Sherard Osborn (25 April 1822 – 6 May 1875) was a Royal Navy admiral and Arctic explorer. Biography Born in Madras, he was the son of an Indian army officer. Osborn entered the navy as a first-class volunteer in 1837, serving until 1844 on , , and . In 1838, he was entrusted with the command of a gunboat at the attack on Kedah in the Malay Peninsula, and was present at the Battle of Canton in 1841, and at the Battle of Woosung in 1842. From 1844 until 1848, he was gunnery mate and lieutenant on , the flagship of Sir George Seymour in the Pacific. He took a prominent part in 1849 in advocating a new search expedition for Sir John Franklin, and in 1850 was appointed to the command of the steam-tender HMS Pioneer (1850) in the Arctic expedition under Horatio Thomas Austin, in the course of which he performed a remarkable sledge-journey to the western extremity of Prince of Wales Island. He published an account of this voyage, entitled Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal (1852), and was promoted to the rank of commander shortly afterwards. In the new expedition of 1852–1854 under Sir Edward Belcher he again took part as commander of Pioneer. In 1856, he published the journals of Captain Robert McClure, giving a narrative of the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Early in 1855, he was called to active service in the Crimean War as the captain of HMS Vesuvius (1839). After seeing considerable action in the Black Sea he was promoted to post-rank in August 1855, and was appointed to , in which he commanded the Sea of Azov squadron until the end of the war. For these services he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath, awarded the Legion of Honour, and the Turkish Order of the Medjidie. In 1859 he published the work A cruise in Japanese waters, The fight on the Peiho and some of the first Japanese illustrations (since a shipment in made 1620 by John Saris) which he published initially in the Once a Week periodical which Osborn acquired in Edo in 1859. As captain of , he took a prominent part in the operations of the Second Opium War, and performed a piece of difficult and intricate navigation in taking his ship up the Yangtse to Hankow in 1858. He returned to England