Crawford, John; Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava in the Year 1827 . . . . with an Appendix, containing a Description of Fossil Remains, by Professor Buckland and Mr. Clift. London, H. Collburn, 1829. Large quarto, pp. xii, 516, half title, 89. colored frontispiece, large folded map of "Burman Dominians and Adjacent Countries", five additional plates (three colored), six wood-cut vignettes. In original rust colored silk binding with gold/black spine title label, text uncut and untrimmed, small ink smudge on lower spine, lower portion of one outer hinge nicely repaired to match, very good+ copy. Very rare.

John Crawford (1783-1868), a Scottish orientalist, was born on the island of Islay, Scotland. After studying at Edinburgh he became surgeon in the East India Companys service. He afterwards resided for some time at Penang, and during the British occupation of Java from 1811 to 1817 his local knowledge of the region made him invaluable to the government. In 1821 he served as envoy to Siam and Cochin-China, and in 1823 became governor of Singapore. His last political service in the East was a difficult mission to Burma in 1827. In I861 he was elected president of the Ethnological Society. He died at South Kensington in 1868. Having kept diaries of his travels and observations, Crawfurd wrote a History of the Indian Archipelago (1820), Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries in 1856 the above work, Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Ava in 1827 and Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin-China, exhibiting a view of the actual State of these Kingdoms in 1830. Of particular interest to the historian of geology and paleontology are Crawford's observations and also Buckland and Clift's observations of vertebrate fossils found in the region and the accompanying plates of those fossils.