TRAVELS IN SIBERIA: Including Excursions Northwards, Down The Obi, To The Polar Circle, And Southwards, To The Chinese Frontier.

First edition in English. Two volumes. 8vo. Publisher's original brown cloth, blind-stamped decoration to the covers, titles in gilt to the spines. Half title in volume I. Folding map frontispiece in volume II. An excellent near fine copy, the bindings square and tight with just a little bumping at the tips of the uniformly faded spines. The contents, with some spotting to the map and early and late pages, are otherwise clean throughout and without previous owner's marks. The pages largely uncut to the rear of both volumes. Scarce in original cloth, exceptionally so in this condition.

Adolph Erman was a physicist and traveller who embarked on a circumnavigation attempt in 1828, travelling from Berlin with the expedition of Christopher Hansteen as far as the Mongolian Border, before proceeding from Kyakhta alone after Hansteen turned back. He made it across the Sea of Okhotsk to Russia's south-eastern peninsula where at Petropavlovsk he joined Fedor Petrovich Litke and sailed to Tahiti, returning to Europe via South America. He wrote up his travels across five volumes published in Berlin from 1833 until 1842. After his award of a Royal Geographical Society Medal in 1844 - the speech conferring him that medal held him in the same esteem as Humboldt - William Cooley set about translating the Siberian portion of Erman's travels, which include finding the existence of a Siberian magnetic pole, and exploring the "life of the roaming Samoyede under the polar circle... in a climate which, at first view, seems hardly compatible with human existence" (preface). It is these parts of his journey that are covered in the present work. (Howgego III, E17).