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John Ross offers a contrasted image as a British naval officer. I attempt to read Ross’s narrative of his adventures, Exploring Baffin’s Bay (1819), from a socio-rhetorical perspective, showing first how his text implicitly produces images of the self and of the other. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ I then replace the explorer’s rhetoric in its sociological context, that of the Admiralty’s ‘worthy officers,’ the codes of which seem to have been misconstrued by the simple Scottish seaman.