MARTYN, HENRY (178 81 2) , English missionary to India, was born on Feb. 18, 1781, at Truro, Cornwall. He was educated at Truro grammar school and St. John's college, Cam bridge, and was senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman in 1801. In 1802 he became a fellow of his college. He had intended to go to the bar, but the stories of the missionaries William Carey and David Brainerd decided him to seek a missionary career. He obtained a chaplaincy under the East India Company and left for India on July 5, 1805. He translated the whole of the New Testament into Hindi, and into Persian twice, and the Psalms into Persian, the Gospels into Judaeo-Persic, and the Prayer book into Hindustani. Ordered by the doctors to take a sea voy age, he went to Persia to correct his Persian New Testament, whence he wished to go to Arabia, and there compose an Arabic version. He set out from Bombay in January 1811 for Bushire, bearing letters from Sir John Malcolm. After an exhausting jour
ney from the coast he reached Shiraz, and was soon plunged into discussion with • the disputants of all classes. Having made an unsuccessful journey to Tabriz to present the shah with his trans lation of the New Testament, he fell ill with fever, and had to seek a change of climate. On Sept. 12, 1812, he started with two Armenian servants, crossed the Araxes, rode from Tabriz to Erivan, from Erivan to Kars, from Kars to Erzerum, from Erze rum to Chiflik, urged on from place to place by a thoughtless Tatar guide, and, though the plague was raging at Tokat (near Eski-Shehr in Asia Minor), he was compelled by prostration to stop there. On Oct. 6, he died.
See his Journals and Letters (1837) ed. Samuel Wilberforce. See also Lives by John Sargent (1819; new ed. 1885), and G. Smith (1892).