Tristram, Henry Baker (1822-1906)

naturalist, born at Eglingham, Northumberland, on 11 May 1822, was the eldest son of Henry Baker Tristram, vicar of Eglingham, and his wife, Charlotte, the daughter of Thomas Smith.
His younger brother Thomas Hutchinson Tristram (1825–1912), an ecclesiastical lawyer, became chancellor of London and many other dioceses.

Educated first at Durham School, Henry became a scholar of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1839; he graduated BA with a second class in classics in 1844, and proceeded MA in 1846.
He was ordained a deacon in 1845 and priest in 1846, and was curate of Morchard Bishop (1845–6). Because of lung trouble he went to Bermuda, where he was secretary to the governor and naval and military chaplain from 1847 to 1849.
There he took up the study of birds and shells. In 1849 he became rector of Castle Eden, co. Durham, and held the living until 1860. He married in 1850 Eleanor Mary (d. 1903), the daughter of Captain P. Bowlby; they had one son and seven daughters, including the missionary and teacher Katherine Alice Salvin Tristram.

Because of ill health Tristram journeyed to Algeria for the winters of 1855–6 and 1856–7. He travelled far into the desert, made an ornithological collection, and gathered material for his first book, The Great Sahara (1860). In the winter of 1858–9 he visited Palestine and Egypt, and in an article on the fauna of Palestine expressed surprise at the limited knowledge of the plant and animal life of the area, which he attributed to the dangers of travel in the region and the stronger emphasis on history and scripture in its historiography. On his return to England he became master of Greatham Hospital (1860) and vicar of Greatham, co. Durham. After a further visit to Palestine in 1863–4 he published the first of his books on the Holy Land, The Land of Israel (1865), produced at the request of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In 1868 he received from Edinburgh University the honorary degree of LLD, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He was made honorary canon of Durham in 1870 and canon residentiary in 1874, when he left Greatham.

In 1879 Tristram declined Lord Beaconsfield's offer of the Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, although he visited Palestine again in 1880–01, 1894, and 1897. During 1891 he travelled in Japan, China, and the American north-west. His chief interest lay in work for the Church Missionary Society, and he acted for forty years as its representative in the county of Durham. He was strongly protestant in conviction and associated himself with the moderate evangelicals.

In his travels and work as a naturalist, Tristram was a close observer and an avid and diligent collector. His knowledge of the geology, topography, and natural history of Palestine was very considerable, and he was a pioneer of Palestine zoology. His study of the larks and chats of north Africa, written though not published before the issue of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, led him to anticipate and subsequently support Darwin and Wallace's communication on evolution to the Linnean Society, though he afterwards modified his views. His collection of 20,000 birds, of which he published a catalogue (1889), he sold to the museum in Liverpool; his collection of birds' eggs ultimately passed to the Natural History Museum. He acted as examiner for the geography prize awarded to public school students by the Royal Geographical Society.

Tristram's scientific competence and easy style made his writings both valuable and popular. In addition to contributions to periodical literature and to Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, he published The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travel with Reference to its Physical History (1865; 3rd edn, 1876); The Natural History of the Bible (1867); The Topography of the Holy Land (1872; later entitled Bible Places, or, The Topography of the Holy Land, 5th edn, 1897); 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), a work which laid the foundations of Palestinian biological research and was published as one of the Palestine Exploration Fund's volumes in the monumental survey of western Palestine; Eastern Customs in Bible Lands (1894); and Rambles in Japan (1895).

Tristram was an enthusiastic freemason, and in 1884 was appointed grand chaplain of England, and in 1885 deputy provincial grand master for Durham. In 1891 he again visited Japan, where one of his daughters was a missionary. In 1893 he presided over the biological section of the British Association at Nottingham. He remained active and alert until his death from heart disease at his residence in The College, Durham, on 8 March 1906.

by New Dictionary of National Biography
A. R. Buckland, rev. Robin A. Butlin


Bibliografia:

A number of birds were named after him, including :
Tristram's Starling, Tristram's Grackle (Onychognathus tristramii)
Tristram's Warbler, (Sylvia deserticola)
Tristram's Woodpecker, (Dryocopus javensis richardsi)
Tristram's Serin,
Tristram's Storm-petrel,(Oceanodroma tristrami)