Records of the Bombay Government, No. XLIII, Memoirs of Baghdad, Kurdistan and Turkish Arabia 1857, is a nineteenth-century original with a new preface by the late Dr R. M. Burrell, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The volume includes six important historical, archaeological and geographical essays covering Baghdad, the Nahrwan canal and large parts of Kurdistan, the topography of Nineveh and the old course of the River Tigris. Also included are some 30 maps and plates, many in colour, most notably the ground-plan of Baghdad. The author and surveyor, Commander J. F. Jones, joined the Bombay Marine - later renamed the Indian Navy - at the age of 14. By the late summer of 1839 he had begun work in the Persian Gulf, where he was to spend most of the next 25 years. He was Political Agent in Bushire from 1855 to 1862 and had an important role to play in the British invasion of southern Persia in 1856.