Page:The Geographical Journal Vol. 27, No. 5, May, 1906, pp. 511-513.djvu/1

 OBITUARY.

well-known traveller, whose writings have done much to popularize a knowledge of Palestine and other countries of the Nearer East, died at Durham on March 8 1906, at the ripe age of eighty-three years. Canon Tristram had held a residentiary stall at Durham cathedral since 1873, and for many years no figure had been better known and more thoroughly identified than his with the city and its neighbourhood, where his genial and striking personality will be seriously missed. His scientific pursuits were undertaken rather as recreations than as the serious business of life but none the less they gained for him wide celebrity, and as a practical field naturalist and ornithologist still more than as a contributor to geographical knowledge, his name had long been known far beyond the circle in which he commonly moved. It is with his travels that we are here, of course principally concerned, but any notice of his life would be incomplete without a reference to the sturdy independence of thought and unflinching adherence to principle which characterized him throughout his public career.

Canon Tristram came of a vigorous Northumbrian stock, being son of the Rev. H. B. Tristram, Vicar of Eglingham near Alnwick. He was educated at Durham Grammar School and at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1844 with classical honours. In the following year he took holy orders, and, after holding the curacy of Morchard Bishop for a short time, became acting naval and military chaplain in Bermuda in 1847, and rector of Castle Eden, co. Durham, in 1849. In 1856, being compelled by ill health to winter in a more southern climate, he went to Algeria, and there undertook the first of the many journeys which made him known to the public as a traveller. Quickly benefiting by the change of climate, he made many excursions into the interior, where full scope was given to his fondness for natural history and love of adventure, his wanderings leading him beyond the mountains to the northern borders of the Sahara. To this region, where French influence was then only beginning its forward advance, he devoted the whole of a second winter in the south, traversing districts hardly known to Europeans, and never before visited by an Englishman. In particular, he made the acquaintance of that interesting people the Beni Mzab, of whom he gave a striking account in the narrative of his journeys published in 1860. In this year he became Master of Greatham Hospital and Vicar of Greatham, which he continued to be until he removed to Durham in 1873. It was during this interval that he carried out his most extended journeys in Palestine and