John Elton

In the same year he proposed to some of the British factors at St. Petersburg to carry on a trade through Russia into Iran and central Asia by way of the Caspian Sea.

Associating himself with Mungo Graeme, a young Scot, he obtained credit for a small cargo of goods suitable for Khiva and Bokhara.

Elton was successful in finding a good market and in obtaining a decree from the shah granting them liberty to trade throughout Iran, and extraordinary privileges.

The apprehensions of the Russian court were, however, excited by the intelligence that Elton was building ships on the Caspian, after the European fashion, for the Iranian sovereign, Nader Shah.

[4] The Russia Company, in October 1744, vainly ordered him to return to England, Elton replying by the transmission of a decree from Nader Shah, dated 19 November 1745, forbidding him to quit Iran.

[4] A great part of Elton's diary during his first expedition to Iran in 1739 is printed in Jonas Hanway's Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea (1754).