James Weddell

[1] He entered the merchant service very early in his life and was apparently bound to the master of a Newcastle collier (a coal transport vessel) for some years.

He was aboard HMS Hope in 1813 in the English Channel when she captured the "Young True Blooded Yankee", a small American privateer.

[2] With the end of the Napoleonic War he was laid off on half pay in February 1816, and for a while resumed merchant voyages to the West Indies.

[3] Strachan, together with James Mitchell, a Scottish insurance broker living in London, owned the 160-ton brig Jane, an American-built ship taken during the War of 1812 and re-fitted for sealing.

News of the discovery of the South Shetland Islands had just broken, and Weddell suggested that fortunes might be made in the new sealing grounds.

However, there were some 45 sealers operating in the area, and seal were already becoming rare (a mere two years after the discovery of the islands), and so he scouted for new hunting grounds.

Michael McCleod, the captain of the Beaufoy, sighted the South Orkney Islands on 22 November 1821, an independent discovery from that of Powell and Palmer just a few days earlier.

Weddell appears to have been resident in Edinburgh, Scotland in the summer of 1826, when he was cited for non-payment of a debt of £245, loaned to him by the Commercial Bank.

[6] Papers now in the National Archives of Scotland show that he and his sponsors appear to have fallen out over liability for payment, and is probably more than coincidence that the navigational instruments taken by Weddell on board, cost, according to his book, £240.

The Leith merchants engaging him may have felt that these were unnecessary for a sealing expedition, yet Weddell has been criticised by such historians as David Walton for failing to take more instruments, not fewer.

[7] Weddell offered his services to the Admiralty with a proposal for a return voyage to the high southern latitudes, but was turned down.

The loss of the Jane meant financial ruin for Weddell, who was forced to take paid employment as a ship's master.