Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949) was a highly-praised collector in many parts of the world for the Natural History Museum in London as well as an all-round naturalist. Only counting birds alone he added over 10,000 specimens to the Museum. Lowe wrote two books on the various expeditions of which he had been part and there are summaries available online what he did and where he went. However there is little of his life and background which involved travel with interesting and important and infamous people in the zoology of the day. In an endeavour to provide a fuller picture of Lowe I have scoured family trees (often inaccurate or incomplete), original material available on genealogy websites (again thanks to clerical errors sometimes inaccurate) and the like. There are still important gaps and I hope readers will contact me if they have more information. To make that job more manageable, I am splitting Lowe’s life into parts. This second part covers deals with the first phase of his collecting trip to the Philippines in 1907. Part one can be found HERE.
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The P&O liner Britannia was in her last year of service when she sailed from London on 11 April 1907. A first-class passenger on this well-stocked ship (5,000 quarts and 8,000 pints of beer, 1,000 quarts and 5,000 pints of stout, 1,500 quarts lager, 1,500 bottles of whisky, 3,800 bottles of wine) was Willoughby Lowe on his first ornithological trip abroad. And by ornithological I mean ornithology as it was then practised: shooting specimens to prepare their skins for museums as their keepers and curators catalogued, classified and named the species of the world.
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| P&O's SS Britannia |
Lowe wrote two accounts of his trip. The first was a paper in The Ibis in 1916; the second was the second chapter of his book, The Trail That Is Always New, in 1932. I am splitting the Philippines story into three because interesting things happened on his way to the Philippines, while he was there, while the aftermath of what he had arranged later made the headlines in London.
Lowes account begins with the usual travellers’ tales of Port Said and the ‘gully-gully’ (here ‘gilly’) magicians. Then on through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to Aden. The heat onboard becomes oppressive, ‘the only relief is at meal time when one sits beneath a punka’. Next was Aden and then Colombo:
One day a flying-fish came through the porthole and landed near the head of my sleeping companion on the upper berth, much to his amazement. As the intruder was of fair size it was cooke for breakfast and proved very good eating.
In Colombo he did a quick tourist tour complete with the gem salesmen and noticed, as we did in 1968 on our first visit to what was then Ceylon and is now Sri Lanka, the enormous number of House Crows (Corvus splendens).
On passage to Penang between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula he came across what must be rated one of the great wildlife spectacles in the world:
…After luncheon on 4th May I came on deck and was talking to some passengers when, looking landward, I saw a long line running parallel with our course. None of us could imagine what it could be. It must have been four or five miles off. We smoked and chatted, had a siesta, and went down to tea. On returning to the deck we still saw the curious line along which we had been steaming for four hours, but now it lay across our course, and we were still very curious as to what it was. As we drew nearer we were amazed to find that it was composed of a solid mass of sea-snakes, twisted thickly together. They were orange-red and black, a very poisonous and rare variety known as Astrotia stokessii. Some were paler in colour and as thick as one's wrist, but the most conspicuous were as thick as a man's leg above the knee. Along this line there must have been millions; when I say millions I consider it no exaggeration, for the line was quite ten feet wide and we followed its course for some sixty miles. I can only presume it was either a migration or the breeding season. I have on various occasions looked in vain in these same waters, and also enquired from officers of ships navigating this region, but have failed to hear of a similar occurrence. Many people have seen snakes of this description but never in such massed formation.
It certainly was a wonderful sight. As the ship cut the line in two, we still watched the extending file of foam and snakes until it was eventually lost to sight. Had we been on a private yacht, how interesting it would have been to have followed them up to a starting or ending point. I have recently consulted Dr Malcolm Smith of the British Museum (Natural History), who is a leading authority on the reptiles of this region, concerning this wonderful phenomenon. He kindly showed me the type specimen from Singapore, which is exactly like those I saw, except that the latter were more brightly coloured and larger in girth than the preserved specimens. Dr Malcolm Smith was surprised to hear of this thick species being found in such numbers. He considers from the peculiar sexual and ventral parts, which are more piscine than the others, that this is a deep water species and only comes to the surface occasionally to bask, or during the breeding season, which takes place in April or May. He described to me an experience he once had in a launch off the Malay Peninsula, when the commoner and smaller species were so numerous that he could not get out of sight of them. The larger species ranges from Northern Australia to Colombo. Dr Malcolm Smith does not consider that the snakes I saw were migrating, but merely breeding, and that the mass of foam was caused by the snakes themselves.
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| Stokes's Sea Snake. Photograph by jarrahdog Gulf of Exmouth, Western Australia 2023 |
Stokes’s Sea Snake, large sea snake with the longest fangs of any, was named by John Edward Gray for John Lort Stokes (1811-1885) a naval hydrographer who served on board HMS Beagle for 18 years and who shared a cabin with Charles Darwin on the famous voyage. Stokes was promoted by seniority in retirement to Admiral in 1877. Stokes collected the specimen in waters off Australia. It is now usually lumped into the genus Hydrophis as first done by Günther in 1864. Astrotia was the generic name proposed by Frank Wall in 1921.
Penang saw the passengers take a rickshaw to the tautologically-titled Eastern and Oriental Hotel (still there) in order to while away the hours under electric fans before reboarding. Lowe noted that P&O ships in those days had no fans in the saloons and passengers had to pay extra to have one in the cabin.
Singapore was next and it is after noting that passengers took rickshaws to shop and to visit the museum and botanical gardens (still superb) with monkeys in the tree-tops that we get a glimpse of his world view circa 1930. He was not opposed to opium, holding that its smokers live to a fair age, are never abusive and only harm themselves…’after all in the East, where human beings are far too numerous, it is of no great importance if a few die earlier than they would normally’. He also railed against education:
If only home governments would only allow those on the spot to “run the show,” and give a fair hand to reduce the standards of education to the simplest form, the Colonies and their inhabitants would be all the better and more peaceful for it. It is the mad craze for giving the native population higher education that causes so much discontent, and will in the end be the downfall of European rule and influence.
Then, after arguing against the impossibility of educating the ‘very inferior races’ to achieve European standards of civilization he held that the education of ‘native girls’ was responsible for 50% of them becoming ‘immoral’ when they left school. I assume he used the word ‘immoral’ to avoid the word ‘prostitute’ which may have given his 1930s female readers an attack of the vapours.
Such views were commonplace in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries and they would have had nods of approval from his readership in Britain. The don’t-educate-the-natives line is rather redolent of Queen Victoria’s opposition to educating the working class in the previous century on the grounds there would be no servants to meet the needs of the upper classes. I don’t think I would have made a very good footman.
Crossing the South China Sea he noted a curious yellow scum on the sea and mistakenly stated that’s why it’s known as the Yellow Sea—a different bit of Asia altogether. Lowe disembarked at Hong Kong. On arrival he saw the devastating effects of a typhoon which had hit Hong Kong on 18 September 1906 killing 15,000 people and causing a million pounds' worth of damage—around £¼bn in today’s money. Lowe was told that the Jesuits who ran the observatory in Manila had sent warning of the typhoon but that the advice was ignored. Was this the case or a conspiracy theory of the time?
Lowe did the tourist bit in Hong Kong. He was very impressed by the place even though It was very hot. He wrote that he was carried up to the Peak in a sedan chair, then a common means of public transport. I pity the carriers. Old Peak Road is a steep climb. He admired the view across to Kowloon which at that time had few inhabitants. Not now. Then he sailed for Manila, stating that only two steamboats, the Ruby and the Sapphire, did that run but not which one he took. On arrival he ‘was greeted by a relative’ (I wonder who that was) in a launch belonging to ‘Smith, Bell & Company’, a company I find was involved in the Manila hemp trade (think Manila rope, Manila envelopes, Manila paper). Founded by a Scot, the company still exists. Lowe also noted that the American customs officers were ‘very courteous and obliging’. Things change.
Lowe was in Manila for nearly a week. Desperate for a bath on arrival he upset the hotel by climbing into the tank holding its entire supply of drinking water, mistaking it for a large bathtub. He suggested boiling the resulting solution—the cure for all ‘drinking’ water in the tropics.
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| Lowe would certainly have seen San Augustin Church in Manila's Intramuros. I took this photograph in January 1967 |
The sights ‘such as they had to offer’ were seen, clearly involving a visit to Intramuros and its churches. He was there for the Corpus Christi celebrations (in 1907 on Thursday 30 May). He called ‘on various friends’ including Archbishop Agius. The ‘we decided’ (who was the other?) to take the sulphur water at the hot springs in Sibul about 40 miles north of Manila. They only stayed for 24 hours encountering chicken, the toughest Lowe had ever eaten, at every meal. They shot a few birds and were glad to get back to Manila after a bumpy journey in a ‘little springless carreta’ drawn by a stallion pony.
The next day Lowe sailed for the island of Palawan. He was on board the ‘Panay, a tiny white gunboat built in England for the Americans during the war with the Filipinos’. The fighting now being over, she was used to carry passengers or anything that might be required such as mails, or even livestock. She still retained one small gun “forrard,” which was used for signalling when she was nearing a port of call’. I read that the USS Panay was previously a Spanish gunboat taken over in 1899. That little gunboat has great interest to naval historians because American to command her (after extensive repairs which took 5 years until 1907) was Ensign Chester Nimitz, later of course Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of naval forces in the Pacific during the Second World War. The dates seem right for Lowe to have travelled on USS Panay during the period of Nimitz’s command.
Lowe’s time on Palawan and his host there will be covered the next article in the series.
