1. Henry Yule published many travel books, including translations of the work of Marco Polo and Mirabilia by the 14th-century Dominican Friar Jordanus.
30 Facts About Henry Yule
1. 2.
Henry Yule was the compiler of a dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms, the Hobson-Jobson, with Arthur Coke Burnell.
3.
Henry Yule was born at Inveresk near Edinburgh in Scotland on 1 May 1820.
4.
Henry Yule was the youngest son of Major William Yule and his wife Elizabeth Paterson.
5.
William Yule had served as an officer in the Bengal army of the East India Company and had retired in 1806.
6.
Elizabeth died before Henry Yule was eight and William moved to Edinburgh with his sons, where Henry Yule attended the Royal High School.
7.
When Hamilton moved to Cambridge in the following year Henry Yule was transferred to the care of the Reverend James Challis, at Papworth Everard near Cambridge.
8.
Henry Yule obtained his commission in December 1838, and joined the Bengal Engineers in 1840.
9.
The eldest, George Udny Henry Yule, worked in the Bengal civil service.
10.
The statistician Udny Yule was the son of George and thus the nephew of Henry.
11.
Henry Yule was interested in Arabic and Persian literature and collected early manuscripts.
12.
Henry Yule's first posting was in the Khasi Hills, a remote area to the northeast of Bengal in the modern state of Meghalaya.
13.
Henry Yule's mission was to establish a practical method of transporting coal to the plains.
14.
Henry Yule returned to England in 1843 and married his cousin Anna Maria, daughter of Major-General Martin White of the Bengal Infantry.
15.
Henry Yule was appointed to a committee charged with investigating the relationship between irrigation by the proposed Ganges Canal and its impact on public health in the area.
16.
Henry Yule lectured at the Scottish Naval and Military Academy and wrote a volume on fortifications.
17.
Henry Yule worked in Arakan and Burma and was put in charge of a new railway system.
18.
The 1857 rebellion made his life difficult, and although Henry Yule was close to the governor generals Lord Dalhousie and Lord Canning, he lost interest in his work.
19.
Henry Yule retired in 1862, and Canning's death in that year made it difficult for him to find any official appointment in London.
20.
Henry Yule devoted his leisure to the medieval history and geography of Central Asia.
21.
Henry Yule's wife became unwell, and they crossed Europe to settle in Palermo, Sicily.
22.
Henry Yule made use of the richly stocked public libraries there during this period.
23.
Henry Yule published Cathay and the Way Thither, and the Book of Marco Polo, for which he received the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society the following year.
24.
Henry Yule remarried in 1877, his new wife Mary Wilhelmina the daughter of a Bengal civil servant, Fulwar Skipwith.
25.
Henry Yule was a member, and from 1877 to 1889 President, of the Hakluyt Society.
26.
Henry Yule was vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society, and would have become a president but for a protest that he led along with Henry Hyndman against Henry Morton Stanley.
27.
The Society wanted to welcome Stanley but Henry Yule stood against the violent methods used in Africa.
28.
Henry Yule contributed introductions to Nikolay Przhevalsky's Mongolia and Captain William Gill's The River of Golden Sand.
29.
Henry Yule died at his home at 3 Penywern Road, Earls Court, London, on 30 December 1889 aged 69, and is buried at Tunbridge Wells.
30.
Henry Yule was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India in 1889.