Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Laufer, Jochelson, and Borgoras hired their own assistants and traveled separately. At this time, Siberia was still one of the remotest regions on the earth, containing areas that were entirely unexplored. Many of the photographs taken by Jochelson, Borgoras, and Laufer show landscapes and peoples being seen for the first time by Western man.

  The first to arrive in Russia, Laufer landed at Vladivostok in June 1898. From there he traveled by steamer to Sakhalin Island (a large, remote island in the Sea of Okhotsk, northwest of Japan), where he remained for the bitter Siberian winter studying the Gilyak, Tungus, and Ainu tribes. A letter he wrote to Boas on March 4, 1899, reveals a glimpse of the details of his fieldwork:

  I did not succeed in obtaining any anthropometric measurements. The people were afraid they would die at once after submitting to this process. . . . I succeeded in measuring a single individual, a man of imposing stature. who, after the measurements had been taken, fell prostrate on the floor, the picture of despair, groaning, "Now I am going to die tomorrow!" . . .

  I took phonographic records of songs, which created the greatest sensation among the Russians as well as among the natives. A young Gilyak woman who sang into the instrument said, "It took me so long to learn this song. and this thing has learned it at once, without making any mistakes. There is surely a man or a spirit in this box which imitates me!" and at the same time she was crying and laughing with excitement.

  Jochelson arrived in Siberia a year later than Laufer, to research the tribes that made their home above the Arctic Circle. Both Jochelson and his wife, Dina Brodsky Jochelson, were imposing figures, well suited to the kind of expedition they undertook. They were intrepid explorers, hazarding everything to acquire new knowledge. In 1901, during their second year in Siberia, they attempted the almost unthinkable—a two-month trek across the breadth of Siberia, from Gizhiga Bay on the southern side to Nishe-Kolymsk on the northern side, near the East Siberian Sea. In order to take advantage of the shortest route to these remote tribes, they planned to take packhorses across the extremely remote Stanovoi Mountains, over unexplored territory to a small town on the Korkodon River. There they would build a raft and float north to the Arctic Ocean. In a letter to Boas, Jochelson wrote about the harrowing journey:

  This journey was the most difficult one that it was ever my fortune to undertake. Bogs, mountain torrents, rocky passes and thick forests combined to hinder our progress.... A heavy rain which fell during the first few days of our journey soaked the loads of the pack-horses and caused the provisions to rot. Therefore we had to cut down on our rations from the very beginning. After crossing the passes of the Stanovoi Mountains, we reached the upper course of the Korkodon River. By this time our horses were exhausted, and it was necessary to take a long rest. Meanwhile the cold was increasing day by day, and haste was necessary if we were to reach the Verkhne-Kolymsk before the closing [freezing] of the river.

  It took us one day to build a strong raft, and then we began our descent of the river, made dangerous by numerous rapids and short bends, by the rocky banks and by jams of driftwood. Our guides had intimated that we could make the descent in two days, but instead we spent nine days on the raft.

  Jochelson did a great deal of research and collecting with the Koryak, a group of small tribes living along the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk. While among the Maritime Koryak, Jochelson and his wife lived most of the time in the tribe's underground dwellings, which could be entered only through a tree-trunk ladder descending through the smokehole. He complained to Boas:

  It is almost impossible to describe the squalor of these dwellings. The smoke, which fills the hut, makes the eyes smart ... walls, ladder, and household utensils are covered with a greasy soot, so that contact with them leaves shining black spots on hands and clothing. The dim light which falls through the smoke-hole is hardly sufficient for writing and reading. The odor of blubber and of refuse is almost intolerable; and the inmates, intoxicated with fly agaric, add to the discomfort of the situation. The natives are infested with lice. As long as we remained in these dwellings we could not escape these insects, which we dreaded more than any of the privations of our journey.

  The pair continued their trek first to the Arctic coast and then inland again. By 1902 they had crossed the Lena River and reached the town of Yakutsk. During much of this journey, Jochelson was shadowed by secret police, on the orders of the Russian Interior Ministry, who did everything they could to hinder and thwart the success of the expedition, without much success.

  Jochelson made extremely rare and valuable collections among the Yukaghir, the Tungus, and the Yakut tribes of eastern Siberia. The material Jochelson gathered remains today one of the most thorough and important collections of Siberian ethnography in the world.

  Borgoras was the most daring of the three explorers, traversing areas of Siberia unknown even to the Russians. He left Vladivostok in the early summer of 1900, bound for the remote tribes of the Pacific. He landed at the mouth of the Anadyr River in late July of 1900, at Mariinsky Post, at that time the most remote Russian settlement in eastern Asia—nothing more than a detachment of cossacks, living in barracks next to a native village. He studied and made collections with the Reindeer Chukchee and the Ai'wan tribe, the Asiatic branch of the Alaskan Eskimo. Borgoras then made a large loop, lasting a year, following the Siberian coastline north to Indian Point, one of the extreme eastern points of Asia, then cutting inland, following the Anadyr River south and exploring the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. His extensive collections were hauled by dog sled to Mariinsky Post, loaded on a steamer to Vladivostok, and finally sent to New York via the Suez Canal.

  The explorations of eastern Siberia were completed in 1902, and Borgoras and Jochelson traveled to the Museum in New York to edit and publish their results. Boas kept Laufer in Asia, directing him to make collections in China. Jochclson stayed at the Museum until 1908, returning to Russia once to lead another expedition. He then remained in New York until his death in 1937. Borgoras stayed in Russia and was imprisoned after the 1905 Revolution. Eventually he became a leading Soviet citizen, and lived a peaceful life until his death in 1936.

  The collections and ethnographic notes brought back by the Asian leg of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition are a priceless record of the fragile tribes of the area. Boas made it clear that he wanted the explorers to collect everything they could lay their hands on. A letter from Borgoras listing the various results of one expedition gives a clue to the sheer scale of the work. Borgoras shipped back to New York volumes of ethnographic notes; 5,000 objects; 33 plaster casts of faces; 75 skulls; 300 myths, tales, and legends; 150 texts transcribed in the Chukchee, Koryak, Kamchadel, and Asiatic Eskimo languages; 95 wax-cylinder phonographic records; anthropometric measurements of 860 individuals; and hundreds of photographs.

  Since Boas hoped to show a physical affinity between the American Indians and the north Asiatic peoples, physical anthropology—especially the study of racial features and types—was an important part of the expeditions. The anthropometric measurements referred to above (such measurements as the distance between the eyes, the shape of the skull, and arm lengths and leg lengths combined in various ratios) were a way of quantifying similarities and differences in appearance to determine how two groups might be related. Measured individuals were usually photographed from the front, side, and back (remember Albert S. Bickmore), resulting in a series of photographs that looked like mug shots.

  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 tot
al 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.