J. Ross Browne

John Ross Browne (February 11, 1821 in Beggars Bush, Dublin, Ireland – December 9, 1875 in Oakland, California), often called J. Ross Browne, date of birth sometimes given as 1817, was an Irish-born American traveler, artist, writer and government agent. He was Minister to China.

In the late 1970s, Ralston Purina opened a chain of seafood restaurants named after Browne, called J Ross Browne's Whaling Station.

Biography

John Ross Browne was the third of seven children born to Thomas Egerton Browne, an Irish newspaper editor, and his wife, Elizabeth (Buck) Browne. Thomas Browne was an ardent nationalist who ran afoul of the Dublin Castle administration and was sent to prison, but released on condition of his leaving Ireland. In 1832 or 1833 the family emigrated to the United States. They settled in Louisville, Kentucky, where Thomas became a schoolteacher and eventually editor and proprietor of the Louisville Daily Reporter.

Browne briefly attended Louisville Medical Institute, an experience that inspired his first book, Confessions of a Quack (1841). In 1842, after working several years on a riverboat, he signed on to a whaling ship. In 1846 he published the book Etchings of a Whaling Cruise at Harper & Brothers, New York, which earned him recognition as an artist and writer, and is thought to have influenced Herman Melville. He married Lucy Anne Mitchell in 1844. The couple had nine children.

In 1849, at the time of the California Gold Rush, Browne moved to California and worked in various jobs for the government, as an agent for the Treasury Department, surveyor of customs houses and mints, investigator of Indian and Land Office affairs, and official reporter for the state constitutional convention. He published parts of these experiences in the popular press as From Crusoe's Island (1864). He then went on a trip to Europe and the Middle East, published his impressions serially at Harper's Magazine and then in book form as Yusef (1853). Browne and his family moved in 1861 to Germany, an experience that resulted in An American Family in Germany (1866), with Browne's side trips detailed in The Land of Thor (1866). In 1863 he returned to the American West, vividly describing Arizona, Sonora and other regions in his Adventures in the Apache Country (1869). He was appointed Minister to China in 1868, but was recalled in 1870.