Dinosaurs in the Attic (41 page)

"Then I sweated in New York," Caplan recalled, "hoping to hear about those crystals, but it was some months before I even got a letter from Carmo." Carmo explained that he was having trouble exporting them, because the Brazilian government officials felt they were too valuable to be allowed to leave the country. After some maneuverings, permission was granted, and the three stones were shipped to New York.

Finally the crystals arrived, and Caplan hastened down to the customs office for the opening of the crates. They weighed an incredible 225 pounds, 300 pounds, and 596 pounds respectively—all the more remarkable, considering that only a few years earlier a six-pound topaz crystal had been unprecedented. When they pried off the top of the crate holding the biggest crystal, Caplan was horrified to find himself looking on a jagged mass of rough topaz—the crystal had no termination (crystal point). "Well, I really got clipped here," Caplan said; either he had been cheated or the crystal had broken in transit. The three crates were resealed and moved to the Museum. When they were actually uncrated, Caplan realized that the customs officials had opened the big crate upside down, and that he had been looking at the butt end of the crystal. When turned right side up, it had a lovely, symmetrical termination.

Harvard was notified, and a curator came down to New York to make the first choice. "There was no doubt in my mind," Caplan said, "that [Harvard] would pick the biggest one, but to my surprise they preferred the 225-pound crystal because of its slightly better quality." So the American Museum got the 596-pounder, by far the largest topaz crystal in existence and, indeed, one of the largest crystals of any kind. In gem terms, the crystal weighs over 1,350,000 carats.

The Caplan topaz sits in the middle of the Mineral Hall, illuminated from below and through the stone; it gives off a gentle amber glow, tinged with blue. According to George Harlow, curator in the Museum's Mineral Sciences Department, if it were to be cut into gemstones, the resulting gems would be colorless; assuming a la-percent yield (that is, assuming that only 10 percent of the crystal would yield gem-quality stones), the crystal would result in 135,292 carats of gemstones.

We end our exploration of minerals and gems with a brief look at the Newmont Azurite. This mineral, like the Star of India, is unique. Considered by many to be the finest non-gem mineral specimen in existence, it was appraised some time ago at a quarter of a million dollars. Its perfect crystals sprout from a greenish lump of copper ore. The larger crystals are of the deepest, richest blue—so blue that they look black at first glance. They are also perfect, and arranged in what is considered to be an exceptionally pleasing pattern.

The stone came from Tsumeb, Namibia, in Southwest Africa, home to mines that are owned by the Newmont Mining Corporation. Azurite is usually associated with copper, and it was discovered by one of the miners in a Newmont copper mine, who managed to sneak it out undiscovered. The miner had run up a rather large bar bill at the local tavern (perhaps five or ten dollars), and he offered the tavernkeeper the stone as payment. A local Newmont official learned of the mineral, and arranged to buy it back from the tavern keeper.

The Neumont Azurite eventually made its way to the Newmont corporate headquarters in New York, where it was casually put on display. About ten years ago the company called in a dealer to appraise the azurite and several other interesting specimens that had come out of their mines. When the dealer told them the rock was worth $250.000, Newmont officials realized it was far too valuable to keep around the office, and they generously donated it to the Museum. Along with the Newmont Azurite came another office specimen, a huge mass of crystallized gold found at a company mine in California in a mud-filled pocket. This specimen was also valued at a quarter-million and is on display in the hall.

FROM SIBERIA, WITH LOVE

The Mineral Hall and the Meteorite Hall represent either extreme of the Museum's reach, the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. Here we have come full circle, from animate to inanimate creation, and our tour is at an end.

This magnificent granite pile, this Museum on the west side of Central Park, between two rivers, in the New World. holds between its walls perhaps the greatest single collection of natural and man-made things ever assembled. The only consistent criterion for including something in this collection has been whether it "meant" something—whether it included the necessary documentation required for future study. Since it is impossible to know exactly what information might be needed at some future time, the Museum has tended to collect and save everything. An isolated piece of rock, or a fish in a jar with no label, is valueless for the Museum's purpose, except perhaps as an object of beauty. Objects discovered in the collection with no associated information are usually thrown out.

It is this massive body of information, this invisible collection, that we have tried to chronicle in this book. Having begun our journey with an obscure production of nature, the beetle
Bambara intricata,
we will end it, rather arbitrarily, in front of an equally obscure production of humanity, exhibited in a case in the Hall of Asian Peoples. It is a small scrap of birchbark tied on one end to a red ribbon, and covered with incised geometrical designs. This scrap is actually a letter—a love letter—written by two girls of the Yukaghir, a now-extinct people who once lived in northeastern Siberia, near the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The letter, which was directed to the anthropologist Waldemar Jochelson, is written in a pictographic language that is similar to an early stage in the development of our own alphabetic system, and that may hold important clues to the development of writing in general. It is believed to be the only genuine Yukaghir love letter in existence, although a number of copies of Yukaghir love letters can be seen in Leningrad.

The letter is an unusual example of the misunderstandings that can sometimes arise between anthropologists and the people they study. The letter had languished in an anthropology storeroom for nearly eighty years before it was "rediscovered" by Cynthia Wilder, an assistant in the Anthropology Department, during the preparations for the Hall of Asian Peoples.

Of all the tribes Jochelson studied in Siberia, he felt a particular fondness for the Yukaghir. Jochelson saw them as a mild-mannered people who believed in honesty, kindness, and hospitality and abhorred rudeness, foul language, and personal violence. These qualities resulted in their being exploited and abused by the cossacks, by Russian settlers, and especially by the local priests, and further contributed, Jochelson felt, to the rapid decline and eventual assimilation of Yukaghir culture.

The love letter is one of thousands of artifacts Jochelson saved from the Yukaghir, some of which are on display in the Siberian section of the Hall of Asian Peoples. The history of the love letter is curious. Jochelson received it during his first stay with the Yukaghir in 1895 and 1896, shortly after he had been exiled to Siberia by the Czarist government for his revolutionary activities. He had two companions on this trip, a Yukaghir interpreter named Alexander Dolganoff and a cossack guide.

While the Yukaghir frowned on immodesty and were very bashful in discussing sexual matters, there was considerable freedom in relations between the sexes. Virginity was not important to the Yukaghir, and most girls set up their own tents at puberty and quietly began receiving lovers. One custom in Yukaghir society was to provide an unmarried girl to any man who was away from his wife. A father would normally offer his daughter's bed to a visiting man as a matter of hospitality. If the man was important, the daughter would consider it an honor to share her bed with him. However, it was completely up to the girl whether she had sex with the man. If she found him objectionable, she was perfectly free to "leave her loincloth on," as the Yukaghir proverb went.

Jochelson spent his first four months among the Yukaghir learning their language in the house of a tribal elder, who lived near the Yassachna River. The elder and his wife had an adopted daughter of about seventeen or eighteen years of age. As soon as Jochelson settled in, he noticed that the usual nightly visits of young men to the girl had ceased. After a while, the wife of the elder seemed puzzled by Jochelson's sexual abstinence. She said, "It seems that among you, men can live without wives." Jochelson explained that where he came from, a married man was supposed to remain faithful to his wife, even when he was away. for a long time. The woman replied, "Well, it seems that the Russians here have different customs. They go to other girls and wives, even when they have their own wives with them." Later his interpreter, Dolganoff, told him that the elder's adopted daughter was very offended by the fact that Jochelson had not visited her, as was the custom for a male guest in her parents' house.

That summer, at a camp near the Yassachna River, Jochelson wrote, a similar misunderstanding occurred with the same tribe:

In this village lived the blacksmith Shaluguin, an old Yukaghir, who had a large family, among them several daughters. The youngest was considered to be the prettiest on the river Yassachna. For a long time I intended to take her photograph in holiday dress, and meant to do it before my departure; but, as she was then staying with her relatives in another settlement, I asked the old man to send a boat for her. In spite of the fact that I explained to the old man what I wanted his daughter for, my request was understood in another way. The girl arrived late in the evening, and I put off taking the photograph till the next morning. My canvas tent was standing near the skin tent of Shaluguin. Imagine my astonishment next morning when, stepping out of my tent, I noticed between it and that of Shaguluin a separate small tent, which the girl was just then taking away! She was in a very angry mood, and my photographs were not successful. Afterwards my interpreter told me that the young men laughed at the girl for having uselessly put up a separate tent.

When Jochelson left the Yassachna River, the two spurned Yukaghir girls wrote him the love letter together. It told the story of their frustrated romance with the anthropologist and, according to Jochelson, was given to him with no trace of jealousy or bad feeling.

In the Yukaghir love letter, people are represented by thin decorated lines. Jochelson is depicted standing in front of his house. He occupies a position of status, as evidenced by the tallness of the character. On either side of him appear the two jilted Yukaghir girls. Both send passionate thoughts to him—shown as two faint lines emanating from the tops of their heads. But Jochelson rejects their love, as indicated by the two lines turning back in a series of squiggles. Two figures appearing on the far left and right are Jochelson's interpreter, Dolganoff, and the cossack guide. The two girls point out, using crossed designs, that they achieved more satisfying relationships with them.

Jochelson kept this letter in his personal collection and later was not able to locate any similar examples. By 1901 and 1902, when he returned to the Yukaghir on a trip sponsored by the American Museum, drastic changes had already taken place. The tribe had been decimated by disease and starvation, and Jochelson spent much of his time trying to get medical supplies, food, and assistance to them. In the face of overwhelming change and misfortune, the Yukaghir had abandoned many of their traditional customs, including, it seems, the practice of writing love letters. In his ethnography,
The Yukaghir,
published by the Museum in 1910, Jochelson speculated on the future of the tribe:

    The Yukaghir, who in the past, according to all collected information, were a fairly numerous tribe, at the present time consist ... of a few hundred people scattered in small groups over an enormous area, which groups are dying out rapidly.... This tribe is therefore on the verge of complete physical and ethnic extinction.

The study of the tribe ... insignificant in numbers and having no future—was a difficult and, from a practical point of view, a thankless task. But the science of ethnology recognizes that a knowledge of small tribes is equally as important as that of great peoples. In fact . . . information about the life and history of a tribe which is becoming extinct is particularly important.

Jochelson's statement can be generalized to embrace all the collections in the Museum. This birchbark love letter may seem to a casual visitor to be like any other obscure thing in the Museum. Its label copy gives little indication of the story behind it. And yet, like the love letter, each object in the Museum—just as in the world at large—carries with it a rich and secret lode of history, of information, and of meaning.

Conclusion

This is as good a point as any to end our armchair tour of the Museum. Let us now ascend to the fifth floor curatorial offices, where a spiral staircase takes us to the sixth floor and the old Animal Behavior Department. From there, a short stair leads to the Museum's roof—the roof where this book began. From this viewpoint we can look over the Museum's jumble of walls, roofs, and turrets that enclose and protect its fabulous collection. Somewhere below us is
Bambara intricata,
the featherwing beetle; Meshie the chimpanzee; the Copper Man; the great dinosaurs; gold and gems, spears and graveposts—in short, the greatest natural history and anthropology collection ever assembled.

Museum personnel will come and go, papers will be published and debated, new exhibitions will be constructed and old ones closed. New wings will be built, storage areas will be renovated, and data will be entered and retrieved from large computers. Discoveries will be made, new hypotheses will be proposed, and scientists will venture forth to return with even more materials for study. But the collections—the
real
Museum—will remain forever.

Selected Bibliography

Akeley, Carl E.
The Autobiography of a Taxidermist.
The World's Work. Vol. XLI, No.2, 1920.