Memoirs by Commander James Felix Jones, I.N. Steam-Trip to the North of Baghdad, in April 1846; with notes of various objects of interest en route. Journey for the purpose of determining the tract of

£15,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A notoriously rare book, complete and in the original binding. Jones’s work is among the most important nineteenth-century sources on Ottoman Iraq, **with a particularly valuable study of Baghdad, in which the city is described in granular detail, from its coffee houses to Najdian horses.**The book is also beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured lithographed illustrations, chiefly focused on architecture, and maps. The large folding map of Baghdad is a spectacular achievement , especially so as it was based upon a clandestine survey by British officials who recorded its dimensions on their shirt sleeves. Felix Jones joined the Bombay Marine at the tender age of fourteen and first saw service in the Palinurus surveying the northern part of the Red Sea, whilst a later commission found him engaged on the first British survey of the Persian Gulf under Haines. In 1839 he surveyed the harbour of Kuwait (then referred to as Graine), and this led to an almost continuous period of service in the Middle East, ending in 1862 as Political Agent in the Persian Gulf, in which capacity he planned the British invasion of Persia. Memoirs… relates to his travels, surveying and archaeological researches in Ottoman Iraq, Kurdistan and the Kermanshah province of western Iran. R.M. Burrell, in his excellent introduction to the 1998 reprint (Archive Editions), stresses its importance and research value, singling out the Memoir on the Province of Baghdad for special praise: “For historians, the o

• Printing: later

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