village of Marateca, 11,478. Palmella is an ancient and picturesque town, still surrounded by massive but ruined walls and dominated by a medieval castle. Viticulture, market gardening and fruit-farming are important local industries. Palmella was taken from the Moors in 1147 by Alphonso I. (Affonso Henriques), and entrusted in 1186 to the knights of Santiago. The title “duke of Palmella” dates from 1834, when it was conferred on the statesman Pedro de Sousa-Holstein, count of Palmella (1781–1850).
PALMER, SIR CHARLES MARK. Bart. (1822–1907), English shipbuilder, was born at South Shields on the 3rd of November 1822. His father, originally the captain of a whaler, removed in 1828 to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where he conducted a ship owning and ship-broking business. Charles Palmer at the age of fifteen entered a shipping business in that town, whence, after six months, he went to Marseilles, where his father had procured him a post in a large commercial house, at the same time entrusting him with the local agency of his own business. After two years' experience at Marseilles he entered his father’s business at Newcastle, and in 1842 he became a partner. His business capacity attracted the attention of a leading local colliery owner, and he was appointed manager of the Marley Hill colliery in which he became a partner in 1846. Subsequently he was made one of the managers of the associated collieries north and south of the Tyne owned by Lord Ravensworth, Lord Wharncliffe, the marquess of Bute, and Lord Strathmore, and in due course he gradually purchased these properties out of the profits of the Marley Hill colliery. Simultaneously he greatly developed the then recently-established coke trade, obtaining the coke contracts for several of the large English and continental railways. About 1850 the question of coal-transport to the London market became a serious question for north country colliery proprietors. Palmer therefore built, largely according to his own plans, the “John Bowes,” the first iron screw-collier, and several other steam-colliers, in a yard established by him at Jarrow, then a small Tyneside village. He then purchased iron-mines in Yorkshire, and erected along the Tyne at Jarrow large shipbuilding yards, blast-furnaces, steel-works, rolling-mills and engine works, fitted on the most elaborate scale. The firm produced war-ships as well as merchant vessels, and their system of rolling armour plates, introduced in 1856, was generally adopted by other builders. In 1865 he turned the business into Palmer’s Shipbuilding and Iron Company, Limited. In 1886 his services in connection with the settlement of the costly dispute between British ship-owners and the Suez Canal Company (of which he was then a director) were rewarded with a baronetcy. He died in London on the 4th of June 1907.
PALMER, EDWARD HENRY (1840–1882), English orientalist, the son of a private schoolmaster, was born at Cambridge, on the 7th of August 1840. He was educated at the Perse School, and as a schoolboy showed the characteristic bent of his mind by picking up the Romany tongue and a great familiarity with the life of the gipsies. From school he was sent to London as a clerk in the city. Palmer disliked this life, and varied it by learning French and Italian, mainly by frequenting the society of foreigners wherever he could find it. In 1859 he returned to Cambridge, apparently dying of consumption. He had an almost miraculous recovery, and in 1860, while he was thinking of a new start in life, fell in with Sayyid Abdallah, teacher of Hindustani at Cambridge, under whose influence he began his Oriental studies. He matriculated at St John’s College in November 1863, and in 1867 was elected a fellow on account of his attainments as an orientalist, especially in Persian and Hindustani. During his residence at St John’s he catalogued the Persian, Arabic and Turkish manuscripts in the university library, and in the libraries of King’s and Trinity. In 1867 he published a treatise on Oriental Mysticism, based on the Maksad-i-Aksa of Aziz ibn Mohammad Nafasi. He was engaged in 1869 to join the survey of Sinai, undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund, and followed up this work in the next year by exploring the desert of El-Tih in company with Charles Drake (1846–1874). They completed this journey on foot and without escort, making friends among the Bedouin, to whom Palmer was known as “Abdallah Effendi.” After a visit to the Lebanon and to Damascus, where he made the acquaintance of Sir Richard Burton, then consul there, he returned to England in 1870 by way of Constantinople and Vienna. At Vienna he met Arminius Vambery. The results of this expedition appeared in the Desert of the Exodus (1871); in a report published in the journal of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1871); and in an article on the Secret Sects of Syria in the Quarterly Review (1873). In the close of the year 1871 he became Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, married, and settled down to teaching. His salary was small, and his affairs were further complicated by the long illness of his wife, who died in 1878. In 1881, two years after his second marriage, he left Cambridge, and joined the staff of the Standard newspaper to write on non-political subjects. He was called to the English bar in 1874, and early in 1882 he was asked by the government to go to the East and assist the Egyptian expedition by his influence over the Arabs of the desert El-Tih. He was instructed, apparently, to prevent the Arab sheikhs from joining the Egyptian rebels and to secure their non-interference with the Suez Canal. He went to Gaza, without an escort made his way safely through the desert to Suez—an exploit of singular boldness—and was highly successful in his negotiations with the Bedouin. He was appointed interpreter-in-chief to the force in Egypt, and from Suez he was again sent into the desert with Captain William John Gill and Flag-Lieutenant Harold Charrington to procure camels and gain the allegiance of the sheikhs by considerable presents of money. On this journey he and his companions were led into an ambush and murdered (August
1882). Their remains, recovered after the war by the efforts of Sir Charles (then Colonel) Warren, now He in St Paul’s Cathedral.
Palmer’s highest qualities appeared in his travels, especially in the heroic adventures of his last journeys. His brilliant scholarship is displayed rather in the works he wrote in Persian and other Eastern languages than in his English books, which were generally written under pressure. His scholarship was wholly Eastern in character, and lacked the critical qualities of the modern school of Oriental learning in Europe. All his works show a great linguistic range and very versatile talent; but he left no permanent literary monument worthy of his powers. His chief writings are The Desert of the Exodus (1871), Poems of Belid ed Din (Ar. and Eng., 1876–1877), Arabic Grammar (1874), History of Jerusalem (1871), by Besant and Palmer—the latter wrote the part taken from Arabic sources; Persian Dictionary (1876) and English and Persian Dictionary (posthumous, 1883); translation of the Koran (1880) for the Sacred Books of the East series, a spirited but not very accurate rendering. He also did good service in editing the Name Lists of the Palestine Exploration.
PALMER, ERASTUS DOW (1817–1904), American sculptor, was born at Pompey, New York, on the 2nd of April 1817. In his leisure moments as a carpenter he started by carving portraits in cameo, and then began to model in clay with much success. Among his works are: “The White Captive” (1858) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; “Peace in Bondage” (1863); “Angel at the Sepulchre” (1865), Albany, New York; a bronze statue of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston (1874), in Statuary Hall, Capitol, Washington; and many portrait busts. He died in Albany on the 9th of March 1904. His son, Walter Launt Palmer (b. 1854), who studied art under Carolus-Duran in Paris, became a member of the National Academy of Design (1897), and is best known for his painting of snow scenes.
PALMER, GEORGE (1818–1897), British biscuit-manufacturer, was born on the 18th of January 1818, at Long Sutton, Somersetshire, where his family had been yeomen-farmers for several generations. The Palmers were Quakers, and George Palmer was educated at the school of the Society of Friends at Sidcot, Somersetshire. About 1832 he was apprenticed to a miller and confectioner at Taunton, and in 1841, in conjunction with Thomas Huntley, set up as a biscuit-manufacturer at Reading. By the application of steam-machinery to biscuit-manufacture the firm of Huntley & Palmer in a comparatively short time built up a very large business, of which on the death of Huntley in 1857 George Palmer and his two brothers, Samuel and William Isaac Palmer, became proprietors. In the same year George
