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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1820 Excerpt:... monarch to make the people Christians as it was to make them subjects. From this river to the great river Oby, we crossed a wild uncultivated country, barren of people and good management, otherwise it is in itself a most pleasant, fruitful, and agreeable country. What inhabitants we found in it are all pagans, except such as are sent among them from Russia: for this is the country, I mean on both sides the river Oby, whither the Muscovite criminals that are not put to death are banished, and from whence it is next to impossible they should ever come away. I have nothing material to say of my particular affairs till I came to Tobolski, the capital city of Siberia, where I continued some time on the following occasion. We had now been almost seven months on our journey, and winter began to come on apace; whereupon my partner and I called a council about our particular affairs, in which we found it proper, as we were bound for England, and not for Moscow, to consider how to dispose of ourselves. They told us of sledges and rein deer to carry us over the snow in the winter time; and, indeed, they have such things that it would be incredible to relate the particulars of, by which means the Russians travel more in the wint.er than they can in summer, as in these sledges they are able to run night and day; the snow being frozen, is one universal covering to nature, by which the hills, vales, rivers, and lakes, are all smooth and hard as a stone, and they run upon the surface, without any regard to what is underneath. But I had no occasion to push at a winter journey of this kind; I was bound to England, not to Moscow, and my route lay two ways; either I must go on as the caravan went, till I came to Jaroslaw, and then go off west for Narva, and the gulf of Finlan...