Ross had a cold reception on his return, and Scott wrote to Hooker in 1905: 

“At first it seems inexplicable when one considers how highly his work is now appreciated.  From the point of view of the general public, however, I have always thought that Ross was neglected, and as you once said he is very far from doing himself justice in his book.  I did not know that Barrow was the bete noire who did so much to discount Ross’s results.  It is an interesting sidelight on such a venture."[11]

In discussing and urging the importance of the Antarctic Expedition which was finally sent under Scott in the Discovery, Hooker urged the importance of work in the South Polar Ocean, which swarms with animal and vegetable life.  Commenting upon the fact that the large collections made chiefly by himself had never been worked out, except the diatoms, he writes: 

“A better fate, I trust, awaits the treasures that the hoped-for Expedition will bring back, for so prolific is the ocean that the naturalist need never be idle, no, not even for one of the twenty-four hours of daylight during a whole Antarctic summer, and I look to the results of a comparison of the oceanic life of the Arctic and Antarctic regions as the heralding of an epoch in the history of biology."[12]

When Ross went to the Antarctic it was generally thought that there was neither food nor oxygen nor light in the depths of the ocean, and that therefore there was no life.  Among other things the investigations of Ross gave ground for thinking this was not the case.  Later still, in 1873, the possibility of laying submarine cables made it necessary to investigate the nature of the abyssal depths, and the Challenger proved that not only does life, and in quite high forms, exist there, but that there are fish which can see.  It is now almost certain that there is a great oxidized northward-creeping current which flows out of the Antarctic Ocean and under the waters of the other great oceans of the world.

It was the good fortune of Ross, at a time when the fringes of the great Antarctic continent were being discovered in comparatively low latitudes of 66 deg. and thereabouts, sometimes not even within the Antarctic Circle, to find to the south of New Zealand a deep inlet in which he could sail to the high latitude of 78 deg..  This inlet, which is now known as the Ross Sea, has formed the starting-place of all sledging parties which have approached the South Pole.  I have dwelt upon this description of the lands he discovered because they will come very intimately into this history.  I have also emphasized his importance in the history of Antarctic exploration because Ross having done what it was possible to do by sea, penetrating so far south and making such memorable discoveries, the next necessary step in Antarctic exploration was that another traveller should follow up his work on land.  It is an amazing thing that sixty years were allowed to elapse before that traveller appeared.  When he appeared he was Scott.  In the sixty years which elapsed between Ross and Scott the map of the Antarctic remained practically unaltered.  Scott tackled the land, and Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling.