Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, and 1823

New York: Harper and Brothers, 1842. Hardcover. Good+. xvii, 302 pp with folding map, in original binding of leather-backed textured cloth boards. Issued as No. 167 in Harper & Brothers School District Library series. Spine rubbed at edges, light scattered foxing, reinforcement to map on verso. Written on the front free endpaper "School District Library No. 13, Town of Oysterbay." Wrangel "was appointed in 1820 to command the Kolymskaya expedition to explore the Russian polar seas. Sailing from St. Petersburg, he arrived at Nizhnekolymsk on 2 November 1820, and early in 1821 journeyed to Cape Shelagskiy on sledges drawn by dogs. He sailed afterward up Kolyma River, advancing about 125 miles into the interior, through territory inhabited by the Yakuts. On 10 March 1822, he resumed his journey northward, and traveled 46 days on the ice, reaching 72° 2' north latitude. He left Nizhnekolymsk on 1 November 1823, and returned to St. Petersburg on 15 August 1824. He established that north of the Kolyma River and Cape Shelagsky there was an open sea, not dry land, as people thought. Together with Fyodor Matyushkin and P. Kuzmin, Wrangel described the Siberian coastline from the Indigirka River to the Kolyuchinskaya Bay in the Chukchi Sea. (See Northeast Passage.) His expedition made a valuable research in glaciology, geomagnetics, and climatology and also collected data about natural resources and native population of that remote area" (wiki).