Gerhard Maydell traveled to Siberia in 1859 to take part in the expedition of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society to the Amur Territory and Sakhalin Island as an assistant to Fyodor Schmidt, but he fell ill and stayed in Irkutsk.

[2][3] In 1868 Maydell was commissioned by the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia to undertake an expedition to unexplored areas of Yakutia on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Continuing along the Selennyakh River, a left tributary of the Indigirka, the group went with reindeers across the Aby Lowland and the Alazeya Plateau and reached Srednekolymsk.

At Markovo the group split in two, with Neyman and Afonasiev heading northwest to the mouth of the Kolyma to explore the Bear Islands.

In the following decades Maydell's work was subject to further scrutiny and, despite the critical attitude of later researchers, Soviet geologist Sergei Obruchev of the USSR Academy of Sciences took a positive view.

His dictionaries and linguistic samples resulting from his work among the Far East Siberian people were studied and processed by Anton Antonovich Schifner of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.