A carved bust of Dr William Ross (1823-1904), who was Assistant Surgeon of HMS 'Virago' when that ship visited Pitcairn Island in 1853 and one of the islanders did this portrait of him in whale ivory.

Ross was educated at Aberdeen, graduated with a medical degree in 1844 and became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in the same year. He entered the navy in 1845, and served as Assistant Surgeon in ‘Calliope’ in the New Zealand War of 1846-48. In 1853, now in the 'Virago in the Pacific, he was in medical charge of the expedition across the Isthmus of Darien from the Pacific to the Atlantic and later helped to rescue an American expedition lost in the same area. During the war with Russia in 1854, he was at the attack on Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka by the combined British and French squadrons and in 1855 was at the capture of Chilean pirates in the Straits of Magellan before becoming surgeon in the ‘Vesuvius’ in the Black Sea and Sea of Azoff. He was then (1857-8) surgeon in the ‘Assurance’ in India and Burma during the Indian Mutiny, was promoted to the rank of Fleet Surgeon in 1868, and retired in 1881 after finally serving as Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals and Fleets. He received a Greenwich Hospital pension in 1895.