Dinosaurs in the Attic (7 page)

The Museum had gone to Asia just in time.

Wherever they went, all three men had observed one grim fact: mass starvation and disease were decimating these tiny tribes. American whaling had driven away sea mammals vital to the maritime tribes' survival. Various Russian fur traders and missionaries had brought measles, smallpox, and venereal disease. Periodic epidemics swept through villages, killing one-third or more of the inhabitants. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the general spread of Western culture and technology contributed to the rapid and total extinction of some of these tribes, and the utter transformation of the rest.

When the Museum built the Hall of Asian Peoples in 1980, much of the Siberian material was removed from storage and placed on display. A group of visiting Soviet anthropologists, viewing the partially completed hall, were astonished at what the Museum had. According to one anthropologist, the Museum's collection was the greatest aggregation of northeast Asian ethnography in the world, unsurpassed even in the Soviet Union.

THE END OF THE EXPEDITION

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition ended in 1903, when Jesup, impatient to see results, and feeling that the question of the origin of the American Indian-from migrations of Asiatic nomads across the Bering Strait—had been amply solved, cut off funds. Boas, an extremely cautious scholar as well as an abrasive person, felt that years more work and study were needed for the definitive answer. By nature, Jesup simply couldn't understand Boas' attitude. Additional problems arose when the Museum hired a new Director, Hermon C. Bumpus, to manage much of the administrative details of the Museum. After 1903, the Museum administration began to grow increasingly skeptical about Boas' activities, and especially about the work of the one man who continued to work in Asia after the Jesup expedition ended.

That man was Berthold Laufer, who had moved from Siberia to China. Typically, Boas had asked him to get every possible thing he could find on daily Chinese life, especially objects illustrating the life of the common man in China. Laufer was a painstaking collector, and a flood of material poured into the Museum—more than 20,000 specimens of every conceivable kind of thing.
^*6

Laufer was working during this time under extremely difficult conditions. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900, a Chinese uprising against foreigners, had been heavily squelched, and resentment against Westerners ran high. In addition, there were the usual collecting difficulties. As one of Laufer's letters to Boas, defending his failure to procure an industrial collection, attests: "Please do not think that making collections in this country merely means going shopping; it is an awful hard task which requires a great deal of good nerves, the self-control of a god and an angel's patience; sometimes it even wearies me to death and makes me tired of life."

Boas constantly wrote to Laufer, telling him what to collect and what to save for later, and the two sometimes became involved in unpleasant disagreements. But despite haggling, the final result of Laufer's work was summed up by a present-day anthropologist as "one of the finest records of the material culture of a civilization ever assembled."

Meanwhile, Boas' troubles at the Museum were deepening. As Jesup grew older, he became more insistent that Boas publish the definitive work of the expedition—the proof that America was peopled by tribes from northeastern Asia. Boas also quarreled with Hermon C. Bumpus about the Northwest Coast exhibition. Boas, the strict scientist, wasn't able to understand what a popular museum should be, and detested seeing his work simplified for the general public. Bumpus meanwhile was alarmed at the seemingly endless flow of artifacts coming from China and filling up valuable Museum storage space, and he tried to curtail Asian collecting. The end result of all this internecine strife was that in 1905 Boas resigned in anger and took a teaching position at Columbia University. Ironic though it is that Boas never published his
magnum opus
proving the migration of early man across the Bering Strait, most anthropologists generally agree that the expedition proved the question beyond a reasonable doubt.

At Columbia, Boas continued to work with anthropologists and collections at the Museum, even though he held no official position. Among his students were Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who spent over fifty years at the Museum. Boas' influence on American anthropology, both through his own work and through his students, shaped the course of American anthropology in a profound way. Even today, many of our contemporary ideas about culture, race, and society originated with Boas and his students.

FOUR

Exploration at the Top of the World

A map of the world, circa 1890, reveals few unexplored areas. Africa had been penetrated and mapped, the Amazon traced to its source, the vast Sahara crossed and recrossed. The map shows, however, two vast blank areas, surrounded by dotted lines, each one straddling a geographic Pole. At that time the northern blank spot covered an area of over one million square miles on the top of the globe, overlapping parts of both North America and Greenland.

No one knew what would be found at the North Pole. Conservative scientists speculated a wasteland of ice, or perhaps an unknown landmass. Still others predicted an "Arctic Atlantis," a lost continent heated by hot springs and populated with wild game. Some even advanced wild theories about a maelstrom or a tropical sea at the Pole.

Curiosity about the Pole grew out of the centuries-long quest for a Northwest Passage—the hypothetical and economically important sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and thus between the rich markets of Europe and the Orient. The search for the Northwest Passage, begun in America's infancy, soon metamorphosed into a search for new lands and peoples. As Greenland and the Northwest Territories were gradually explored and mapped, the search finally focused on the North Pole itself. Polar exploration excited the public as no exploration had before, and an explorer returning alive from the far north could expect a tumultuous welcome as well as certain wealth in the form of book royalties and lecture fees.

While most people saw polar exploration and the discovery of the Pole as ends in themselves, President Jesup and the Museum seized upon this opportunity to acquire collections of animals and artifacts from within the unknown regions. The Museum helped finance a number of polar expeditions, in return for receiving the resulting scientific collections. Jesup cared little for the flags, sledges, and souvenirs that other institutions such as the National Geographic Society wanted; the Museum was much more interested in the zoological specimens, Eskimo artifacts, and geological data accumulated along the way.

Jesup's interest brought the Museum into association with a young naval lieutenant, Robert E. Peary, who had been exploring Greenland and the far north with the ultimate goal of getting to the Pole. Jesup first learned of Peary when the explorer's wife asked him to contribute a thousand dollars to a "Peary Relief Expedition," organized to rescue her husband, who was stranded in northern Greenland at the time. Jesup struck a sort of deal with Peary: He would help finance the explorer's work and pull strings to keep him on leave from the navy if Peary would make collections in the Arctic for the Museum.

The ethnological work dovetailed neatly with the work of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. In 1897, the same year Boas left New York for British Columbia, Jesup obtained leave from the navy for Peary by writing to President McKinley. His letter told the President of Peary's potential value in helping to make the Arctic collections at the Museum "second to none in magnitude and completeness." Jesup was influential enough to obtain almost ten years of cumulative leave for Peary. He also paid for some of his ships and equipment, and formed the Peary Arctic Club—a group of his wealthy friends, who poured money into Peary's efforts.

Jesup's investment was soon to pay handsome dividends in collections. Among the zoological and ethnographic material that eventually found its way back to New York were numerous birds, Arctic hares and foxes, polar bears, marine mammals, Eskimo artifacts—and several huge meteorites.

PEARY'S IRON MOUNTAIN

In the spring of 1894, after one of many unsuccessful attempts to reach the Pole, Peary found himself waiting out the Arctic spring with nothing to do. Like many Arctic explorers before him, Peary had heard stories about an "iron mountain" somewhere in northwestern Greenland. Now, with so much time on his hands, Peary decided to locate the fabled mountain once and for all.

The story of the iron mountain dated back to 1818, when an English explorer, Sir John Ross, sailed north to the head of Baff'm Bay in an effort to locate the Northwest Passage. On the western shores of Greenland he discovered an unknown tribe of Eskimos—among the most northerly peoples in the world. He was astonished to find that these Stone Age peoples, without the knowledge of smelting, somehow possessed knives and spearheads made of iron. The Eskimos refused to reveal the source of the metal, saying only that it came from a mountain of iron, or
saviksoah,
^*7
and had been their source of metal since time immemorial. Ross returned to England with some of the tools, which were analyzed and found to have a high nickel content—much higher than in any naturally occurring alloys on earth. The mountain of iron, English scientists decided, was a gigantic meteorite. A number of explorers following in Ross's footsteps tried to locate the iron, to no avail.

Peary had several advantages over the earlier explorers who had searched without success for the meteorite. By now the Eskimos were trading iron knives, spearheads, and even guns with the white men and no longer had need of the
saviksoah.
More important, the Eskimos liked and trusted the young lieutenant. Peary found an Eskimo who agreed to lead him to the mountain of iron in return for a gun. On May 16, 1894, the Eskimo, Peary, and expedition member Hugh Lee started on their journey with a sledge and ten dogs.

The Eskimo led them south along the Greenland coast, toward Cape York and Melville Bay. They sledged along the frozen bays rather than attempting the sheer cliffs and headlands of the fjords. May is possibly the worst month to travel in the Arctic. Warmer weather breaks up the ice pack, making sea travel difficult. Blizzards are frequent and fearsome events. As it happened, soft ice and a powerful blizzard immediately beset the party, and after two days the Eskimo guide refused to proceed farther, sledding off into the whirling snow. Peary and Lee doggedly pushed on to a nearby Eskimo village and found another guide, a man named Tallakoteah. Tallakoteah spoke of three irons, which he called "the Waman," "the Dog," and "the Tent." During the next week, Tallakoteah led the party through some of the severest conditions Peary had yet experienced in the Arctic. The sea ice began to disintegrate, and they sometimes found themselves balancing across cakes of floating ice and wading through waist-high slush. At night, freezing winds piled up huge drifts, covering their igloo and dogs. Finally, when the sea ice became impassable, the party had to haul its dogs and sledges up to the top of a thousand-foot plateau to avoid open water. On May 27, near the shore of Melville Bay, Tallakoteah halted on a large, level snowfield and planted his saw knife in the hard pack. He announced they had reached the Woman. From a hill, Tallakoteah pointed out the location of the other two meteorites. Peary was skeptical; all that was visible was a bit of "blue traprock" poking out of a drift. Nevertheless, the Eskimo deftly cut through the snow with his knife, exposing a smooth brown surface. Soon he had enlarged the hole to a pit three feet deep and five feet across. In the middle sat an ugly, squat lump of brown iron. "The brown mass," Peary wrote in his book,
Northward Over the Great Ice,
"rudely awakened from its winter's sleep, found for the first time in its cycles of existence the eyes of a white man gazing upon it." The explorer leaned into the hole 'and claimed the object by scratching his initial
P
into its malleable skin.
^*8
Surrounding it were hundreds of broken stones, with which the Eskimos had been hammering off flakes of iron for centuries. (The meteorite itself reveals a dented surface, completely covered with hammer marks.)

Tallakoteah then told Peary the legend of the three irons. According to the local myth, they had once been a sewing woman and her dog who lived in a tent in the sky. An evil spirit hurled the woman, the dog, and the tent from heaven and they landed on earth as lumps of iron. Although Peary took this as proof that the Eskimos had witnessed the fall of the meteorites, today scientists feel that the three meteorites—all part of the same shower—fell thousands of years before the coming of the Eskimo to Greenland.
^†9
It is more likely the Eskimo made up the story, knowing Peary thought (absurd white man!) that the irons had fallen from the sky. A common problem that anthropologists face is the less-than-truthful informant.