The Duke of Bedford’s Zoological Exploration of Eastern Asia in the 1900s—2. Anderson, Sowerby and Ward

We know the following were participants in the 1904-11 Exploration. The leader was Malcolm Playfair Anderson and the following were involved for longer or shorter periods of time: Arthur de Carle Sowerby in 1908 and then Frank Kingdon Ward and Dr J.A.C. Smith after Anderson's return to China in 1909. A great deal is known about and has been published about Sowerby and Kingdon Ward but virtually nothing of Smith, although I now have more information on him than was available previously; he will be the subject of a ffurther article in this series.

Malcolm Playfair Anderson

Malcolm Playfair Anderson
1879-1919

Anderson’s father, Melville, Professor of English Literature at Stanford from 1891 to 1910, had the sad job of writing his son’s obituary for Condor, the ornithological journal. Malcolm Anderson was born in Indiana in 1879. For two years in his early teens he was in Germany with his mother and siblings. He returned to the U.S.A. highly unimpressed with both the educational system and militarist schoolboys amongst whom survival depended on ‘force of arms and fists’.

He graduated from Stanford in 1904 with a degree in zoology. However, from the age of 14 he had been on several collecting expeditions in the U.S.A. Somehow he must have come to the attention of Oldfield Thomas at the Natural History Museum in London for he was immediately employed by the Zoological Society of London to conduct the exploration being paid for by the Duke of Bedford, so his father wrote. However, I am by no means convinced the Zoological Society was involved, with both Anderson and his father seeming to conflate the two organisations. The confusion may have been because the Duke was President of the Society at the time.

He collected, he wrote and he photographed through Japan, Korea and China. This is his description of collecting a wildcat on the island of Tsushima, midway between Japan and Korea:

From our hilltop we wandered on down a trail singing and whistling, till we met a man on horseback and another on foot. The horseman dismounted and bowed, then passed on. The man on foot paused and addressed us. He was a funny old fellow with a bald head. Orii answered, told him our business, and asked him about animals. His answers were not very clear, as he had had too much sake. However we gathered that one of his neighbors had recently killed a wildcat, and the old man thought possibly it was still unskinned. WC asked directions and were told to go to the next village and ask for his house (his name, he said, was ‘Man of the Shining Head’ and he was distinguished as the best drinker in his village). We found the owner of the cat (which was skinned). I bought the skin for two yen, and asked about the body. It had been given away. We went to the neighbor who had received it and found that he had eaten part of the cat and buried the head and vertebrae. To dig the thing up was the work of a moment, and we were in possession of scientific evidence of the presence of the wildcat on Tsu-shima.

The cat is regarded as a subspecies of the Leopard Cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, locally critically endangered and the subject of active conservation measures.

In 1908, he travelled to Europe and worked on his collections but returned to China in 1909 to continue the exploration, to ‘the desert of the north beyond the Great Wall, and in the mountains on the border of Thibet’.

I do not know how the finances of the Exploration worked but Anderson is said to have sold the skin of the last confirmed wolf seen on Honshu to the Natural History Museum in London for 8.50 yen. However, is it not possible that having paid two hunters for the carcass, he was simply reclaiming expenses?

After his work on the exploration Anderson made two collecting trips to South America, the second with his wife whom he had married in 1913. He was ill after the second expedition but managed to write some articles on his travels. In 1918 an appeal was launched to encourage men in the U.S.A. to work in the shipyards. Anderson volunteered but he was killed by a fall from scaffolding from a shipyard in Oakland on 21 February 1919. He was 39. His only child, a son, died in infancy.

Oldfield Thomas named three species after Malcolm Anderson: a vole, Myodes andersoni; a shrew-mole Uropsilus andersoni and a niviventer, Niviventer andersoni.

I have found three articles by Anderson, published posthumously in Natural History in 1920, on experiences in China. They are listed below.

Arthur de Carle Sowerby

In his account of his work on the Clark Expedition, Sowerby explained where he went on the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration:

Before going into details of the present work, it might be well to say something about that already done in the same districts. In connection with the Duke of Bedford’s Exploration of Eastern Asia in the early part of 1908, Mr. Malcolm P. Anderson and the writer had already made collections of mammals in Shensi [Shaanxi Province], at Yen-an Fu and Yü-lin Fu. We also collected in the mountains of Shansi (Shanxi Province], north-west of T’ai-yüan Fu.

As well as a biography published in 1956, Sowerby was the subject of a major article in the Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1998-99. Keith Stevens introduced it as follows:

Although the lives of many Western expatriates who lived in China and experienced the excitements and horrors of travel and the exoticism of the old civilisation cry out to be recorded, most expatriates lived mundane, cliché-ridden existences, apart that is from the occasional excitement caused by the troubles and emergencies of the times, brigandage, rioting and war. They never or only very rarely ventured far from their Treaty Fort and certainly not into the dark hinterland of China. Should they have ventured anywhere at all it would have been to hunt or shoot in the immediate area of the Port or go to a nearby beach or classical tourist site, such as Nanking or Soochou. And of all only a mere handful of those who did venture far afield have left sufficient records to enable a portrait of their life to be disentangled and recorded. Arthur de C. Sowerby was one such venturer.

Arthur Sowerby was born in China to missionary parents in 1885 and lived in interesting times: through the fall of the Manchu Dynasty; the era of the War Lords; Nationalists versus Communists; invasion, occupation and internment by the Japanese. He retired first to U.K. and then to the U.S.A. where he died in 1954. Towards the end of the First World War he served in the Army where, in view of his complete fluency in Chinese dialects, he served as an officer in the Chinese Labour Corps. By this time he was suffering from arthritis which plagued him for the rest of his life.

Stevens describes Sowerby as an explorer and author but as a man who needed to earn his living, at least, perhaps, until he married his second, American, wife in 1922. The dire state of his finances was noted in his correspondence with Clark. There are gaps in the record in which it is not known what he was about. Educated in China, Bath and the University of Bristol, he did not complete his degree course but ran away to sea after a failed romance. He worked his passage to Canada, stayed there for a while before returning to China and his parents in 1905.  He taught at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin but it is thought he only stayed there for the year before he joined the Duke of Bedford’s exploration. He was paid by Robert Sterling Clark for the duration of that expedition and for his collecting expeditions over the next 20 years, and may well have continued teaching in Tientsin.

In late 1911 he took part in the Shensi Relief Expedition to rescue and lead to safety foreign missionaries caught up in the aftermath of the revolution. An account of this successful mission through country where banditti were rampaging was written by Sowerby for an appendix to a book on the fall of the Manchu Dynasty.

Manchuria and parts of Mongolia were the subject of four expeditions. After his demobilisation in 1919 he stayed in Edinburgh for a year to complete his five-volume work, The Naturalist in Manchuria. By 1921 he was off back to China via the U.S.A. where further expeditions followed, again through bandit-ridden country.

For around 25 years he lived in Shanghai. He produced and published a monthly periodical, the China Journal. He served as honorary director of the Shanghai Museum, one of the activities of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was president of the China Society of Science of Art which was incorporated into the Royal Asiatic Society. He later served as president of the latter. He had his publishing business and was a director of other companies. He took an active part in the Shanghai International Settlement, the residents’ associations, for example. 

A jerboa was named after Sowerby by Thomas as Dipus sowerbyi. It is now recognised as a synonym of Dipus sagitta, the Northern Three-toed Jerboa.

Frank Kingdon Ward (publishing as Kingdon-Ward)

Frank Kingdon Ward
1885-1958

I will not dwell on the explorer, plant collector and author, Francis Kingdon Ward (1885-1958) simply because there is a whole website devoted to his life and further information elsewhere. However, he took part in one expedition of the exploration because of his extraordinary family connexions. Ward’s father was Professor of Botany at Cambridge. The early death of his father left Frank needing to find paid work after two years at Cambridge rather than the three needed for a degree. A family friend, none other than one of the authors of the Wade-Giles system of transliteration of the Chinese language into roman characters—and Professor of Chinese at Cambridge—Herbert Allen Giles, pulled strings in Shanghai and Frank Ward soon found himself teaching at a school in that city.

During the long school holidays he visited Java and Borneo but after two years, another school friend—this time Oldfield Thomas—saw him recruited for the Duke of Bedford’s exploration for another collecting expedition. He wrote that trip up, the approximate route of which is shown on the website, in his On the Road to Tibet. He was accompanied by Dr J.A.C. Smith.

Thomas named a vole, Eothenomys wardi and a shrew, Blarinella wardi for Ward.

Ward went on to many further and alarming travels and much plant-hunting in Assam, Burma, China and Tibet. He served in the Indian Army in the First World War, as a spy in Tibet, and taught survival techniques in the Second World War.

Anderson MB. 1919. Malcolm Playfair Anderson. Condor 21, 115-119

Clark RS, Sowerby A deC. 1912. Through Shên-kan. London: T Fisher Unwin

Sowerby RR. 1956. Sowerby of China : Arthur de Carle Sowerby F.R.G.S., F.Z.S. Kendal: Titus Wilson.
The author was Richard Raine Sowerby (1887-1968) a solicitor, farmer and local historian. He described himself as a distant kinsman of Arthur Sowerby.

Stevens K. 1998-9. Naturalist, author, artist, explorer and editor and an almost forgotten president: Arthur de Carle Sowerby 1885-1954: President of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 1935-1940. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38, 121-136

Ward FK. 1910. On the Road to Tibet. Shanghai: Shanghai Mercury

Articles by Malcolm Playfair Anderson in Natural History Volume 20:
For the sake of his ancestors, pp 92-99;
The discovery of the Chinese Takin. pp 428-433;
A winter journey in northern China. 517-534.

UPDATED 5 September 2019