Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949). Collector of specimens for the Natural History Museum in London. Part Two: To the Philippines; his first collecting trip with a sea snake spectacular on the way there

Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949) was a highly-praised collector for the Natural History Museum in London as well as an all-round naturalist. Counting just birds 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 on what he did and where he went. However there is little of his life and background. He travelled with interesting, important and infamous people in pursuing 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 third part 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.

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.

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.

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.

Life at the Top 2: Southern Rock Agama on Table Mountain, South Africa

 

The other lizard we saw on Table Mountain In South Africa in March this year was this male Southern Rock Agama (Agama atra). In contrast to the Black Girdled Lizard I showed in a previous post, this agama has a much wider distribution, occurring on rocky outcrops, South Africa, Mozambique, Eswatini (Swaziland), Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Life at the Top: Black Girdled Lizard on Table Mountain, South Africa

In South Africa in March into April this year we had a fine day with excellent visibility for a morning trip in the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. It did not take long to spot several Black Girdled Lizards (Cordylus niger) sunning themselves on individual the exposed Table Mountain Sandstone that makes up the surface of the flat summit.

The name C. niger is attributed to Georges Cuvier in 1829, although his paragraph reads as if that name was already in use. On a cold morning on Table Mountain the unremitting blackness of this species would no doubt speed up its  warming up in the sun.

The girdled lizards (Cordylidae) occur only in southern and eastern Africa. In the last century girdled lizards were often kept in Britain by amateur herpetologists. In the early decades the Giant or Lord Derby’s Girdled Lizard (Smaug giganteus  but formerly Cordylus giganteus) and the Armadillo Girdled Lizard (now Ouroborus cataphractus) were particularly popular not only for their heavy armour and spikes but also because the latter when threatened grasps it tail in its mouth and thus rolls itself into what can only be described as an armoured doughnut or, at more of a stretch, an armadillo.

As well as on Table Mountain and the rest of the Cape Peninsula, there are five isolated populations of the lizard on the coast and an island north of Cape Town.

Up on the cable car

The surface of the flat summit

The common name for most cordylid lizards was for many decades zonure, after the generic name then in use. Why this name was dropped in favour or girdled lizard or girdle-tailed lizard I do not know. I much prefer zonure over a name that implies they wear a corset.

The view down the Cape Peninsula

Any butterflies about? Oh, just a few million. The Monarchs of Mexico: January 2025

 

The remarkable life history of the Monarch butterfly in North America (Danaus plexippus) is very well-known not least because the entire population from North America east of the Rockies overwinters at a few sites in the Mexican mountains where they constitute one of the great wildlife spectacles of the world. How and why the Monarch does what it does raises all sorts of fundamental biological questions. In short, in spring the butterflies leave the mountains of central Mexico and fly north. Once in the USA they breed rapidly; the caterpillars which feed on milkweed which is toxic to most animals then pupate and hatch. Those new adults then fly north and repeat the whole process again and again, until the 5th generation is reached. All the members of that generation which by then have been hatched in Canada and the northernmost parts of the USA then fly all the way back—up to 2,800 miles (4,500 km)—to the same areas of the same mountains in Mexico which their great-great-great grandparents left months earlier. The whole winter is spent closely packed on the branches of oyamel fir trees over small areas. Each hectare of occupied forest is estimated to hold over 20 million Monarchs. On fine and not-too-windy days some butterflies will take flight. They are said not to consume much nectar during the winter but do take on water.

It is no wonder that the brain teems with questions ranging from how the return flight to the USA is spring is fuelled through the method of navigation to the genetic and environmental factors controlling the whole process.

The pine forests in Mexico used by the Monarchs to overwinter are at an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet. The altitude chosen is said to be increasing as temperatures have risen. Overwintering in a cool place is clearly an important mechanism of preserving energy supplies. Why they pack themselves so closely in the trees is an interesting question. 

In Mexico we visited two Monarch sites: Piedra Herrada Monarch Reserve on one morning and Sierra Chincua on another. Both were well set up for visitors. Getting to the butterflies involves an initial climb on horseback and then a climb on foot, with much puffing and panting initially by the horses and then by their riders to nearly 11,000 feet (3,300 metres).

Here are a some photographs:

At both sites the ascent to the Monarchs began on a horse

Piedra Harreda. The cluster of Monarchs can be seen high in the trees

At Sierra Chincua the Monarchs were in oyamel firs on a windy ridge at ca 11,000 feet

Butterfly watching at Sierra Chincua

Densely packed Monarchs on an oyamel fir tree

Deep in shad it is hard to take in the fact that every 'leaf' is in fact a Monarch with the branches of the oyamel fir weighed down by the extra weight being carried

After our return we read that the population was estimated to have doubled compared with the previous winter. The overall trend has been downwards. However, the method used to estimate the total population is very indirect (the number of hectares occupied by the overwintering Monarchs). All sorts of factors have been suggested to account for the apparent decline, from logging in Mexico (although the sites occupied are very small) to a fall in the abundance of milkweed. As with all butterflies there seems to be large variation depending on the weather.

I read that the common name Monarch for this orange butterfly is after none other than the Prince of Orange, King William III of England, Ireland and Scotland 1689-1702. 

Here is a video showing the Monarchs in flight during our two days at the sanctuaries in Mexico:

I could tell you what this ‘paper’ says—but I won’t. A blot on modern science practice

The gold standard in science is still the publication of a paper in a respected journal that passes the scrutiny of other scientists in the field of research—the peer-reviewed paper. Although standards of refereeing and editing papers over the past few decades have fallen markedly and peer review only helps prevent errors of thought, conduct or interpretation there is no other way of recognising new knowledge. 

Preliminary, i.e. not properly published, research finds its way into the public domain by a variety of routes. The unwise admission of journalists to medical conferences where unpublished work may be presented and discussed is one example, Such opportunities are widely abused by those clinicians and scientists seeking the limelight rather than new light.

Some years ago physicists began the circulation of papers before they had been accepted for publication. The preprint was born and there are now websites that house them. Some preprints go on to be published properly but other linger in limbo. Some journals would not—and I hope still do not—allow publication of research that has appeared in print or online in any informal format. I can only assume that authors ‘publish’ preprints either to indicate they have publications in the offing on a CV when looking for a job or to ward off competitors from doing the same work and publishing properly first.

It is the preprints in limbo that pose a problem. When I was looking up signs of more recent research for an article that appeared here I came across a paper that was highly pertinent. However, I then found it was on a preprint server having been uploaded nearly two years ago. With no trace of a proper publication I was in a dilemma. Was I to describe the work together with a caveat that it was not a peer-reviewed publication. Or was I to ignore it, even though the findings the authors described would have added weight to the other evidence I was discussing. I chose the latter course.  If the work is published properly I will update the article—one huge advantage of a non-print site like this. Having read the preprint I suspect that referees may be questioning some of the methodology and suggesting more work. We shall see.

The animals in question? Here is a clue.

Lineated Woodpecker. Mexico 2025

This Lineated Woidpecker (Dryocopus lineatus)—a female—was in the village of Singayta, a short distance inland from San Blas on the Pacific side of Mexico in February.

A large woodpecker, this species occurs over much of Central and South America as far south as northern Argentina. Those in Western Mexico can be distinguished by the white stripe not extending, or only as a thin white line, to the face. Now considered by those who use subspecies as D. l. scapularis it was like other birds we saw and photographed on the Pacific side of Mexico first described as a distinct species by Nicholas Vigors from a specimen collected by the expedition led by Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856) on board HMS Blossom when at  San Blas in December 1827.

Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949). Collector of specimens for the Natural History Museum in London. Part One: Early Life in England and Farming in Colorado

In previous articles (here) I have touched on the life of Willoughby Lowe (1872-1949) a highly-praised collector for the Natural History Museum in London as well as an all-round naturalist. Counting just birds 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 on what he did and where he went. However there is little of his life and background. He travelled with interesting, important and infamous people in pursuing 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 first part covers his life from 1872 until 1907, including the first chapter of The Trail that is Always New.

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The Reverend Edward Jackson Lowe (1825-1893) had ten children, eight by his first wife, Mary Wainwright (1840-1880), and two by his second, Elizabeth Sutcliffe (1851-1929). Willoughby Prescott Lowe was the seventh, born on 10 December 1872 at Tylers Green in Buckinghamshire where his father was vicar. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Great Gonerby, Lincolnshire but then, in 1880, to the vicarage of Stallingborough also in Lincolnshire.

The village of Stallingborough is on the coast at the point the Humber estuary reaches the North Sea. As such it offered a variety of habitats and places to explore, as Willoughby explained:

Many were the happy days spent in this delightful hunting-ground in company with my brothers—watching birds and animals, shooting, trapping and bird's-nesting. We had free access to all the surrounding country even down to the banks of the Humber. All my pocket-money went in powder and shot, taxidermist's materials and books on the subject, also occasionally in having a specimen well mounted by a professional.

Realising his son’s interest in natural history, Willoughby Lowe’s father arranged an interview at the Natural History Museum in London with its director, William Henry Flower. Flower told him that such work was very poorly paid and would probably grow out of his great interest. Flower was wrong on the latter point. No doubt disappointed by the advice from London, the 16-year old asked his father if he could join another brother in going to work with yet another brother ‘living in the wilds of Colorado’. The answer was ‘yes’:

It exceeded my wildest hope, to think that I should soon be crossing the Atlantic with the anticipation of seeing birds and animals of the New World, together with the excitement of buying a double-barrelled gun and getting the necessary equipment! Finally the auspicious day arrived in April 1888 when we left for Liverpool, spending the night at the London and North Western Hotel, and the following morning we embarked on the Cunarder Servia. That first voyage will always remain fixed in my memory, with the thrill of seeing swarms of gulls and other sea-birds following the ship, also my first acquaintance with petrels and shearwaters, and how I wished to possess some!

Lowe recalled that RMS Servia used sail and steam during the crossing of approximately 10 days to New York. The Lowe brothers travelled on a historically important vessel. Clyde-built, Servia was the first liner to be built of steel, the first liner specifically designed for passengers and one of the first to be equipped with electric lighting albeit only for the public and engine rooms.

RMS Servia

From his book and further searches, I deduced that the brother already in Colorado was his eldest, Wainwright Edward Lowe born in 1862. Searches showed that he had first entered the USA in 1881, having been described in the England Census of earlier that year as a medical student. He became a US citizen in 1891 and thus in 1920 had to obtain a US Passport for travel. His address then was Beulah Star Route, Pueblo, which, as can be deduced from Willoughby’s account, is south-west of Pueblo. He was a sheep farmer and stock rancher. Wainwright Lowe was described as a ‘stockman’ when he crossed the Atlantic in 1928. It seems that it was then or shortly after that he and his wife returned to UK, living in Kent. A newspaper report from 1933 shows that he and his wife were living at a house in Fitzroy Road, Tankerton, Whitstable (a servant aged 17 confessed to stealing money). Wainwright Edward Lowe died in 1934.

The brother ‘H’ with whom Willoughby travelled can only have been Horace Gordon Lowe (1868-1948). Although Horace had matriculated at Oxford in 1887, his voyage to Colorado in April 1888 and lack of a degree would suggest he, like his elder brother Wainwright, also dropped out (a term not then in use) of university. I do not know when he returned from Colorado but by 1889 he was at theological college. Thus, like two of his brothers, he was ordained in the Church of England. He died in Torquay, Devon, in 1948.

Willoughby and Horace travelled by rail past Niagara Falls and via Chicago and Denver to Pueblo. After a night at the Victoria Hotel the two brothers decided to walk the 18 miles to their elder brother’s shanty in the cool of the evening. That took longer than expected and they arrived after dark and very thirsty. They had arrived in what really was the Wild West to sleep on sheepskins and to furnishings comprising a table, three chairs and a washing bowl.

I have not been able to work out in what capacity Wainwright Lowe was working but I suspect he had some title to the land. They kept both sheep (perhaps mainly) and cattle cared for over a wide area by herders of Mexican descent. They moved sheep to the Wet Mountains of Huerfano County for the summer defending their flocks of sheep from coyote, lynx and puma (mountain lion) raids at night. Willoughby had begun observing  and collecting birds and mammals virtually upon arrival and the birds of the Wet Mountains were the subject of a paper in The Auk that was published in 1894.

The winters were brutally cold with heavy snow falls lasting for days.

After two years Willoughby Lowe returned to England for six months. Indeed, at the 1891 Census he was back home, living in the vicarage at Stallingborough with his father, step-mother, brother, and two half-siblings. 

As well as accounts of the landscapes, weather, plants and animals encountered during travels with the sheep to the mountain pastures (including correct deductions about olfaction in birds), Lowe’s chapter offers a great deal of information on what life as a farmer and traveler entailed in the late 1800s.

Lowe and a Navajo employed as a sheep ‘herder’ went by train to New Mexico since sheep were cheaper there than in Colorado. He bought 2000 to shepherd back to Colorado in what proved to be a highly unpleasant journey, with torrential rain for days on end, at one point a pack of 300  wolves, and a skunk at which he took a pot shot and received the consequences which made sleep impossible. He continued:

Our route lay through cattle country in places, and there is always great enmity between cattlemen and sheepmen, the reason being that wherever sheep go cattle will not feed. We were warned by cowboys that if we attempted to pass through this country they would shoot us. At all events we took the risk, travelling as fast as we could by night to avoid being seen….

…Most people had but one idea, namely, how to turn a dollar, and so long as you turned it successfully, you were a "smart" man! In the West there was one other factor that counted, and that was the man who got the first pull with his six-shooter. Personally, I have never in all my life carried a revolver; I hate them…I have never carried a six-shooter and never wanted one. If I had an occasion to shoot, I had something better, a rifle and a shot-gun, which are carried openly and always command respect.

And just as a reminder that fiddling with tariffs by US presidents is not a new phenomenon:

The fiscal policy of America does not often change very greatly, but on one occasion I remember that it did and to our cost, the tariffs being suddenly reduced when President Grover Cleveland came into power. We had just previously bought a quantity of sheep, and the price in forty-eight hours went down by 50 per cent’, spelling ruin to the Western ranchers.

In the chapter Lowe noted:

I was married in 1895, and now left my brother’s house for one of my own on the Charles River. The red sandstone house was situated on the edge of a beautiful rocky cañon, down which the river flowed and on either side pine trees grew in profusion.

Annie and the Seals family

Willoughby Lowe married Annie Seals on 23 December 1895 in Seward, Nebraska. He was 23; she was 19. Annie was the daughter of John Seals, an English sea captain who had retired to Nebraska.

John Seals was born on 18 February 1833 in at Cheshire, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He worked his way up the merchant navy, obtaining his master’s ticket at the age of 27. In 1860 he married Sarah Allwood who died, aged 37, on 1 February 1873 at Firgrove, Sealand, Cheshire. Within a few months he married Annie Roberts, also of Sealand—Annie Seals’s mother. Annie was born on 13 October 1876 but at Saughall, also in Cheshire, her mother died on 27 October, one would guess from the timing, of child-bed fever.

Newspaper articles reporting John Seals’s death at home in Seward on 17 December 1896—a year after his daughter’s marriage—outlined his move to live in the USA. 

He finally abandoned the sea, and while on a visit to the Messrs. Cattle was induced to make this bis home. He purchased a fine farm just northwest of the city of Seward, on which he had built a fine residence, where he has resided for the past thirteen years [i.e. since 1892].

and:

He was a retired sea captain, and owned a fine farm and home one mile northwest of Seward. He was a genial, pleasant gentleman, and made many friends during his several years residence here. He was married about two months ago to Miss Anna E. Ivey late of England. His daughter, Mrs. W. P. Lowe of Pueblo, Colo., arrived here several days before His death.

A census in 1885 showed that Annie was with him and that he was employing two farm hands plus the wife of one of them as housekeeper. 

Where they were before his second wife’s death in 1876 and life in Nebraska I do not know. He may have been at sea but there is no trace of young Annie in the 1881 census of England.

It is tempting to speculate that John Seals met his third—and very unfortunate—wife, Anna Eliza Ivey, on a trip to UK. We can trace John and Annie arriving at Liverpool from Montreal in June 1892 on the Allan Line’s SS Mongolian. Anna Eliza Ivey from Berkshire (born 1950) was, in 1881, a governess while by 1891 living ‘on her own means’ with a boarder and servant in North Street, Reading. The rapidly widowed Mrs Seals moved to the Los Angeles area of California where in February 1898 she married another Englishman, Samuel Eliott who was born in Liskeard, Cornwall in 1852, a landscape gardener who had lived in the USA since 1892. Widowed again sometime between 1910 and 1029, Anna died in Los Angeles on 29 December 1947, aged 97.

Discovering who Annie Seals was and where she came from is not helped by the errors in her marriage certificate. There she is shown as ‘Anna’ while her mother is down as ‘Sarah’ Roberts instead of Annie.

It is now obvious that Willoughby Lowe and Annie Seals met in Seward, Nebraska in 1893 or 1894, thanks to his acceptance of a glass of water in the Huerfano Valley. He had ridden over to see how their sheep were doing during their summer sojourn grazing in the mountains he found the man tending them was ill and had to return home. Lowe then rode 15 miles to the valley in order to engage another.

As I approached a Mexican's house, his wife saw me, rushed in and shut the door; but in answer to my repeated knocking she came out and enquired what I wanted, becoming more tractable when she found I could speak her language. Unfortunately her husband, who was a herder, had gone away. She then told me what misfortune had befallen her. Sickness had carried off nearly all her family, and she asked me if I would go in and see two of her children who were on the point of death; she also showed me another child who had died during the night. It was a pitiable sight, and after trying to console her I rode away to another house, where I found a man. But unfortunately for me before leaving I drank a glass of water, little suspecting what dire results would follow, as no doubt it contained the germs which gave me typhoid fever…

He then set off for home but first his horse got stuck in quicksand and was freed by great exertion, then he was caught ‘in a terrible rain-storm which was so heavy there were large lakes of water on the prairies,. The next day he shot water-fowl and stayed up late into the night to preserve them. The day after that he was very ill. He was taken to the doctor in Pueblo who immediately recognised a case of typhoid. He spent ‘many months’ in the hospital run by the Irish Sisters of Charity ‘to whose devoted attention and skill in nursing I certainly owe my life’. After returning to the ranch:

…an invitation came from a relative asking me to stay with him and recuperate my health in Nebraska; thereupon I packed up and left Seward, a small town in the midst of rolling prairie farms…

Not long after returning to Pueblo he was back in hospital—this time for a broken arm caused by a cottontail spooking a horse and dragging the other horse and a new wagon over precipitous rocks.

Having looked at the family trees I then realised that the relative of Willoughby’s in Seward, Nebraska was John Seals. John Seals’s mother was Sarah Lowe, the sister of Willoughby’s grandfather. Annie Seals and Willoughby Lowe were second cousins.

A Daughter, A Gun Accident, Cattle and Home

Annie and Willoughby’s daughter, Annie Charlotte Mary Willoughby Lowe was born in Pueblo on 20 September 1896.

In his chapter on life in Colorado he recalled:

On 3rd March 1897 I narrowly escaped a serious accident. I had two guns, a double barrelled breech-loader and a twelve bore muzzle-loader. I foolishly did not realise that old guns will not fire modern smokeless powder. The old muzzle-loader was kept ready charged, and upon looking out of the window I saw a partially albino Junco, or Snow-bird, as it is commonly called. I was anxious to have this as a specimen, so I seized the old gun, walked out in the snow and fired. A terrific explosion followed. The right barrel broke away an inch below the nipple, and the left barrel also exploded half way down. Both barrels were torn apart and blown in different directions; the fore-end and locks, together with the grip on the handle of the stock, were splintered and blown to fragments. I was knocked backwards, and a piece of metal struck my nose and broke it, whilst my face and hands were powder burnt and pierced with tiny fragments of splintered wood. My wife set my nose, having great difficulty in stopping the haemorrhage. We were twenty-five miles from the nearest doctor, and entirely alone; it was intensely cold weather with deep snow on the ground, so there was nothing to be done but to wait a few days until I had recovered from the shock. When she drove me to the hospital, the doctor declared that he could not have set my nose better, and that I was uncommonly lucky to be alive! It is difficult to realise how a thing of this kind affects one's nerves. It was months before I could fire a gun again…

The account reads as if he was more concerned with cattle on ‘the ranch’ (his, his brother’s or somebody else’s?) in these later years in Colorado, describing; patrolling the 16-mile perimeter fence each day, round-ups, branding and the devastating effect of lightning on cattle standing near barbed-wire fences. A horse he was riding was killed by a charging cow. Rattlesnakes were common.

But then he finished his chapter with:

In 1897 we decided to leave Colorado and return to England. I had spent nine years in the West, and had had varied experiences when I was young enough to enjoy them to the full. The wonderful scenery with the crimson sun dipping nightly over the Rockies, when all was silent but for the howl of some coyote and the incessant chorus of chirping crickets, the whole sky a canopy of gold, throwing a reflected glow on the vast prairies; in the winter the range of mountains appearing very blue and white like some great ice-berg, and with the sun guarded by two " sun dogs," 1 proclaiming worse weather to come; also the rarefied atmosphere and refraction of light making great distances seem near, and occasionally a beautiful mirage appearing on the desolate plains; these scenes with a charm of their own leave many pleasant memories of one's early days in the Far West. I hear that all this open country is now fenced in, and the Ford car has come into possession! I am afraid the younger generation will have to seek fresh fields for their adventures and excitements in a land of unspoilt Nature.

The Lowes disembarked from Cunard’s RMS Campania (converted into an aircraft carrier during the First World War) in Liverpool on 22 October 1897 from New York. Willoughby’s occupation in the passenger list is described as ‘none’. Thereafter, their whereabouts are unclear apart from glimpses provided by official records. Their first son, Prescott Willoughby Cecil Seals Lowe, was born on 9 April 1898 in Colwyn Bay, Wales. The boy was then christened by his uncle, George Lincoln Gambier Lowe on 19 June 1898 at Throwleigh a Dartmoor village in Devon where George was Rector. Throwleigh as will become evident was to play a large part in the life of Willoughby Lowe and his family.

Willoughby Lowe was not done with North America. He, his wife and children sailed for Montreal from Liverpool on board the Allan Line’s SS Parisian in September 1990. I have been unable to find the reason for this trip or of when they returned to UK. They cannot be found in the 1901 Census in Britain, suggesting they were still abroad. However by 1903 they can be found living in Throwleigh.

The Agatha Christie Connexion

Willoughby and Annie Lowe’s house in Throwleigh, Gorsemoor, has attracted attention because it appeared in an Agatha Christie novel, The Sittaford Mystery. The website, Agatha Christie Wiki, has the following:

In the book, Captain Trevelyn had built himself a comfortable dwelling Sittaford House and then "as a speculation, he had built six small bungalows, each in its quarter acre of ground, along the lane." This description closely matches that of "Gorsemoor House" at Throwleigh. Gorsemoor House (coordinates 50.6979952, -3.8945263) is located along Shilstone Lane and sits in the shadow of Cosdon Hill. It was built by a wealthy local resident Willoughby Lowe. He also built a number of granite bungalows adjacent to his property along Shilstone Lane. In fact a look at an Ordnance Survey map of the area will show neat parcels of land with small bungalows on Shilstone Lane on the edge of Gorsemoor House. There are actually seven such parcels today but perhaps only 6 in Christie's time.

According to the Throwleigh Archives, there is a strong local tradition that Agatha Christie stayed at Gorsemoor House herself and did some writing there.

Christie and her sister Madge also bought a bungalow at Throwleigh for their brother Monty in the 1920s. This bungalow, according to the Throwleigh Archives, is "Crossways", one of the granite bungalows along Shilstone Lane. 

Occupation and Catholicism

I can only assume that Willoughby Lowe and/or Annie had by the first decade of the 20th century means sufficient to live the life of the country gentleman—a far cry for his avoidance of working for the Natural History Museum in London because of the poor pay. In later decades there is evidence from newspaper advertisements that he was farming the surrounding land.

With a father and three brothers as Church of England clergy, Willoughby Lowe and his then two children were baptised as Catholics at Okehampton, the nearest town to Throwleigh, in 1904. Thereafter, newspaper reports indicate the Lowes played a major role in the church in Devon.

The Western Times of 30 March 1906:

Roman Catholics of the neighbourhood have decided on providing a church in Okehampton in which members of their body may worship. Hitherto services have been held in a room et the house of Mr. Mudge, but a movement, In which Mr. Willoughby Lowe, of Throwleigh, has taken a prominent part, was set on foot, which resulted in a contract being placed with Messrs. Geen, Son and Co., of Okehampton, to erect an iron church on a site in Station-road. The building will be made partly of wood, ornamented with a spire, and will be 60 feet long and 24 feet in width. It has to be completed in six weeks, and when opened it will be in charge of the Rev. Dr. Burns, from St. Boniface College, Plymouth.

I wonder whether this devotion is the reason for Martin Hinton’s comment in his Foreword to Lowe’s second book (The End of the Trail, 1947): ‘In matters of faith Mr. Willoughby Lowe and I are probably poles apart. But we are both naturalists…’

To the Philippines

Ten years after he left Colorado to return to England, Willoughby Lowe set off for the Philippines. In many ways his experiences of living and surviving in the Wild West while collecting specimens had set him up as the ideal, hard-working and tough field naturalist that natural history at the time demanded. He was 34 and his career as a collector-naturalist was just beginning in earnest.

It was the Philippines that established his reputation and that trip will be the subject of Part Two of this series.

Lowe WP. 1894. A list of the birds of the Wet Mountains, Huerfano County, Colorado. Auk 11, 266-270