6 - Alan Owston (1853–1915): Naturalist and Yachtsman

Summary

INTRODUCTION

ALAN OWSTON, WHO lived in Yokohama from 1872,when he was nineteen, until his death in 1915,was recognized worldwide as a naturalist and ornithologist focusing on Japan. He created large, comprehensive and important collections relating to Japan's natural history.

Owston is credited with the discovery or co-discovery of a large number of new species, with many bearing his name in some way. This is principally by the pseudo-Latin word Owstoni which is based on his surname, but there are some where his first name is used (Japan White-eye ssp. Zosterops japonicus alani) and there is even one – Storm-petrel Stonowa – where the Latin genus name is an anagram of his surname and initial. Many specimens supplied to Owston by Japanese collectors and natural history experts, who worked with or for him, are at least partially named after those people. Some of the species named after Alan Owston are listed in the appendix to this chapter.

The exhibition rooms and storage rooms of the leading natural history museums around the world including the Smithsonian in Chicago and the Natural History Museum in London are today graced with Owston's fine and valuable natural history collections covering marine life and birds.

Alan Owston was also a keen and competitive yachtsman, a cofounder of the Yokohama Yacht Club, and helped to make yachting one of the most popular sports in Yokohama. He spent much of the latter half of his life sailing round the coast of Japan on his motorized yacht, dredging the ocean floor for specimens of unknown marine life. Whereas most experts were closely affiliated with a leading insti tution, which took a lot of the credit, Owston was totally independent and experts in other parts of the world contacted him by writing simply to ‘Alan Owston, Yokohama.’

EARLY LIFE

Alan Owston was born in Pirbright in Surrey on 7 August 1853, the second son of a clergyman with an M.A. from Cambridge University. He attended St. John's College at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex as a boarder and was listed as being there in the 1871 census. At the age of eighteen he went to Shanghai to work for Lane, Crawford and Co. After working there for six months, he moved in 1872 to Yokohama to work for the same firm. His elder brother Francis became a sea captain and eventually followed him to Japan.