During the Opium War, Captain Elliot, the founder of the British colony of Hong Kong, sent a naval squadron under Commodore Sir JJ Gordon Bremer to officially take possession of Hong Kong Island for Her Majesty Queen Victoria on January 26, 1841. Bremer was extremely displeased when he discovered that one day earlier, Captain Sir Edward Belcher, Lieutenant Kellett and the crew of HMS Sulphur had already taken possession of the island, raised the Union Jack flag, drunk to Her Majesty's health and given three hearty cheers.

Belcher and Kellett had earlier arrived in Singapore on their return journey to England, after a five year, round-the-world voyage conducting a marine survey, when they were ordered to sail to China and join the British fleet there. They were attached to the Hydrographic Department of the Royal Navy, responsible for producing admiralty charts.

About the only perk that these explorers received was the privilege of giving an English name to the territories that they charted. The place names of very few locations that Belcher named after himself have survived possibly for homonymous reasons – Belcher is not a pretty name. For example, Belcher Valley is now called Happy Valley. Legend has it that its moniker was changed after an amorous Victorian cartographer proposed marriage to a young lady on an unnamed beach during a picnic. When he was rejected he called the picnic site Repulse Bay. He proposed to her again at Belcher Valley and was accepted. He renamed the site Happy Valley to commemorate the joyful occasion. Like Belcher, other Royal Navy captains frequently named places they explored after themselves, their relations and friends. There is even a case of a hydrographer naming an island on the Yangtze River Rover Island, after his rabid Irish retriever who died there. Royal Navy cartographers such as Captains Cook and Vancouver have fared rather better than Belcher, as has Lieutenant Kellett. In Hong Kong, Mount Kellett and Kellett Island – the home of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club – still carry his name.

Kellett is best known as an Arctic explorer. Although Sir Robert McClure is credited with discovering the North West Passage, some historians think that Kellett should have been awarded that honour, or even Lieutenant Bedford Pim, whom Kellett sent across the ice flows to establish the vital contact with McClure's expedition. Both Kellett and McClure, whose ships were icebound, would almost certainly have been able to sail through the passage from different directions when the ice melted the next summer had they not been ordered to abandon their ships by Belcher, the commander of the expedition. When the ice melted, Kellett's ship the HMS Resolute drifted unmanned, like a ghostly Marie Celeste, for more than 2,000 kilometres through the Davis Strait in between Baffin Island and Greenland.

"She must, at first, have looked like a phantom ship," wrote Captain James Buddington of the American whaler the George Henry, "a spirit of some ocean child risen from the deep and stalking forth upon the sea, still wrapped in its white grave clothes."

Buddington and his crew boarded Kellett's ship and took her back to New London, Connecticut. She was bought by the US Congress, refitted and returned to Queen Victoria. This early example of the special relationship between America and the United Kingdom was much appreciated by the British.

Years later, when the ship was broken up, a desk was made from her timbers and presented to President Hayes. The Resolute Desk, as it is known, languished in a storeroom at the White House until it was rescued by President John F Kennedy, who put it in the Oval Office. It was used by Presidents Reagan and Clinton and is still in use in the White House today.