BELL, John, of Antermony, a Scottish traveller in the first half of the last century. He was born in 1691, and was educated for the medical profession, in which he took the degree of M.D. In 1714 he set out for St Petersburg, where, through the introduction of a countryman, he was nominated medical attendant to Valensky, recently appointed to the Persian embassy, with whom he travelled from 1715 to 1722, through Russia, Turkey, Persia, and China. He had scarcely rested from this last journey, when he was summoned to attend Peter the Great in his perilous expedition to Derbend and the Caspian Gates. The narrative of this journey he has enriched with interesting particulars of the public and private life of that remarkable prince. In 1738 he was sent by the Russian government on a mission to Constantinople, to which, accompanied by a single attendant who spoke Turkish, he proceeded in the midst of winter, and all the horrors of a barbarous warfare; and in May 1738 he returned to St Petersburg. It appears that after this he was several years established as a merchant at Constantinople, where he married in 1746. In the following year he retired to his estate of Antermony in Scotland, where he lived in ease and affluence, beloved by his neighbours and respected by all who knew him. He died in 1780.
His travels, published at Glasgow, in 2 vols. 4to, 1763, were speedily translated into French, and widely circulated in Europe. (T. S. T.)