Boas had one year of service as a volunteer in the army: an option for university graduates who entered reserve officer training in place of the three years of service. In July 1881, before undertaking his military service (or his “slavery,” as he called it) and fresh from his doctoral examinations, Boas was able to join his mother, Hete, and Aenne in the Harz Mountains for a holiday. Hedwig Lehmann recalled this time: “In summer our Uncle Jacobi came . . . to visit our parents. Mrs. Krackowizer came with her children Marie and Alice to Germany, to take her daughters to . . . the boarding school in Stuttgart. . . . Uncle Jacobi . . . invited our mother, Aenne, Marie, Alice and me to . . . the Harz Mountains, and our newly minted Doctor Franz went directly to Harzburg.” Lehmann collapsed into one sentence a romance that took from July 1881 to April 1883 to blossom forth: “And then it happened, that Marie and Franz concluded a partnership for life.”1
After they had declared their love for each other Franz wrote Marie, “When I first saw you coming down the street . . . , I did not realize how quickly you would capture my heart. I do not think it took a whole day before you had won me entirely.” He continued, “I can say that not one minute of those few beautiful days has been lost and do you know what I like to think about most? The Regenstein, the horse cart and the Teufelsbrücke [Devil’s Bridge] the last morning as we enjoyed the last beautiful minutes together.” Marie recalled this time and queried, “Did you really love me already in the Harz?” She admitted, “How frightened I was before you came! The girls had told me so much about their beloved brother and on top of that he did not at all like to spend time with strange girls. I wanted at first to stay out of your way. But you were so different from the terrible picture that I had made of you.” Recalling her most treasured memory, she asked if he remembered “while the others were already going back to the wagon, how we ran to the other side to see what was there.” She continued: “And the morning on the Devil’s Bridge while we leaned on the banister and I wanted to throw your hat into the water, which you willingly subscribed to. How you looked at me! But at that time I did not fully understand how to read your eyes even though I liked to look into them. Only as I was separated from you longer, it became clear to me that I loved you, you only.” Following the time in the Harz Mountains, Uncle Jacobi, Emilie Krackowizer, and her two daughters spent two days in Minden as guests at the Boas home and then they left for Austria, the country that had been the home of Ernst Krackowizer before he fled to America as a refugee from the revolutions of 1848. After their visit to Austria, the Krackowizers settled in Stuttgart, where the girls attended school. During their correspondence, Franz sent Marie “a fifteen-page notebook recalling the holiday in cut-out caricatures and humorous verse and she thanked him playfully as ‘his enthusiastic (?) botany student.’”2
Entering the army as lance corporal of the infantry regiment, Boas reported to military duty at the fort in Minden on October 1, 1881. He wrote his mother, who was away at Wiesbaden recuperating from an illness, “I arrived here the day before yesterday and immediately threw myself into soldiering.” The next day he would receive his uniform and present himself “along with three other volunteers . . . to the instructing lieutenant.” They would serve “daily from 8–11 and from 2–4, from 4:30–5:30 for instruction.” As a one-year volunteer, Boas was able to live at home with his family. Boas’s father had built a large two-story house in 1878, on land made available after the city’s fortified walls were taken down. While the house was under construction, Boas had written to his parents about “looking forward to my peaceful, lovely study, the elegant music room [and] the garden. . . . And the location is so convenient that it’s almost in the city!” To his father Boas wrote that once “Villa Boas” was constructed and they were sitting in the garden receiving visitors, he mustn’t “scramble” about so much, but rather enjoy the “lovely house of your own.” Boas had helped his family move from their old house on the Market to the new Villa Boas and then he left for Kiel. In his mind it did not become home to him until he lived there during his year of military service.3
In a letter to Uncle Jacobi, Boas wrote, “Soldiering is really quite disagreeable. It keeps me busy six or seven hours a day, and so I can find no more than four hours for decent work, and you know how little one can accomplish in this time.” Boas was appreciative of being able to spend time at home: “Since I went to the university I was never here for any longer period, and the little girls, Hete and Aenne, have grown big in this time. I rejoice every day that I can again learn to know my sisters.” During his year of military service, Boas shut himself in his study in the evenings and continued his work. His mother wrote to her brother, Salomon Meyer, that Franz had spent the whole Christmas season in his room studying: “He won’t allow anything to disturb him. . . . For him there is only science.” She reflected, “If he remains healthy only then do I know certainly that we have great pleasure through him.” Marking the months in service right along with her son, she wrote, “The first quarter of his slavery is thankfully almost over.” Then, as if counting her blessings, she concluded, “The only good thing of the matter is that we have him once more for ourselves, before he moves on in life and in the distance.”4
Working in the military during the day and holed up in his study at night, Boas was also carefully charting his “plans for work for the coming years.” He wrote to Jacobi, “I hope that my plans will have sufficient interest for you that I can tell you about them. Perhaps you remember the things I told you once on our wonderful Harz journey. These matters I have made the goals of my scientific career. I am certain that I do not lose sight of this for one moment.” Boas continued, “You may remember that, in a few words, it is the mechanism of the life of organisms and especially of peoples that is before my eyes.” He felt, however, that he needed “to keep this goal as a distant one,” because he had first to acquire knowledge of the methods of study and to establish himself in his field. He said he was going to “clean up the studies” he had undertaken in psychophysics: he had published one paper in Pflügers Archiv, “and one or two more will follow.” Boas continued, “Then I will leave psychophysics in peace since it leads me too far afield” from the study of human geography. “As my chief work,” Boas wrote, “I have another plan, to study what influence the configuration of the land has on the acquaintance of peoples with their near and far neighbors. . . . But I believe it essential to become acquainted with two other sciences, physiology and sociology, for I believe that even a geographer cannot feel quite sure of himself until he has studied these.” As if steeling himself to ask, Boas expressed the need for help from Jacobi in finding a position: “Of course it is not my purpose just to sit down and do nothing but study for I wish also to employ that which I have learned up to now. . . . I cannot and do not wish to do this at Papa’s expense, and must look around for a position.” Boas said that “with great difficulty” he could “achieve an appointment as a Privatdocent with a stipend.” Finally, Boas wrote, “Now it is your fault that Johns Hopkins University sticks in my head as a desirable place to work . . . for . . . one or two years. Do you think it possible for me, and that I am competent enough to get a fellowship there? (At last I have said what I have been trying to say for a quarter of an hour).”5
Jacobi did all he could to assist Boas in obtaining a fellowship at Johns Hopkins. In March 1882 he wrote an encouraging letter: “I do not think it would be hard to get a stipend. However, I cannot say much about it without closer inquiry.” He asked Franz for “a statement of your expectations,” for a list of the “public or private recommendations,” for some reprints of articles, and for an indication of the “direction of your work now and for the future.” Jacobi concluded, “The stipend is only for $500, which is something for Baltimore.” Johns Hopkins University President Daniel Coit Gilman wrote a cordial letter to Boas: “Although we have never met I know you so well through our mutual friends . . . as well as by your professional standing that you need never offer an excuse for asking any information which we can give.” With approximately one hundred applications for the fellowship program, Gilman cautioned, “All we can promise to any candidate we promise to all, fair consideration.” He concluded on the positive note: “I wish we might see you here.” Having received a copy of the letter, Jacobi wrote Boas asking him to send his materials immediately to Baltimore for receipt by May 12, 1882.6
Boas also sought advice from his mentor Theobald Fischer about his plans. In enthusiastic support, Fischer wrote, “If you can get a position at Johns Hopkins University, it would be beneficial to you. . . . A two-year stay in the United States would expand your intellectual horizons.” Enclosing his letter of support, Fischer added, “I write it intentionally in German because any decent person must understand English and German.” Fischer advised Boas that “above all before the commencement of actual work you must go forward at a rapid pace with preliminary work, which is the inspection, collection and sifting of the raw data.” He concluded, “Through detailed studies of the migrations of the Eskimos, you can, in fact, promote important science.”7
On April 10, 1882, Boas sent materials to Jacobi for the Johns Hopkins fellowship application. In his statement of objectives, Boas noted the shift of interest during his university years from mathematics and physics to geography: “By studying the natural sciences I became aware of other questions which prompted me to take up geography. This subject fascinated me to such an extent that I finally chose it as my major study.” In a crucial revelation of his change of perspective, Boas wrote, “In the course of time I became convinced that a materialistic point of view, for a physicist a very real one, was untenable. This gave me a new point of view and I recognized the importance of studying the interaction between the organic and inorganic, above all the relation between the life of a people and their physical environment.” Even at this point in his years as a young scientist, Boas eschewed a single-stranded approach to understanding human behavior. For Boas the materialistic approach proved to be a narrow frame that precluded understanding the complexity of human life. Here lay the seeds for the later growth that resulted in the complex study of the physical environment and people’s interrelationship with it. He would come to see this as the mutable physical traits of people and the reflection of their lives in language, folklore, and ritual—and, ultimately, as Boas developed the concept, in their culture. His “life plan,” Boas said, arose from this orientation and would involve compiling research to answer such questions as, “In how far may we consider the phenomena of organic life, especially those of the psychic life, from a mechanistic point of view? And furthermore what conclusions may be drawn from such a consideration?” In order to undertake such research problems, Boas said, he would need to have “a general knowledge of physiology, psychology, and sociology.” He was anxious to complete the smaller projects on psychophysics and meteorology so that, as he said, “I may give all my energy to working on the question which I have chosen as my life’s work.”8
Unable to send Jacobi reprints of his papers, he recounted that, in addition to several others, he had published “a small paper,” on “A Proof of Talbot’s Statement,” in Annalen der Physik und Chemie (Annals of physics and chemistry) in 1882. His present focus was on “the relationship of the migration of present day Eskimo to the configuration and physical conditions of the land.” Acknowledging that this was “a very extensive piece of work,” he explained his approach: “I am taking it up chiefly from a methodological standpoint, in order to discover how far one can get studying a very special, and not simple case, in determining the relationship between the life of a people and the environment.”9
Boas waited anxiously for news from Johns Hopkins. In May he wrote his sister Toni, “I wonder what will happen with my application to Baltimore? It must be in their hands for several days already.” With excitement, he exuded, “It would be very lucky for my scientific career if I could go there.” Boas said he could “do practically nothing” all day since he had military duty. He said he was able on occasion to “read something about my Eskimos and afterwards take notes. I still have 140 days.” By July, having heard nothing from Johns Hopkins, both Boas and his parents were anxious about his prospects. The family network was buzzing. Franz’s mother had received a letter from her sister-in-law Phips, wife of her brother Jacob, who lived in New York and who had heard “that Franz can have no hope for the position in Baltimore for this year.” The sister-in-law added, “He may hope for it for next year.” Sophie wrote to Jacobi, “I beg you to tell us at once whether this prospect for next year is a figure of speech or whether he can really count on it. My husband has now agreed to furnish funds for further study for one year.” Franz, she said, wanted to make plans for his year of study and much would be determined by whether or not he would be going to Baltimore. Appending a note at the end of the letter, Boas recounted that he had journeyed to Kiel during his military leave to talk about “my problems with my professors.” Boas continued, “I was in great doubt whether I should try to obtain a practical position in October or whether I should accept Papa’s kind offer. I asked them whether in view of my ultimate plans if it would be worthwhile for me to devote some time to study.” With the support of his professors, he said, “I shall decide to do so.” He reiterated his mother’s plea for his uncle to tell him “whether I really have any chances in Baltimore.”10
When he learned that he had not been awarded a fellowship, Boas was devastated. He sat “as a spirit” in his study in Minden, pouring over “the Eskimo language, [with] a Lexicon.” In commiseration, Boas’s father wrote him from Berlin, where he was on business: “Mama informed me today that . . . Baltimore is nothing. So another disappointment. You will have to experience more of them. I am also very disappointed since I took for granted that you would get the position.” He advised his son, “So now put these ideas away and come up with other plans. Please make use of your time in Kiel to discuss and deliberate thoroughly with your friends there, how you should shape your future.” With belief in his son and always generous in his support, Franz’s father continued, “If it should be necessary for you to spend another year to fully prepare yourself for your future you can count on me.” He concluded his counsel: “Do not let this disappointment depress you. Go with determination on your way.” In closing, he wrote, “Enjoy yourself to the utmost. I shall be home by the end of the week. Best Wishes, Your father, M. Boas.”11
Boas’s mood worsened with the required military maneuvers in August 1882. He wrote his parents from the Teutoburg Forest in Bielefeld, where five battalions were quartered in overcrowded and uncomfortable conditions. “I cannot tell you much about our march,” he wrote, because “one finally becomes too stupefied to even look around.” From the dry, rocky region of Salzkotten, Boas bemoaned, “Yesterday and today we had very long marches through endless deep sand which was very tiring. I kept up very well, my feet held out until today.” The end of the maneuvers was in sight, with only a week more of “this plague” and then “three days of brigade exercises . . . not nearly as tiring as the four days of marches.”12
Finally, his year of active military service came to an end. Boas found lodging in Berlin. Living “a truly regulated life,” Boas went daily to the library and returned to work at home when the library closed. He was finishing “a short geographical work about the northern borders of the distribution of the Eskimos” that he was hoping would appear soon in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Journal of the Geographical Society at Berlin). Continuing with his study of the Eskimo language, he was also learning Danish—an easy language, he said, to acquire.13
Boas noted in a letter to his mother that in Berlin he was “right in the middle of the geographical circle and could not have found a better place to spend the winter.” Boas had gained initial introduction to the circle of scientists through Miss Hennig, whom he had met at a dinner at the Lehmanns. Miss Hennig worked as an assistant to Dr. Wilhelm Reiß, a geologist and explorer and a prominent member of both the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin (Society for Geography in Berlin) and the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte (Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory). In response to Dr. Reiß’s invitation, Boas approached his house with “palpitations of the heart at 12 o’clock and with a well-practiced and prepared speech.” However, as Boas wrote, “this was an unnecessary effort, since I had hardly sent my card in when Dr. Reiß appeared in the doorway and welcomed me as though I were a good old acquaintance.” Put at his ease, Boas did not have to deliver his “great speech” but “could explain to him quite leisurely,” as he said, “who I am and what I want.” Dr. Reiß assisted Boas in every way, from setting him up with a cartographer who would instruct him in making maps, to inviting him to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte for the express purpose of introducing him to Rudolph Virchow and Adolph Bastian. “As I hear from Miss Hennig,” Boas wrote, “he has already told Bastian about me and since he happens to be working on Eskimos just now, he asked Reiß to introduce me to him as soon as possible.” Boas playfully wrote, “So tomorrow evening you must hold your thumbs for me so that I might succeed in awakening Bastian’s interest in me.” When he knew Bastian better, he would give him reprints of his work and “explain to him as clearly as possible the purpose of my studies.”14
Virchow was the leading physical anthropologist in Germany, and Bastian the leading ethnologist. However, scientific disciplines were not firmly delineated in the nineteenth century. Virchow was claimed by the “science of medicine, anatomy, pathology and anthropology . . . as one of their great men.” Bastian had studied under Virchow when the latter first began lecturing at the University of Würtzburg in pathology. In 1869 Virchow and Bastian founded the Berliner Anthropologische Gesellschaft, with a name change the next year to Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. Virchow served as president; and Bastian served as vice president and as the organizing force for Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, the journal of the society. Years later, in the obituary for Virchow, Boas remarked that the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte “soon became a center to which flowed a flood of anthropological material from all parts of the world, and where important scientific questions were discussed by the most competent authorities.” Throughout his lifetime Bastian was a traveler of the world, who took “intermediate sojourns in Berlin, his chosen headquarters.” From his travels and “his incessant activity as a collector,” Bastian accumulated the “vast treasures” that comprised the collection of the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, the Royal Museum of Ethnology, of which he was founder and curator; he also served as president of the Berlin Geographical Society (1871–73).15
The evening at the anthropological society yielded a rich reservoir of contacts. “I arrived there,” Boas wrote his parents, “at seven in the evening” on Saturday, October 21. Initially, he felt “very unhappy,” since he knew none of the men. By his own admission, he was ill at ease in social situations: “I try very hard in social gatherings to be courteous but you know that it is very hard for me.” He added, “I hope I shall learn some of this also here in Berlin.” Boas was relieved when Dr. Reiß arrived for the specific purpose of introducing him: “The first one whom I met was Bastian. Dr. Reiß introduced me before the beginning of the meeting as the Dr. Boas about whom he had already spoken and who was making himself ready for travel in North America.” Bastian engaged enthusiastically in conversation with Boas. As Boas wrote, he “immediately pounced on me with the question [as to] when I wished to leave.” Responding in detail to Bastian’s many questions, Boas observed, “He seemed to be interested in [my responses] although he did not seem to see the entire thought connection immediately.” Reiß gave Boas the key to capturing Bastian’s attention: “Dr. Reiß told me later that I must always emphasize my intention to travel in speaking to Bastian if I wish to be sure of his interest.” Certainly, he must have been captivated enough, since he asked Boas “to visit him in the Museum where I wanted to go so much.” After a “long, drawn out . . . and excessively tiring meeting,” the group adjourned to the coffee house. Dr. Reiß appeared again at just the right moment to introduce Boas to Virchow, who invited the young man to sit next to him: “When Bastian saw us sitting together he also came over and listened to me once more.” The evening concluded with Bastian and Virchow both giving him advice “about what I must still learn and declared themselves ready to give any help I might need.”16
Eager to follow up on his introduction to Bastian, Boas visited him two days later, on Monday, at Berlin’s Royal Museum of Ethnology: “Unfortunately I came on an inauspicious day since new things had come in which had to be unpacked, but Bastian graciously showed me the Eskimo objects and permitted me to work with them whenever I wanted.” Bastian put Boas in touch with Professor Wilhelm Julius Foerster, the director of the Berlin Observatory, who would teach him “meteorological and magnetic observations and also skull measurements.” Boas concluded, “Are you not also happy that I can learn everything that I want here?”17 Once established in the circle of scientists, Boas continued to move in its orbit. At the invitation of Dr. Reiß, he attended the meeting of the geographical society and listened to talks by travelers who had just returned from “Northwest America (Alaska) and another from Madagascar.” He attended “the obligatory dinner after the meeting to which Dr. Reiß invited me.” He had met again with Professor Foerster and arranged a time to go to the observatory to “reckon and observe.” Perhaps most important, he had gone to the museum to confer with Bastian, “where I had to report on my work and where he enlarged in a lengthy lecture on his ideas.” Bastian, Boas observed, “is a very pleasant man who takes part most graciously in all my efforts but the most gracious is still Dr. Reiß who took so much trouble to introduce me everywhere that I cannot express my thanks to him enough.”18
While enthusiasm was building in the German scientific community over Boas’s promise and plans, bafflement, if not consternation, was mounting among his relatives. Salomon Meyer, affectionately called Uncle Mons, had written Boas’s parents about Franz’s overly ambitious “travel desires.” In his letter to his parents, Boas referred to “Uncle Mons’s foolish remark” and added, “Besides my travel desires [are] only to North America.” Boas reiterated, “The only thing that matters is that I learn all that a thoroughly prepared geographer needs to know. That I strive to travel as soon as possible you already know.”19
Jacobi wrote his parents a more serious critique of his plans on July 19, 1882. Boas had been participating in army maneuvers when the letter arrived, and then he was caught up in the delirium of release from the army and the details of his move to Berlin in October. He did not respond to Jacobi’s letter until November 26. Point by point, in cool but combative prose, Boas addressed his uncle’s letter: “First I must correct an error.” He continued, “You thought that I had sought the fellowship in Baltimore because I thought I would get ahead better there than here. That was not the reason. I wanted to have the opportunity to continue my studies without being a burden on Papa, to learn things that I must know as a geographer, and which I absolutely need for my scientific goals.” Driving directly to the heart of one of Jacobi’s critiques, Boas asserted, “My dearest aim has always been, and still is, the achievement of a German professorship.” He also addressed Jacobi’s criticism that he had chosen not to take the state examination, a decision that Boas said was due “chiefly to the influence of his university professors, who regarded it as quite unnecessary.” Boas anticipated that he would have to spend at the most “three or four years as Privatdozent,” particularly if he selected geography. During this time, he anticipated becoming financially independent with the stipend he would receive from students who would pay to study with him. “In everything I do,” Boas wrote, “the concern is chiefly with the years until I can become ‘habilitiert,’” the latter rank marking the successful completion of the dissertation, publication of articles, and public presentation and defense of his positions that would allow him to lecture at a German university. He continued, “Since, as you know, I wish to devote, if at all possible, a number of years to scientific journeys, I am advised by experienced persons to ‘habilitieren’ myself next year and then get a leave of absence immediately, which I would spend in travel. Then, they tell me, if I have accomplished anything, I could count on an ‘ausserordentlicher’ Professor at that university on my return.”20
Boas’s father, “with his usual good-heartedness,” had agreed to support Franz for another year. In Berlin, Boas was currently studying precisely what he had intended to in Baltimore—“cartography, astronomical determination of places, and meteorological determinations.” Then Boas addressed the same criticism that Uncle Mons had leveled against him: “Furthermore, I want to correct your misconception that I am dissipating myself over too wide a field.” He continued, “If you remember my last letter and our conversation summer before last you will know that my study-plan has become quite fixed.” Boas said that he was focusing on a topic linked directly to his “general train of thought” that he would use as his thesis for habilitation: “I am studying the wandering of the Eskimos, their knowledge of the country they live in and of adjacent lands, in the hope to prove a close connection between the number of persons in a tribe, the distribution of food supplies and the nature of the country.” Boas said that he was publishing material on this topic in the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin during the winter. “Thus,” Boas concluded, “I have specialized my work sufficiently and do not plan to jump from here to there in my studies.”21
Boas continued, “My greatest desire is directed to the American polar region, and so far as it is at all possible I am very well equipped for it. I am completely at home in the literature of this region, as the small studies that will appear in the next months will show you. Furthermore, I am learning everything that is needed for scientific trips, and finally and most important I am learning the Eskimo language, and have already made good progress. If I should really succeed in getting there my chief field of work would be the wandering of the Eskimos.” Informing Jacobi of his care with making contacts, Boas wrote, “I am taking great pains to interest the appropriate circles here in the matter. I have become acquainted with Virchow, Bastian and other important people, and am in communication with a gentleman in Bremen [Moritz von Lindeman] and in Copenhagen [Hinrich Johannes Rink] both of whom are authorities in the field, as well as with Scottish whalers.” With great detail, Boas had worked out the plans for his travels. “I can tell it to you precisely,” he wrote. “West of Davis Strait, opposite Greenland, Baffinland extends to about latitude 74 degrees north. On its west coast below 73-degree latitude lays Ponds Inlet and Eclipse Sound. Here there is an Eskimo settlement Kaproktolik.” Annually these Eskimos traveled overland to trade at a settlement in the Fury and Hecla Strait. These latter Eskimos traveled “along the unknown eastern shore of the Fox Canal up to about 66 degrees N 75 degrees W,” where Eskimos from the Cumberland Sound visit. “The chief problem,” Boas wrote, “is cost. I have figured it out and find that everything can be done for five hundred or six hundred dollars.” After itemizing his budget, he reviewed his ideas for seeking inexpensive or free transport aboard a whaler and soliciting sponsorship from the American Geographical Society. In sum, Boas wrote, “I hope to accomplish quite a lot through this trip. . . . I will be accepted among the geographers.” Boas concluded, “Finally may I ask you not to tell my parents or sisters about my plans so as not to cause them unnecessary worry.”22
Boas maintained that he wanted to shield his parents and his sisters from worry about his travels. In fact, he himself wrote to them frequently on this topic, as he did in the same month that he had written to Jacobi: “That I strive to travel as soon as possible you already know.” In January 1883 he wrote, “Resign yourselves now to the thought that in any case, I shall go away.” He continued, “For now I have turned to the German Polar Commission, in order possibly to contact directly the German station which I could use as a good starting point and support.” Bastian, he said, was also attempting to get information for him, “and I shall hopefully get an answer soon regarding the time when the ship will sail.” By the next week, Boas was making inquiries about when the whaler Germania would leave, “and whether I may possibly go along.” Fischer, he wrote, “wants to put a notice of my trip in a journal.”23
Boas had initially hoped to gain support from scientific societies. He had made an inquiry to the Humboldt and Ritter Foundations but to no avail. However, as he observed later, “I saw very soon that for a young and untried man, without personal connections, it was practically impossible to obtain funds for a journey from one of the scientific societies.”24 With resourcefulness, Boas presented a proposition to the owner of one of the Berlin daily papers. Clearly surprised himself that this plan had worked, Boas wrote his parents, “You are probably curious to know where I shall suddenly get the money. It happened this way. Last Friday I had the cheek to write to Mr. Rudolf Mosse, the owner of the Berliner Tageblatt, in the following vein. I outlined my plans and asked for 2500 Mark for the trip and promised to send him reports of the same. I called his attention to the fact that I was offering him the advantages that the New York Herald Tribune had obtained from Stanley at the sacrifice of much time and money, for a minimal sum (such impudence).” Boas stressed to the owner of the Berliner Tageblatt that his trip would garner “attention in many circles, first because it would determine the last of the unknown coastal regions of Arctic America and also that the method of travel would be unusual (still greater impudence).”25
Boas received a letter of interest from editor-in-chief Dr. Arthur Levysohn, who had been directed by the owner of the newspaper to follow up on the proposition. “I just found out,” Boas continued, “that Mr. Mosse is inclined to consider my proposition, only he would like to know my preparation and get to know my connections.” Boas name-dropped liberally: “I spoke of everyone and used their titles, which apparently impressed him.” Boas had come to the interview with a file of correspondence on his proposed trip, copies of his printed articles, and letters of recommendation, one of which was from a personal friend of Dr. Levysohn. “They still want a small paper in the form of an article,” he enthused, “which I shall make as elegant and popular as possible. . . . I shall begin the essay this afternoon, ‘Arrival of a ship at an Eskimo Village,’ a highly colored account!” Very confident that he would receive the money, Boas had also spoken with the chair of the German Polar Commission, Georg von Schleinitz, about the possibility of obtaining passage on the Germania, whose captain was August F. B. Mahlstede. Schleinitz had said, encouragingly, “He could probably take me and a servant,” for payment of one Reichsmark per day for food. Boas closed his letter, “Be happy together with me and write soon.”26
The following day Boas presented his essay to the owner of the Berliner Tageblatt Mosse and to the editor-in-chief, Levysohn. Ecstatic with the positive response, Boas relayed Mosse’s words—that “he would accept anything which was as well written” as Boas’s sample article, and “that he had no further doubts about the matter.” Boas said that before he left on his journey he would write an article on the “history of explorations in these regions and one on equipment and plans.” Boas observed, “The Tageblatt will be in a position to publish direct news of the trip.” He continued, “I pretended that the money needed would be considerable and that I was doing the Tageblatt a favor by letting them have my reports. I did not let them think that my trip in any way depended on their granting me the money.” The contract would be finalized when Boas returned from Hamburg, where he was making arrangements for his trip. He would agree to produce “a certain number of articles,” with the publication of these left to Mosse. “Furthermore,” Boas continued, “I will bind myself to undertake the trip without asking for more funds.” Boas would retain “free hand in regard to scientific publications,” but the articles in the Tageblatt “must be published before those in [other] journals.” In a postscript Boas wrote, “What makes me happiest is that I got the money through my own personal efforts.” In the final agreement, Boas would receive three thousand Reichsmarks for a total of fifteen articles, to be published exclusively by the Berliner Tageblatt, with Boas’s father providing bond for his son, making good on the agreement. The articles were to appear from August 1883 to April 1885. The agreement was mutually beneficial for both the Berliner Tageblatt and for Boas. As Müller-Wille notes, “With this contract the newspaper secured exclusive rights to first publication of any news that Boas would send from the Arctic,” and this would be, as proudly proclaimed in the editorial introducing the series, for “the glory of unser Vaterland, our fatherland.” Boas, in turn, gained through this agreement “a large readership throughout German-speaking Central Europe,” and, as a result, he became quite well known “as a writer, traveller, and scientist.”27
Boas traveled to Bremen to visit with Lindeman on February 1; to Hamburg to talk with Neumayer from February 2 to 3; to Kiel to consult with his professors from February 3 to 5; to Hamburg and Eimsbüttel on February 6; and then back to Berlin. Relating details about the longer-term strategies for his academic career, Boas wrote his parents about the counsel his professors had offered. Over dinner in Kiel, they had discussed Boas’s plans for academic affiliation through the process of habilitation. As Boas related, Fischer and Erdmann and “several other men are of the opinion that I would be right to habilitate myself later.”
In Hamburg, following Bastian’s recommendation, Boas met with Georg von Neumayer, chairman of the German Polar Commission and director of the Imperial Seewarte (marine observatory), and with Austrian Carl Weyprecht, co-founder of the First International Polar Year (1882–83). Germany had joined with eleven other nations in an international effort to study climatological and physical factors in the Arctic and had sent a crew of eleven men to the northern end of Cumberland Sound to establish a research station. As Müller-Wille notes, Boas’s choice of “location and research themes [were] certainly influenced by the contemporary scientific atmosphere that strongly encouraged research in polar regions.”28 Boas wrote his parents from Hamburg, “Neumayer unexpectedly received me most graciously and offered me much more than I had expected.” Neumayer agreed that Boas could travel on the Germania—the two-masted schooner built in 1869 for Arctic waters—gave him “a number of maps and the inventory of the station out of which I should choose what I wanted,” and “took over my entire equipment of instruments, guns, furs and a large part of the provisioning so that I shall have no cost in these matters.” With astonishment, Boas noted, “This support is worth as much as an entire sum of 1500 Mark. The instruments alone are (according to how I want to supply myself) 830 Mark!” Boas was “twice as happy” that he had made the connection with the Berliner Tageblatt, and that this was “really the way I presented it to the people.”29
Neumayer had invited Boas to give a lecture regarding his research plans to the Geographische Gesellschaft in Hamburg on February 2, 1883. To his parents, Boas wrote that his lecture “went off very well,” though he initially “shook and trembled inordinately.” At the conclusion of his lecture, Neumayer lavished so much praise on him that Boas said it made him “so uncomfortable” that he wanted “to run away.” After the visit with Neumayer at the lighthouse in Hamburg, Boas went out to the borough of Eimsbüttel at the invitation of Captain Paul Friedrich August Hegemann, “an old, experienced Polar traveler,” who had offered to order all of Boas’s supplies. The next morning Boas and Hegemann went to the stores that “had supplied the earlier expeditions with provisions and clothing.” The merchants in these stores would send Boas the “lists of necessities.” Attempting to quiet their worries, Boas assured his parents, “I am well taken care of by advice and action.”30
As Lehmann recalled, “My parents were very unhappy about the perilous trip, but also very proud. My father made only one condition. Franz should not travel alone.” Boas’s parents suggested Wilhelm Weike, the gardener and servant who had worked for the Boas family for four years. Just ten months younger than Boas, Weike had been born in the neighboring Westphalian farming village of Häverstädt. He attended the village elementary school from age six to fourteen, as required by Prussian law. By the age of nineteen, in January 1879, he had moved to Minden and by October 1, 1879, Weike was employed “as gardener and house servant” by the Boas family. Having earned their trust during his years of employment and being accustomed to hard work, Weike met the prerequisites of Boas’s father.31
Boas warmed to the choice. In January he wrote his parents, “Ask Wilhelm seriously whether he would care to travel with me. Send me his last name so that I may write him myself.” Boas continued, “Let him be examined once more to see whether he is healthy and strong enough” to make the trip. Meier Boas made all arrangements and assumed all the expenses so that Weike could accompany his son to the Arctic as his servant. In training for his trip, Weike was taught “to cook, to sole shoes, and to pour bullets” and to keep Boas’s revolver and rifle in good working order. This young man of twenty-four would accompany the scientist-explorer son of his employer to the Arctic. Just four months later, Weike would write in his diary of the sights that were unfolding before him even prior to having sailed from Cuxhaven, Germany, “When one lives in a small town one has no concept of life in the big city . . . [of] all the rushing about and chasing in the streets with the horse trams and other conveyances, and . . . the commercial activity, and the trade and traffic from one house to another.”32
Trying to quiet another concern of his parents, Boas wrote, “Incidentally regarding my trip, I can give you comforting information that where I am going there are Europeans, namely Scottish seal hunters, who live there all year round, so that I shall have them to fall back on.” With his parents still worrying about their son’s isolation during his time in the Arctic, Boas wrote the following month that he “would live together with 20 Scotsmen, among them one captain, and helmsman and a good spacious wooden house, and also about 5 tons . . . [of] coal, so that I could live in winter about as in civilized regions.”33
Boas made little mention of Marie Krackowizer in his letters to his parents during the year of his military service and through the months he lived in Berlin. He did make reference to her, however, in notes to his sisters Hete and Toni, who were clearly his link to Marie. In May 1882, ten months after having met Marie, Franz wrote Hete on her birthday with a playful, parenthetical mention of Marie, “(Note: I wanted to see whether I could write one sentence which would fill an entire page. And you see that not only women, as Marie Krackowizer believes, but even your much loved brother can accomplish this.)” In a postcard to his parents, written while he was on military maneuvers, Franz added a note: “Have you, Hete, heard from Miss Krackowizer whether she passed her exams well?” Months later after their mutually professed love, Marie wrote to Franz that while he could solve many deep problems, he was slow to figure her out: “Toni was much quicker. She told me she saw a long time ago from my letters, that I loved you.” Marie continued, “But I really did not want to betray it only I liked to write something about you because otherwise I would never find out anything about you.” In candor, she said, “Hete was the most trusted in giving information about you.”34
For Marie’s mother, Emilie Krackowizer, the prospect of a match between Franz Boas and her daughter was fraught with challenges and worries. In February 1883 she wrote to Sophie Boas and to Toni that “Hete’s letter to Marie yesterday . . . [fell] like a bomb upon us.” She extended her “deep sympathy to the dear mother and gentle sister concerning the planned Eskimo explorations.” Diplomatically, she countered, “If on the other hand you support the decision with pride then you must agree with your son and brother who follows the compulsion of his science so courageously.” Emilie Krackowizer’s letter was long and full of detailed news of Marie, who was “very busy with making clothes and will have finished the course the end of this month, and will be in a position to help herself in this, which in my opinion is of the greatest advantage in cramped pecuniary circumstances.” Marie was taking French conversation, wanted to take flower painting, and was studying piano, though, candidly, her mother observed, “Her progress is not great!” The social life in Stuttgart was “quite limited and Marie is still waiting for her first ball.” For Emilie Krackowizer, “time moves quickly enough and I think more than ever about the return trip.” As they “move toward home in the fall,” she said, they would like to stop in Minden, “if it is not inconvenient.” Apologizing for her daughter who had not responded to Toni’s letter, Mrs. Krackowizer wrote, “She is still in the ‘Sturm und Drang’ period and must clarify much in herself before she is all through.” Finally, she observed of her daughter, “But she is good, honest, and true, I guarantee that.”35
February and March 1883 involved the dizzying preparations for Boas’s trip and the stark realization that he would be separated from his family for over a year. “Due to the long trip,” Boas wrote his parents, “the days with you seem to lie almost like an eternity behind me.” Boas had been invited to give a talk about his trip to the Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin in April. To his parents, he wrote, “You will then be able to see the lecture in print since the local papers always publish notices of the meetings and besides that they appear in detail in the records of the Society for Earth Sciences.” Toni, who had moved to Berlin to be with her brother during the last few months prior to his departure, told Franz that his parents wanted him to give a lecture about his trip in Minden. He wrote them, “I do not think that would be right since it looks like bragging. If I were urgently asked to do it from many sides, then the matter could be considered. I or acquaintances of mine may not have anything to do with it.” In tribute to Boas, his cousin Willy Meyer wrote, “Honest and sincere congratulations on your great scientific achievements!” Even as Boas was already “respected and celebrated,” on his return, “lecture halls are open to you” and “your career is secured.” In New York, “your name is on everyone’s lips.”36
Boas traveled to various cities at the end of March 1883 to make additional contacts for his trip. In his new capacity as a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt, undertaking the writing of two trial articles, he reported on the Third Assembly of Geographers, held in Frankfurt from March 29 to 31, 1883. Here he met again with Neumayer, and he heard Friedrich Ratzel talk on “The Importance of Polar Research to Geography.” With the assembly gathered during the period of the International Polar Year, Ratzel’s speech focused on the shift in polar research from the expeditionary to the stationary approach, “to fixed stations where measurements and experiments agreed upon by an international scientific organization were conducted in a synchronized fashion.” Ratzel’s approach profoundly influenced Boas’s conception and implementation of his research in Baffin Land and would, by extension, have profound implications for the future development of fieldwork in anthropology.37
Using the visit to Frankfurt as an excuse, Boas journeyed to nearby Stuttgart to visit the Krackowizer residence on April 1, 1883. On April 3 he wrote to his parents, “Luckily I knew the name of the street where the Krackowizers live and also soon found the house since I only knew it was between 4 and 10.” Two months later, after Franz and Marie had exchanged many epistles of love, he wrote her about this visit to her home, “Do you believe that the 1st of April was an easy day for me? I had to collect myself entirely in front of your door in order not to betray all my thoughts and feelings immediately and I did not know how you felt towards me.” Later Boas admitted that he had traveled to Frankfurt as an excuse to his parents and sisters for his visit to Stuttgart: “I had nothing whatsoever to do in Stuttgart but to see you. I could not leave Germany without having seen you once more, and now I am and remain your blissful Franz.” He had written to Marie’s mother in advance of arriving at their house, “so that he did not come,” Marie wrote to Toni, “to a locked door which could easily have happened since we usually go for a walk on Sunday afternoon.”38
In her letter to Toni with parenthetical remarks to Hete, Marie told of Franz’s visit, “Do I need to tell you how happy we were to have him with us yesterday? I had not let myself dream of such a beautiful surprise, to see him once more and to be allowed to speak with him before his long,” and then she inserted a black line, “trip.” She continued, “I would like to have put between long and trip the words terrible and horrible but I may not do that anymore since he described it as not terrible at all.” Through Franz’s account, she came to understand “the whole thing much better,” particularly that his travels would not be “‘at random’ over the entire northern planes.” She would be able “to imagine sometimes at which of these very interesting tribes of Eskimos he happened to be.” She admitted that she had shown him “Hete’s map which I had admired and had already learned by heart . . . and he thought it was not quite accurate.” Then, coyly, she asked, “Are you angry, Hete?” Picking up a pen, Franz had sketched a new map on the other side of the paper so she would “learn my lesson over again.” Breathlessly moving on to the next topic, Marie effused, “I think it is very nice that Wilhelm will go with him. It must be a relief to know that a trustworthy person, whom you know, will be with him.” Realizing that her words were tumbling forth on the page, she wrote, “I think I am writing a terrible jumble. Perhaps I did not sleep quite long enough.” Marie concluded her letter, “Mama sends many greetings and tells you that she likes Franz very much and now understands why you are so proud of him and how difficult it will be to part with him.” In a postscript, she added, “Please do not let anyone read this smear!”39
Under the pretense of telling about his voyage but really to convey his feelings about Marie, Boas wrote to Jacobi on May 2, 1883, that the “preparations for my trip are nearing their end.” He told of his arrangement with the Berliner Tageblatt for the funding of his trip: “I like the connection with the newspaper. I attended as a correspondent for it the German Geographic meeting in Frankfurt am Maine.” Boas segued into an account of his visit to the Krackowizers: “While I was there I could not forego the pleasure of going to Stuttgart to again see the Krackowizers before my departure, or if I should be honest, to see Marie.” With great feeling, he wrote, “I could not bring myself to undertake this trip without having spoken to her once more.” Boas remarked that Marie was “going back over there.” He was hoping that “good fortune” would lead him to America where he might find “a steady position so that I may tell her what I feel for her.” He continued, “I held it to be wrong at this time before the dangerous journey and considering my insecure future, to express myself even though my leaving becomes so very, very hard.” In sharing “this extremely secret information,” Boas found Jacobi to be the ideal confidante: he knew Boas “well enough to take part in my wishes,” and he was “very friendly with the Krackowizers and will see Marie often.” He concluded, “You must not think that because of this confession that I go from here very depressed. On the contrary, I know exactly what I want, scientifically and for my future life and go with a steady eye on that with confidence and hope.”40
While clearly roiling beneath the surface with powerful emotions, Franz and Marie exchanged polite and restrained letters. “According to my promise,” Boas wrote, “I am sending you today a map of the region where I shall travel and a short outline of the planned journey.” While he might not be able to fulfill his promise “to send you a picture of myself in Eskimo costume,” he said he would send a picture of himself as a “‘European,’” but only if she would reciprocate with a picture of herself. Revealing the intensity of his emotions, he wrote that her picture “will keep alive the hope that I shall see you again.” He told her of his prospect of meeting “an American whaler so that I could make my return trip by way of America.” He concluded, “The remembrance of the few hours I spent with you in Stuttgart is a great pleasure to me, it is too bad that I had to leave so quickly.”41
More artful in shielding her emotions, Marie responded to him playfully that, with such a long trip planned, he “will not reach the American whaler. We are planning to send one very early.” In turn, Boas wrote, “It is very kind of you to send me a whaler real early.” Then he added, “But seriously, I hear through Uncle Jacobi that [Emil] Bessels, a North Pole enthusiast in Washington, thinks in all probability that I shall be able to get free passage on an American whaler, all the more reason to go home that way.” He told her that Jacobi had offered him “a large sum of money,” in case he did not have enough for his trip. “Isn’t that good of him?” he asked, observing, “I am also glad to know from the letter that he approves of my plans and wishes.” Boas reflected, “Even though one ought to know what one has to do, there is satisfaction in knowing that a person whom one honors so highly, approves. I only hope that I shall have good luck among the Eskimo. The success of my trip depends on this.” Continuing on the theme of luck, Boas reflected, “If one has luck one is known as ‘the daring explorer,’ if bad, as the ‘adventurer.’ It makes no difference. I know what I want and am looking hopefully into the future.” Recognizing the fickle opinion of others, Boas expressed the desire that “the opinion of my friends does not depend on what others say.”42
Taking pity on the two, Toni broke the juggernaut by writing to Marie about Franz’s love for her. With effusive gratitude, Marie wrote to Toni, “If you knew what a period of uncertainty and despair I have lived through since April 1, you could then imagine how happy your letter . . . made me.” With clarion honesty, Marie wrote, “The closer the time of Franz’s departure draws near the more impossible it seems to me to have to stand his going away without my knowing whether he liked me just a little bit.” Rhetorically she queried, “How could he otherwise be the center of my actions and thoughts if he had no interest in me.” She continued, “Now I may think of him and all he does, what concerns him may make me happy or sad. Do you now believe that I love him, that I am happy and therefore will wait patiently without knowing anymore until he comes back, until I can see him again?” With agonizing self-doubt, she admitted, “But Toni, I cannot understand how Franz can like me because it seems to me that everything that is great and worth loving in him is lacking in me and I am afraid when he knows me better he may perhaps be disappointed. If this could happen then I would wish we had never seen each other, for I do not believe that anything could change my feeling for him.” She acknowledged that Toni was right when she observed that Marie had “not yet seen many men.” She countered forcefully, “But those that I have seen have made no impression on me and as much as I know there exists only one man, one who in the true sense of the word is Man, who can be honored and loved and he is Franz.” Then, firmly, she said, “Now I believe I have told you enough and you must promise me that you will tell Franz no more than is necessary to give him quiet [so that he has] all his strength for his great work.” “The rest,” she wrote, “I want to tell him later if he really should ask me about it.” She queried urgently, “But I may still write to him as before? I shall not even tell him that I like him. The poor man, that he should have so many problems just now in the last minute.”43
Toni had no sooner received the letter from Marie than she shared it with Franz. In a letter written to Marie twelve days later, Franz told her with sweet honesty of his emotions on hearing this news: “I cannot comprehend the heavenly feeling that filled me that evening. It was in the arbor in front of our house where I first heard and saw it, and slowly, slowly I had to read it, word for word in order to believe this most wonderful happiness. I was not able to say a word, my heart beat so and I had to read your letter, which held all of my happiness, over and over alone.” Immediately following his reading of Marie’s letter to Toni, Franz wrote her, “Dear Marie! Now I may call you that.” He continued, “I cannot believe it yet that only a few hours ago I had the most frightening doubts about telling you of my love.” Before having read Marie’s letter, Boas had written a declaration of his love, but he had not dared to send it. Of this first love epistle, he admitted, “The letter lies closed before me, now you may also read it.” Boas had begun the first letter “Dear Fräulein, I cannot leave here without telling you how much I love you, how you are constantly in my thoughts, how you are the content of all my wishes and dreams. Now that the hour of parting nears, all of my resolutions to hide my love from you melt away; I must know whether you have a warm feeling for me, whether you love me in return.” With profound and ecstatic relief after hearing from Toni, Franz queried, “Why did we both torment each other these long weeks when the knowledge of our love could have made us so happy?” He continued, “I do not know even now how I came out of Stuttgart, how I could leave you. Nothing has been so hard for me as to leave you without knowing whether you loved me.”44
In another letter to Marie he wrote, “Do you know the last parting will always be printed in my memory.” Franz continued, “How you sat with folded hands, half smiling, half fearful, [and] followed me with your look. At that time, I began to hope that you loved me. And I do not know even today how I found the door and the stairs. I only know I stood long in front of your house and later at night returned to tell you a silent farewell. I do not think I have ever felt such pain as on that evening when I left and had not told you what I felt.” In her letter to Franz about his arrival in Stuttgart, Marie wrote, “And now I see you again so distinct and clearly before me as you stood in front of our door and greeted me. I thought I could not hide my joy at seeing you again after two long years.” She continued, “And there I stood and what did I say?—nothing, I think—as I said nothing but foolishness the whole day long. . . . And then I see you at the piano. How you for the first time and last time played your “Nachtlied” (Night Song), my farewell. I wept in my bed that night.” She recalled saying good-bye: “How I felt when I said adieu in our little hallway—how happy was my heart. I folded my hands forcefully so that I would not run after you and hold you back.” Just days before his departure for the Canadian Arctic in 1883, Boas wrote Marie, “Music is for me a source of comfort in sorrow and music is often the first thing that enters my mind in sorrow or sudden joy.” Referring to his visit with her and her family, he confessed, “For whom else did I play Schumann’s ‘Nachtstück’ [night piece] but for you.” He continued, “I have never thought of it without seeing you, beloved, before me, and on that evening I thought only of you. . . . This piece by Schumann shall also be the last which I shall play before I leave and I shall often hear its soft and quiet happiness in foreign lands.”45
In the first love letter he had written to Marie, Boas stressed his firm intent of not binding her to him during his absence:
And if you do love me you must listen to this. I may not tie you to me today, and therefore would never be angry with you if during my long journey your heart spoke differently and you were to follow another man. I must leave you free as you are today. But when I return, may I then ask whether your heart still belongs to me. . . . I shall be back in the fall of 1884; if I should not come then I can still come in the fall of 1885. If then I have not returned, some misfortune has happened to me and you must no longer expect my return. But I go with a happy faith in my good fortune, and will you give me the hope that I may then come to you to ask whether you will be my Marie.
Resolutely he concluded his letter, “I have said what I had to say to you, and tremblingly await your verdict that will make me a happy mortal, or will rob me of the most joyful hope that has ever filled my soul.” In both the first and the second letter that Boas wrote to Marie on May 28, 1883, he referred to the ease with which he would face difficulties if he were sure of her love for him. In the first letter, he queried whether she could give him “the right always to think of you when I am in snow and in ice, in the hope of a happy future.” In the second, he declared, “If I may think of you and then see your eyes before me, I know that I shall not waver.” He added, “And you also do not be afraid of the long separation. It is only a short time, which will hopefully smooth the way for my life’s work. Onward!” As if sealing their new and sweet love, Boas declared, “Now I also know what to name my little boat that will take me on my journeys. Yours, the luckiest that I know. Formerly I wanted to call it Vorwärts, Onwards, but now your name, Marie, is a better vorwärts.”46
The day after his declaration of love, Boas wrote to Marie’s mother to explain his intentions. He enclosed a letter for Marie because he could not “send away the letter to your mother without sending you a few lines which tell you how happy I am.” He continued, “I am in heaven since I know that you love me. I say it over and over to myself so often and I still cannot hear it often enough.” True to his gift for focus, he added, “But with it all I continue to do my work.” In the next sentence he shifted back to elation and disbelief and referred to her letter, which he had tucked in his shirt pocket over his heart: “Only sometimes I feel where your letter lies to see whether it is really, really true that you love me.” Marie responded,
My Franz,
Are you really mine? Yes, you are that. I read that out of every word of your dear letters which I read over and over.
Then she asked, “Why did you have to torture me so much? Why did you not tell me earlier that you loved me?” With a sweet truthfulness that struck to the heart, she confessed, “Do you know, I think I loved you before I saw you.” She continued, “But I did not really know until your letter to mother came from Frankfurt. And then when I saw you again, when I again could look into your eyes, I thought I should have to throw my arms around your neck and always look into them to read whether you loved me. And you were so calm, so very calm that I had also to be calm but I hardly dared to look at you for fear that you might possibly read something in my eyes that you did not want to see.”47
Marie said that she “always felt . . . quieted” in his presence so that her “inner self” felt that she had to see him again “in order to allay this terrible fear which sometimes overcomes me that we might perhaps never see each other again.” She continued, “I am not as brave or strong as you and I am terribly afraid of the separation, I have only now won you over for myself and must already give you up.” Marie asked Franz to write her “often for out of your written words speaks so much courage and confidence that I then can get rid of my foolish thoughts.” As if she had coaxed herself through her worries, she confessed, “I could surely not love you as much if you could ever give up anything that you felt was right and necessary, or would only finish it part way because of a girl whom you loved.” She continued, “Therefore go to your Eskimos, stay as long as you must and come back. And you shall come back! Yes, you shall. My heart tells me so.”48
Marie’s mother was not so charmed. Responding to Boas, she wrote,
Dear Mr. Boas,
I was not entirely unprepared for your letter since I surmised with the eyes and feelings of a loving mother, what on the one hand was beginning to stir in her heart and then that your visit did not seem as innocent as it was presented.
She continued, “Since you have however expressed yourself to Marie and have presented your plans for the future so openly to me, it would be wrong of me if I did not answer you honestly.” With candor, she wrote,
What in the eyes of love seems like a small matter does not always seem so to the sterner view of the parents, therefore you must not be angry that I did not greet your love with absolute pleasure and would have wished that, considering the impending undertaking, the decisive word would have been suppressed, the word which ties the fate of my dear daughter to yours. For even though you say she should be free and not feel herself bound, this is only a figure of speech, since the heart of a girl who has promised herself to the man of her choice will still consider herself bound and her whole thinking and effort will be concentrated in that direction.
Emilie Krackowizer found his trip to the Arctic “and the whole project” as “less than safe.” The future of her daughter’s happiness depended on the success of Boas’s trip, and even with success “the founding of a steady existence” would only be assured “in quite a distant future.” For her daughter, “it will seem very hard that she suddenly must learn the seriousness of life when so few roses have bloomed for her. Marie is, or more accurately was always younger than her years in all of her nature and looked at life happily and ingenuously. She has only lately left the schoolroom and has enjoyed so few of the pleasures other girls her age usually have behind them.” Emilie Krackowizer was sure that Boas would respond to her in the same way her daughter did: “But we love each other and with the knowledge that our love is mutual everything will become easy for us and we look hopefully to the future.” Emilie counseled, “But we must not fool ourselves, that time still lies far off and that I therefore look to the near future with worry and sadness and could not accept your declaration with a happy heart.”49
With Marie’s mother unhappily resigned to this declaration of love and Franz’s parents similarly concerned, Franz and Marie continued in their exuberant correspondence. From all but their family, Franz and Marie kept their newly declared love as “our sweet secret.” “It is too nice,” Boas wrote, “to have such a secret from the whole world.” Marie responded, “I also say with you how wonderful it is to have such a secret from all people! What eyes the people here would make if they knew, if they knew!!” He asked her to make a small flag in black, white, and red, with her name embroidered on it, to fly from his boat and his sled: “This will flutter happily in the cold winds and keep my heart warm.” She wrote about the lounging robe and pipe that she wanted to give him but all he wanted from her was her picture and the flag—he never owned a lounging robe and he didn’t smoke a pipe. Marie and Franz wrote letters to each other at least once a day, if not twice. Franz’s mother and sister Toni thought it unwise for him to write Marie so much, because the impending separation would be even harder for her after she had grown accustomed to frequent letters. “But I know they are mistaken,” Franz wrote her. “The more we feel how much we are to each other the easier it will be for the bad time to pass.” In another letter, Franz requested, “Write to me often as long as we can write. We must be nourished in the [next] 14 days for almost 1 ½ years [of separation]!” Then he promised, “While I am gone, I shall keep a separate diary for you, then you can later live that time through with me.”50
On June 10, 1883, Boas left for Hamburg to make the final preparations for his Arctic voyage. He wrote Marie, “The departure from home this evening did not come lightly even though I shall come there once more.” (Boas did return to Minden for one last time in mid-June.) Boas went directly to the observatory to meet with Neumayer, who was overseeing the preparations. “Here everything looks mixed up,” he wrote. “They are still working on the Germania. Today she got new masts. My boxes stand around in the greatest disarray and await an organizing hand.” Among this equipment, Boas had purchased “3 watches, a prism circle and horizont, a geodetic theodolite, apparatus to measure distance and smaller ones to measure angles, a large compass, barometer, thermometer, hygrometer, aneroid and a photographic apparatus. A small sled boat to carry provisions, guns and ammunition, food for 12 months, furs, woolen clothing.” Through Jacobi’s generous gift, Boas was able to purchase additional equipment. He also had the full support of the German Polar Commission and of the Scottish whaler that would take him to Kekerten in Baffin Land. Boas was feted at an estate near Hamburg by “a very large gathering of men and ladies . . . given by the man who equipped me.” He was, as he wrote, “presented like a wonder-beast to be looked at closely, but not to be touched!” He continued, “I was allowed to live and had to give a toast during which I trembled quite a bit but I hope I did not seem ridiculous. We were back here at the lighthouse only at eleven-thirty. I practically fell asleep on the way back because I had not closed my eyes the night before on the train.”51
Joined by his father and Wilhelm in Hamburg, Boas spent the afternoon of June 19 in a flurry of last-minute shopping for “knives and needles” that he planned to use in trade with the Eskimo. “Then I am finished with everything and we can sail away. . . . I must go on board right away to go with the captain,” he wrote his family. He begged of them, “Please, please do not be sad. Just think how this trip should be the path to my happiness, to my future life and that you must accept the inevitable.” To Marie he wrote, “Do not be sad tomorrow since the last day before my departure is here. . . . Now that the departure is so near I am completely at ease.” Then he asked the question that would be repeated throughout their married life, “Can you be angry with me that my profession makes me go?”52
Meier Boas sailed with his son and with Weike as far as Cuxhaven where he said his farewell and returned home. Boas wrote, “Now Papa has also left me and soon we shall go out to sea. . . . We shall soon see each other again! Just realize that I must be completely responsible for Wilhelm and that this great responsibility must force me to take all precautions.” Lehmann recalled the send-off for her brother: “When Franz finally left for Hamburg, he got a big escort from Neumayer, friends and professors and our father was also with him. He was with him as far as Cuxhaven, and then went the little sailboat to sea. It was too much for my father, the emotional stress, and he came back sick to Minden, [and had his] first heart attack.”53
His family and Marie were left in sadness over his departure. Emilie Krackowizer wrote to Franz’s mother, “Now the difficult farewell is behind you and your son has left in the service of science to undertake a difficult and dangerous trip, I can feel with you, my dear friend.” She spoke of their children’s “inspired love” and expressed the following wish: “And I say with you, may a lucky star shine for your son and therefore may it be decided that the two lovers shall have a happy future.” She described the changes that she had observed in her daughter: “You would be astonished if you could see Marie. How her pleasures have changed. In this short time, she has become much thinner and it seems to me that the expression of her face has changed. The happy ingenuous girl has all at once become ripe and the seriousness of her position has drawn around her eyes lines that I would have preferred not to see so clearly for some time.” Marie wrote to Franz’s mother artfully and honestly about her love for her son. She queried, “And you are not angry with me that he has given me a part of the love that he has for all of you? He has so much that it will be enough for all of us and I shall honor it so well and become so worthy of it.” Marie continued, “I shall do everything in my power to make your Franz happy in order to be worthy of all the happiness that blesses me.” As a parting request of his family, Boas wrote, “Love her well, she belongs to us.” In reference to Marie’s planned visit to Minden, he said, “Let her stay a long time with you before she goes over there. Write to each other often then the separation will be easier for her.”54
Marie visited with the Boas family in Minden for the three weeks prior to her October 14 departure with her family for the United States. In expectation of this visit, she wrote Franz, “I shall be in Minden in the same rooms where you are now, shall speak with the same dear persons with whom you now speak. Oh! And how much they will have to tell me about you.” Playfully, she added, “Franz, there I shall find out all your wickedness. Are you not afraid of that? . . . And in your room! Shall I find everything there the way you left it?” On the eve of her departure from Bremerhaven aboard a passenger ship bound for New York, Marie wrote to the Boas family that she had “a very heavy heart” to be leaving them, “for you now belong to my people and I was so happy in my Franz’s house. As long as I could, I looked out at dear old Minden and then I sat back in my corner and closed my eyes and everything that I had experienced with you passed before me.”55
For Franz Boas, the love of his life, Marie, twined together with his passion for science. In the closing days of his preparation for his voyage, he expressed this sentiment in a letter to Marie: “Behind the pain of departure lies an unmeasured and immeasurable blissfulness which makes a new man of me. My head goes to the Eskimos, my heart stays always and forever with you!” His love for science had been a lifelong focus for him, from when he was a little boy who collected mosses and lichen for his herbarium and chipped away at fossils with his geologist’s hammer, to when he was a promising young scientist about to step from Germany onto the world stage. His love for Marie had begun to blossom during their time in the Harz Mountains and opened to full-bloom two years later. Their romance had been conducted mainly through letters. Aside from the vacation days in the Harz Mountains, Franz and Marie had spent only one day together in Stuttgart on April 1, 1883. Never had they held each other in an embrace, nor had they kissed. In her birthday letter to Franz, Marie wrote, “When will the moment come when I may throw my arms around your neck for the first time?” Then she pondered, “I wonder how old you are? Just think I never thought of it before. I think it was said that you were 23 when you made your doctorate. So you must be 25 now. . . . Do you know that I shall be 22 next month?” For Boas, his love for Marie and hers for him gave compass to his life. He wrote, “In spite of all the pain I would not exchange for anything in the world the knowledge that you love me, that I love you. . . . If anything bothers me, I have only to think of you to feel my strength awakening, to endure everything.” He continued, “Life is to live vigorously, to work and accomplish something in the tumult of the world, and the greatest happiness has he found who has a loving wife at his side with whom he shares all the hopes and disappointments, who fights for and endures his battles with him along with her hopes and wishes. May he succeed or not this most beautiful knowledge must enliven him. [Would that] such a fate be ours sometime.”56
While preparing for the Arctic voyage, Boas was shifting from his graduate training as a physicist and the accompanying materialistic point of view to geography, with a more complex, nuanced consideration of the land, the people, and their migrations. In “From Physics to Ethnology,” George Stocking links Boas’s mentor Theobald Fischer to Carl Ritter, “who after [Alexander von] Humboldt was the leading German geographer of the first half of the nineteenth century.” Ritter emphasized “the interaction of man and environment—the ‘relation of all the phenomena and forces of nature to the human race.’” Fischer discerned in Boas’s explanation of his research an influence from Ritter. “I am very pleased to see,” Fischer wrote Boas, “that in addition to military service you still find time for scientific work. . . . The ideas and studies that you employ now . . . seem to be connected to Ritter’s spirit.” Four years later, Fischer again guided Boas to Ritter: “‘I am glad that you seek to comprehend the significance of the historical factor in geography; this can come best through Ritter.’” Stocking points out that “his contact with the tradition of historical geography thus impelled Boas toward a holistic, affective understanding of the relationship of man and the natural world, which Fischer (and later Boas) regarded as very different from the approach of the physicist.”57
Still, while Boas was shifting from physics to “moderne Geographie,” as this latter emerged in the 1880s in Germany, his intellectual approach was firmly grounded “in both the natural and social sciences, be it physics, geography, ethnology, and also philosophy.” As he departed for Baffin Land, Boas was poised to begin his “one-year sojourn to conduct research into ‘the elementary relationships between Inuit and their Arctic environment.’” Through his travels, Boas anticipated making his mark on geography, for, as he wrote, “I hope to accomplish quite a lot through this trip. . . . I will be accepted among the geographers.” His scientific expedition to the Arctic would be his imprimatur on the academic world. As his mentors had told him, if he traveled and accomplished anything at all, his way would be eased for habilitation to any German university. Indeed, the scientific circle in Berlin was focused keenly on travel, exploration, and discovery. The mettle of a scientist—geographer, ethnologist, geologist, or anthropologist—was forged in travel, often, as with Bastian, the world over and throughout many years. The German scientists were not firmly situated in singular disciplines, nor were scientists elsewhere: an ethnologist such as Bastian could also be a geographer, while a pathologist such as Virchow could be an anthropologist. Trained as a physicist, and identifying increasingly as a geographer, Boas himself queried, “I am still debating whether I should let myself be accepted by the Anthropologists. It cannot be to my disadvantage in any case and I often come in contact with different persons.” Of course, the anthropologists to whom Boas referred were physical anthropologists, since that was the designation used in Europe.58
When Boas left Cuxhaven aboard the Germania, bound for Kekerten in Baffin Land, he was still a physicist, laden with the complex equipment of his science that he put to immediate use. He wrote his parents, “I am already making scientific observations about the speed of waves, the transparency of water.” He planned “some observations with an instrument which Neumayer sent with me.” As he leaned into the “good wind” that was taking him to the Arctic with “air so quiet, so still [and] the heavens so blue,” Boas was gently shifting to an expanded view, one that would embrace ethnology but would not abandon geography, though physics would slide ever so softly from his line of sight. He had all the ingredients for this gentle shift—language study, study of the people, and fieldwork, characterized at the time as travel.59
In a letter to his Uncle Jacobi, Boas conveyed his focus and intent. “I feel a strong working-power within me,” he wrote, “and know for certain that I will make progress with my studies.” In his diary entry for June 9, 1883, Boas penned his intentions: “It is my idea to make a name for myself so that when I return I can make connection with the New York Herald, under proper conditions, so that I can marry Marie in two years. It must go. Then I must go to Alaska for one-half year.” Boas was indeed propelled ahead by his strong “working-power,” but it would take him more than two years to find a job in New York, and then it would be with Science and not the New York Herald Tribune; and it would take him more than two years to be able to marry Marie. Before that time, he would find his way to the Northwest Coast of America, close to, but not quite in Alaska, and he would begin his lifelong study of the Kwakiutl.60