Russie

Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Chita, Sretensk, Blagoveshchensk, TransBaikal villages, 17 May 1861 - 23 September 1880. Two manuscript journals of an English Engineer in Russian Far East, contracted to test and repair some of the pioneering steamships on the Rivers Amur and Shilka, and other important works in the Trans-Baikal region, beginning his work some 24 years before the founding of the Eastern Siberian Inland Navigation Company, and interacting several notables who were involved in the development projects. 8vo. The earliest volume comprises 113 pages of manuscript entries dating from 17 May 1861 to 22 July 1861 and then a few pages from and then from 1 January 1868 to 22 May 1870, with a tipped-in folding map of the Amur River. The subsequent volume contains 135 pages in manuscript and dates from 14 August 1876 to 23 September 1880. Cloth over marbled boards. Volumes measure approximately 19 x 24 cm and 17 x 20 cm, respectively. Map measures approximately 46 x 20 cm. Wear to boards, hinges loose, otherwise internally clean, an exceedingly scarce and early primary source account of early developments of steam navigation in the Far East of Russia. This account is very early for the region, particularly the inner reaches of the Amur river and its tributaries, where there were scarce inhabitants or even visitors, and thus are even fewer surviving manuscript accounts. It pre-dates the founding of the important "Eastern Siberian Inland Navigation Company" which would be founded in 1885, twenty-four years after the writer began his pioneering work. It also pre-dates the Trans-Siberian Railway which would be built between 1891 and 1916 under the supervision of Russian government ministers personally appointed by Tsar Alexander III and his son, the Tsarevich Nicholas (later Tsar Nicholas II). The writer's arrival occurs only three years after the Aigun Treaty in 1858, through which the area north of the Amur belonging to the Manchu Qing dynasty since the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk was suddenly ceded to Russia. The Amur River has formed Russia's border with China since the 1858 Aigun Treaty and the 1860 Treaty of Peking. A folding map compiled in 1858 according to contemporary Russian sources, delineates the winding route of the Amur River throughout the Russian-Chinese borderlands, from Lake Baikal, to the mountainous Transbaikal region, to the Sea of Okhotsk snd the Strait of Tartary. Manuscript