The diplomat and M.P. William Hamilton (1805–67) was also a keen geologist and a protégé of Sir Roderick Murchison. In 1835 he set off with a companion for the eastern Mediterranean, visiting the Ionian Islands, the Bosphorus and the volcanic area called the Katakekaumene. Hamilton then continued alone on horseback through Armenia and Asia Minor before returning to Smyrna (Izmir). Having already published some of his notes as papers for the Geological Society, he published this two-volume account in 1842. The work was praised by Alexander von Humboldt, and in 1843 it won Hamilton the founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society (of which he was one of the secretaries from 1832 to 1854). Volume 1 describes Hamilton's outward journey to Smyrna, and the archaeological sites, geological features, landscapes and people he observed on a long series of excursions across Anatolia, as far as Trebizond and Erzurum.
