medal from the Societe de Geographie in 1879.
19.
George Nares left the ship on 11 March 1879, and from 1879 to 1896 was employed in the harbour department of the Board of Trade.
20.
George Nares was promoted on the retired list twice, firstly in 1887 to rear-admiral, and secondly in 1892 to vice-admiral.
21.
George Nares was a member of the ship committee for Robert Falcon Scott's 1912 Terra Nova Expedition.
22.
George Nares died at home aged 83 at Kingston upon Thames on 15 January 1915, and was buried in Long Ditton churchyard in Surrey.