Biography

Charles Frederick Tyrwhitt-Drake (1846-74), Arabic scholar, naturalist and archaeologist, was born at Amersham, Buckinghamshire, on 2 January 1846. He was educated at Rugby School and Wellington College, and proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1864; but ill health prevented him from taking a degree. He passed the winters of 1866-7 in Morocco, shooting, hunting, collecting natural history specimens, and learning Arabic. In 1867 and 1869 he published accounts of the bird life of Morocco. After visiting Palestine, Syria, Greece, and Turkey, Drake returned to England, but again set out to the East in the winter of 1870, in order to investigate for the Palestine Exploration Fund Society the inscribed stones at Hama, the ancient Hamath. After accomplishing this task he and Richard Burton, then consul at Damascus, explored the volcanic regions east of that city and then the highlands of Syria. They described their journeys in Unexplored Syria (2 vols., 1872). Drake contracted the fever common to the low-lying plains of Palestine, and he died on 23 June 1874 at Jerusalem.

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