He served under Francis Crozier as Third Lieutenant on the ship HMS Terror during the 1845 Franklin Expedition which sought to discover and chart as-yet unexplored parts of the Canadian Arctic, including the Northwest Passage, and make scientific observations.

John Irving was born on Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland on 8 February 1815, the fourth son of John Irving, a lawyer who was a member of the Society of Writers to the Signet and childhood friend of Sir Walter Scott, and Agnes Hay, daughter of Colonel Lewis Hay, a noted engineering officer who perished in the 1799 Anglo-Russian Invasion of Holland.

A member of the Church of Scotland, Irving adopted extreme evangelical religious views aboard Belvidera through his friendship with fellow Midshipmen William E. Malcolm and George Kingston.

Irving and the fellow evangelicals aboard Edinburgh spent their time studying the Bible, Euclid's geometry texts, and Reverend John Sargent's Memoir of the Rev Henry Martyn, BD.

[1] In 1836, John Irving left the Royal Navy and with his younger brother David emigrated to Australia aboard the ship Portland with the intention of running a sheep station.

[5] In April 1848, Irving rediscovered a cairn where Lieutenant Graham Gore and Mate Charles Des Voeux had left a written message on command of Franklin and Fitzjames the year prior.

Skeletal remains found by the 1879 expedition of Frederick Schwatka in a shallow grave on Cape Jane Franklin on the west coast of King William Island has been proposed to belong to John Irving.

[7] The identification of the remains is based on the fact that Irving's second mathematical medal earned during his time at the Royal Naval College was found alongside the grave.