JEFFERYS, Thomas.

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Voyages from Asia to America, First edition in English of Gerhard Friedrich Müller's German study, representing "the most extensive account in English of Bering's polar expedition and of the discovery of the Bering Strait and the Western limits of North America" (Hill). Müller (1705-1783) spent a decade exploring the geography of Siberia between 1733 and 1743, when he served as historian on Vitius Bering's Second Kamchatka, or "Great Northern", Expedition. The present English publication translates Muller's Nachrichten von Seereisen und zur See gemachten Entdeckungen, published in Volume III of his larger history titled Sammlung Russischer Geschichte (1758). It covers both of Bering's expeditions, as well as Spangenberg's 1739 exploration of Kamchatka and Japan. Müller unearthed archival evidence in Jakutsk suggesting that it was not Vitus Bering who first crossed the Bering Strait in 1728, but rather the Russian fur trader Semjon Deschnjow, along with Fedor Popov and Gerasim Ankudinov, years earlier. The editor Thomas Jefferys (1719-1771) added a preface and three maps which were not included in Muller's German edition. Jefferys had been appointed geographer to George III and ran a commercial map-printing business, making him "a principal figure in the emergence of London as an international centre of cartographic enterprise" (ODNB). The first map shows a view of the Russian discoveries in the Pacific, and it is copied from Muller's 1754 and 1758 version with little changes.

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