Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska; Formerly Russian America - Now Ceded to the United States - And in Various Other Parts of the North Pacific

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1869. First edition. Hardcover. Very Good. 8vo. [5], xii-xviii, [3], 22-353, [1], [2], [2] pp. Original purple cloth with a gold decoration on the front board and gold lettering on the spine. Brown endpapers and pastedowns. Illustrated with a frontispiece, a fold-out map, and several in-text and full-page wood engravings. The engravings depict the Northern Lights, glaciers, Sitka, Alaska, volcanoes of the region, the culture, the tools, and portraits of the Chukchis and Koyukon peoples, life in the Yukon, moose hunting, and Fort Yukon. Published the year after the first British edition was released. Arctic Bibliography 19424. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Frederick Whymper". Wickersham 6030. In 1865 Whymper joined the Russian-American Telegraph Project, an initiative to link Europe and the U.S. via telegraph that would run through Siberia. This book is his record of traveling around Chukotka and Petropavlovsk, then into Kamchatka and around the Okhotsk Sea, and up and down the Yukon River. A fascinating account of what was then a new U.S. territory, with vivid descriptions of the native peoples, the Russians in the territory, and the issue of scurvy. A Very Good book with the corners, spine ends, and the front joints neatly touched up; three or so full-page illustrations lack their tissue guards, and the map shows a tear.