Jones, James Felix

James Felix Jones (September 5, 1813 - September 3, 1878) was British officer of the East India Company and the Indian Navy. He served as surveyor, and amateur archeologist active in the Middle East in the mid-19th century. He was born in Shoreditch, London, England. He joined the Bombay Marine at 14, where an aptitude at mathematics led him to be taught surveying. He became involved in various British survey projects throughout the Middle East. As a midshipman on the RIMS Palinurus, he completed a series of surveys of the Red Sea littoral. By the 1820s, he was reassigned to the Persian Gulf, where he worked on the first British survey of those waters. In 1839, he surveyed Kuwait harbor. In addition to his military surveys, he accompanied Henry Creswicke Rawlinson on an overland journey from Baghdad to Hamadān, along the way producing a series of seminal archeological surveys of the ruins of antiquity. These included including the course of the ancient Nahrwan Canal (1848), the course of the Tigris and what he believed to be the site of Opis (1850), the Assyrian heartland (1852), Nimrud and Nineveh (1852), and the Baghdad area (1853). With years of Middle East experience behind him, Jones was assigned the position of Political Agent in the Persian Gulf. It has been argued that, in this capacity, he played a role in the British invasion of Persia (1856 - 1857). He retired from active service in 1862, suffering ill health and returning to London. He settled in Upper Norwood, Surrey, where he nonetheless continued to produce geographical work for the India Office. In 1875, he completed a beautifully drawn map of western Asia, including the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, which survives in manuscript but remains unpublished. Jones' 1878 Geographical Magazine obituary called him 'one of the greatest ornaments of the old Indian Navy'.