[1] In 1830, the whaling company Samuel Enderby & Sons appointed Biscoe master of the brig Tula and leader of an expedition to find new sealing grounds in the Southern Ocean.
Accompanied by the cutter Lively, the Tula left London and by December had reached the South Shetland Islands.
Biscoe correctly surmised that they were part of a continent and named the area Enderby Land in honour of his patrons.
[3] Biscoe again began charting the new coastline the expedition had found and by the end of April 1832 he had become the third man (after James Cook and Fabian von Bellingshausen) to circumnavigate the Antarctic continent.
The Biscoe Islands were discovered off the west coast of Graham Land in February 1832, during his Antarctic circumnavigation aboard Tula and Lively.
[5] Mount Biscoe is a distinctive 700m black peak, the high point of Cape Ann in East Antarctica.
After conversion to an ice-strengthened research ship for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, HMS Pretext was renamed RRS John Biscoe (1944).