Alexander Fowler’s Travels in the Middle East

Fowler is an enigmatic character whose very existence is – despite quite diligent research, known only from a small collection of documents written by his two travelling companions on his journey to Petra in February-March 1868.

Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was the famous American artist, some of whose paintings from the Petra expedition became celebrated works in later years. He was then 42 and was – with his wife and infant son, part way through a residence of almost a year in the Near East, principally Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. The Rev. David Stuart Dodge (1836-1921) was the missionary son of a wealthy donor to the recently established Syrian Protestant College at Beirut (now the American University at Beirut) and himself a founding professor. Fortunately Church’s ‘Petra Diary’ and some of his correspondence mentioning the journey survives and Dodge published an article recounting the expedition. Fowler seems not to have left any record of this or any other of his travels in the wider region.

Church and Dodge often refer to their companion as simply ‘(Mr) Fowler’. In Howat’s modern treatment of Church’s work, Fowler is described as “Alexander Fowler, an English clergyman” (2003: 135). Both parts of that seem to be incorrect: it is clear from other references that this is simply the common shorthand of the time for ‘British’ – elsewhere he is clearly identified as a Scot, in fact “a tough Scotchman”. As for his identification as a clergyman, that seems to be based on Howat’s reading of Church’s Petra Diary which he quotes as saying, “During the morning the Rev. Fowler read service” (2003: 136). That is based on a misreading – the official transcription provided by the Church archive reads (p. 17): “Mr. Dodge read service this morning”. Dodge was certainly a clergyman and Fowler cannot be found in any of the records of the Scottish churches.

What else we know about him is provided mainly by Dodge who recorded that Fowler “had just come from Judea, via Bagdad, Babylon, Nineveh, Mesopotamia, &c. (1868: **). He had met Church in Beirut so we may add Lebanon to the list and later seems to have been in Damascus. We may suppose that Fowler had in fact arrived in Beirut from much further east – perhaps India and certainly from what is now Iraq and – probably through Syria to reach what Dodge calls ‘Judea’.

Fowler gets one more mention in a letter Church wrote while in Rome in November 1868: “Oddly enough – Mr. Fowler – a Scotch gentleman who went with me to Petra, suddenly made his appearance the other day and we spent a whole evening going over our trips. He is very anxious to go with me to Spain. He is a good traveling companion and Scotch like – fully understands making economical arrangements.”

No obvious Alexander Fowler can be traced elsewhere to identify Church’s companion. In 1868 Church was 42 years old and Dodge was 32; Fowler may have been about the same age – 30s-40s? At Petra he is described in the Petra Diary as feeling the walking ‘toilsome … being a man of avoirdupois.’

He evidently had sufficient resources for a long trip already and a willingness to go on to Spain. Evidently leisure, too. Was he normally resident in India? A businessman there, now following an extended period of adventure tourism as he returned to the UK? Other …?

Howat, J. K. (2005) Frederic Church, New Haven (Yale UP)