Nineteenth-Century Travels, Explorations and Empires, Part II Vol 5 by Peter J Kitson William Baker

Author:Peter J Kitson, William Baker [Peter J Kitson, William Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781000558975
Google: kzVPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-16T02:48:29+00:00

Tristram: The Land of Israel

DOI: 10.4324/9781003113478-7

Henry Baker Tristram, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine, Undertaken with Special Reference to its Physical Character (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865), pp. 491-515.

Henry Baker Tristram (1822-1906) grew up in Northumberland. He was the eldest son of a vicar. His younger brother Thomas Hutchinson Baker (1825-1912) became a distinguished ecclesiastical lawyer. Tristram, a leading Freemason, Church of England cleric, naturalist and traveller, graduated from Lincoln College, Oxford in Classics in 1844. Ordained in 1845, after travelling to Bermuda as a naval and military chaplain, he discovered an interest in ornithology and seashells. From 1849 until 1860 he was rector of Castle Eden in Durham. Ill-health led to visits to Algeria in the winters of 1856 andl857. These trips form the foundation for his first book, The Great Sahara (1860). During the 1860s he changed church positions, and in 1868 he gained an honorary LLD (Doctor of Laws) from Edinburgh University and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1861 and 1863-4 he visited Palestine and Egypt, and these visits form the basis for his The Land of Israel.

Disraeli offered Tristram the Anglican Bishopric of Jerusalem in 1879. The offer was declined although Tristram revisited Palestine in 1880-1, 1896 and three years later. In 1891 he travelled to Japan, China and the American Northwest. Tristram was active for more than forty years in the Church Missionary Society. A Freemason, in 1884 he became Grand Chaplain of England, a year later, Deputy Provincial Grand Master for Durham. Part of Tristram's fascination with Jerusalem and its environs may owe something to his Masonic beliefs and desire to see Solomon's Temple. Tristram had one son and seven daughters.

According to H. W. Bruton's entry on Tristram in the Dictionary of National Biography Supplement 1901-1911 (1963), 'As a traveler and a naturalist, Tristram was a close observer and diligent collector. His knowledge of the geology, topography, and natural history of Palestine was unrivalled.' (p. 536). His natural observations led him to initially support the ideas of Wallace and Darwin on the origins of species. An avid collector, he published a catalogue of his collection of 20,000 birds in 1889, which was then sold to the Liverpool Public Museum. His extensive collection of birds' eggs was bought up by the Natural History Museum. His publications, written in a picturesque style, became popular. He contributed extensively to William Smith's three-volume Dictionary of the Bible (1863), and his most popular books are The Natural History of the Bible (1867) and The Topography of the Holy Land, first published in 1872. By the time of its fifth edition in 1897 it was entitled Bible Places, or the Topography of the Holy Land. Other work includes: The Land of Moab: Travels and Discoveries on the East Side of the Dead Sea and the Jordan (1873); Pathways of Palestine: a Descriptive Tour through the Holy Land (1881-2); The Fauna and Flora of Palestine (1884) and Eastern Customs in Bible Lands (1894).

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