The Germania had sailed away from the Scottish coast and past the Isle of Lewis. Boas wrote Marie a letter about his adventurous desires as a ten-year-old boy. It would not make its way back to her until the ship returned from the Arctic:
Fifteen years ago . . . I dreamed of participating in a polar expedition; now I have attained this; I am on my way yet so differently from what I had dreamed of. I am not heading out under the orders of a friend, but am dependent on myself. Not simply inspired by geographical exploration, but with quite definite scientific goals! My thoughts are not always on my science; no, my love, my Marie, they are on you in my heart, and of creating a future around us, beloved. Can you believe that this is much better like this than when I first dreamed of an arctic expedition?
He concluded, “I cannot deny that I often used to think that I was unlucky, but now everything has come out so beautifully that often I am astonished.”1
At three in the morning on June 22, 1883, Boas wrote to his family, “We are sailing away now. Take one more loving greeting from Wilhelm and me.” In the middle of the night, the Germania had been towed out to sea by a tugboat and left to wait for a favorable wind. With the archipelago of Helgoland disappearing in the distance, the crew set course directly for Scotland. They sailed along its northeast coast in the North Sea past Moray Firth and Pentland Firth. With the powerful tidal currents of the passage through the Firth into the North Atlantic, the Germania was pitched and tossed on high waves and Boas was laid flat with seasickness while Weike helped the crew. In a letter to his parents, Boas noted, “So far Wilhelm is doing very well. He suffers very little from seasickness and helps on the ship where he can. . . . I especially let him help in the kitchen and help the carpenter.” With calmer seas on June 28 and 29, Boas began his experiments on the transparency and color of seawater. He and Weike lowered a framed disc of white canvas over the side of the ship to test depth of visibility that in this instance extended to 6.5 fathoms. As they drew closer to Greenland on July 4 and 5, Boas remarked on the sea mammals that swam within sight of the Germania, the porpoises and the lone harp seal, and the birds that flew overhead, the fulmars and gulls.2
On June 23 Boas had begun his letter-diary for Marie that Carol Knötsch refers to as “this love-letter journal.” Müller-Wille writes, “These private letters, which Boas wrote fairly regularly, also served as a field diary from mid-December 1883. For Boas these letters became the most important mental refuge during his arctic sojourn; he expressed his inner feelings in them.” Referring to this as “a very peculiar document,” Cole observes, “In a sense it is a single, 500-page letter composed over a fifteen-month period” that allowed for “amorous effusions,” “escape” from tedious and challenging field situations and recording of fieldnotes. In addition to the letter-diary to Marie, Boas compiled, as Müller-Wille points out, “multi-layered and often parallel letters and journals,” which he used in his subsequent publications. He wrote, “My dearest! Today I am starting to write my diary for you, and first of all I have to tell you how much I love you!” The diary, Boas wrote, “will remain for me the most precious memory of this journey.”3
In one of his first entries Boas described his cabin on board the Germania: “Mine is on the lowest deck in the fore part of the ship. You have to descend a very steep stairway into a small ante-room.” Boas continued, “The entrance to my cabin is to the left of the stairs. The cabin is quite large. In the center is a table which can easily seat four people on either side. . . . There is room enough for Wilhelm and me. We get air through the stairwell and two skylights.” The room, however, smelled persistently of paint and tea no matter how diligently it was cleaned. Suffering already from seasickness, Boas moved into Captain Mahlstede’s cabin on deck, where he had benefit of the sea breeze. “The seamen go about,” Boas wrote, “in the most tattered clothing, torn coats, boots that are almost falling apart.” Occasionally the sailors would rub the cracked leather of their shoes with bacon to render them at least partially waterproof. Attempts at hygiene were nominal. Everyone received a ration of water for bathing on Sunday; however, as Boas noted, “since the soap doesn’t lather with salt water . . . one simply moves the dirt from one place to another.” Boas continued, “Monday clothes are washed and dried on the rigging, but they are so covered with soot that they are almost blacker than before they were washed.”4
Boas took his meals in the captain’s cabin with the captain, the navigator, and the pilot, while Weike ate with the other four crew members. Boas described the kitchen and the cook: “It is a good thing that I do not look into the kitchen very often because what occurs there is anything but nice. The cook has to help with the rigging, rushes to his pots without thinking of washing his hands. . . . Water for washing dishes is available only in the direst need, so that you can imagine the mess.” In pleasant weather, the sailors slept or read to pass the time. Weike was also able to rest, save for the English lessons that Boas insisted on giving him in the hopes that Weike would be able to communicate with the American and Scottish whalers and with the Inuit who used English as a lingua franca. Of these attempts, Boas wrote Marie, “I hope he will learn something before we reach the other side.” Boas feigned a posture of repose in his description to Marie: “You must think of me now seated on a camp stool on one side of the ship, my back against the cabin, my feet against ‘Bord.’ This is how I am writing you, with an occasional look at the broad sea.” Boas had Weike take a picture of him striking a similar stance: “I shall make a print of it for you. . . . I am standing in my most usual position and am watching an iceberg which is lying opposite me.” In reality, if he was not seasick, Boas was writing articles for the Berliner Tageblatt; summarizing his “scientific plans and writing them out in detail;” conducting his experiments on sea water; or writing the detailed letter-diaries to Marie and to his family from which he would later extract information on his trip for publications.5
By July 8, in the early morning hours, they were sailing through “a severe gale” and, with the rising sun, had sighted the coast of Greenland, “35–40 miles away, through the fog.” Weike wrote in his diary, “The gale became steadily stronger; one wave after another swept on board.” Abandoning the effort to sleep, Weike got up, dressed, and delivered to Boas the birthday greetings and presents that his family and Marie had entrusted to him. In a seasick stupor, Boas lifted his head, checked his watch, found that it was three thirty in the morning, felt the raging storm tossing the ship, remarked feebly, “An early birthday gift,” and collapsed back in bed. The Germania passed from the Atlantic Ocean into the Arctic Sea on July 9, and Boas noted, in the throes of intense seasickness, “I have lived a quarter of a century.”6
Boas reflected on this experience of sailing into the Arctic Sea—of hearing the waves slap against the ice floes; the sailor’s shout “Ice in sight!”; and of seeing the slice of iceberg rush past the ship. He wrote, “It has become clear to me now how necessary it is to see a thing in order to get a true living picture of it. I have seen many pictures of icebergs, but this small piece, roaring by in the fog has given me a better conception than any picture or any description. The surroundings, the sight and sound have left an indelible impression on me. The ship, the ocean alive with screaming birds, the thundering sound of the ice, the thick fog and the light of the ice create a background that cannot be reproduced in a picture.” With the passing of the storm, Boas and Weike set to drying everything out. As Boas wrote, “Clothes are strung up, paper is spread out and we too let the sun shine on us.”7
On July 31 Boas noted that they were “drifting near the land.” However, for the next three weeks, with the shifting sheets of ice, Boas despaired of ever reaching land. They would draw near, it was within sight, and then, repeatedly: “Our progress has again ended . . . we have reached the edge of the ice and we can go no further.” Boas could not sleep for worry. He wrote, “Just think of it if I have lost four months for nothing! . . . We are sailing further and further south to see whether there is an opening.” On August 13 Boas noted, “Today there was no wind at all and we were in the midst of the ice, which lay in large floes . . . and smaller pieces all about us. There was some wind in the morning so that we ran into the ice with some force. I was awakened by such a crash at five this morning. I was tossed into the air while lying in bed.” The ice grew thicker and thicker and “stretched so far . . . that it may be covering the entire Strait of Davis.”8
On August 14 the wind died down, the fog lifted, “and suddenly we found ourselves quite close to Cape Mercy,” located at the tip of the Cumberland Sound. Boas remarked, “I was completely overwhelmed with astonishment when the veil lifted and the high mountains appeared.” With the “nearest point . . . only two miles away,” they were so close but still thwarted by the ice. Fervently hoping to be able to round Cape Mercy, Boas wrote, “If only the stupid fog would disappear. We are now close enough to see the contours of the land—the steep cliffs, the snow in the deeply cleft mountaintops. I shall not sleep too well tonight for hoping that we shall sail around the cape. Onwards, only onwards!” On August 22 the Germania rounded Cape Mercy, sailed into the sound, and encountered more ice. On August 28 Boas wrote exuberantly, “Kikkerton in sight! The great news of the day! It is just appearing through the fog and we are sailing on under a favorable wind.”9
With the sailor’s shout of “Ship ahead!,” those on board the Germania spotted a boat carrying Alexander Hall, a whaler from the Scottish station based in Kekerten, along with his crew of six Inuit sailors and a cook, who were returning from hunting walruses. In his article “In the Ice of the North—Kikkerton,” published as part of his series for the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas recalled suddenly hearing a cry from across the water: “We expectantly looked for its source. . . . Then suddenly our captain, well known in these waters, called, ‘Hello, Sandy!’ The ship’s mate also recognized his old friend from the whaling station, as their boat rapidly approached the ship. Soon it was alongside and Mr. Alexander Hall came aboard, warmly greeted by all of us. We learned that up until now no ship had entered the Sound, and that until a few days ago, the Sound had been packed with ice.”10
Hall and the Inuit attached a rope to the Germania and rowed vigorously to guide it to shore. Another small boat came from shore with six Inuit women paddling and an old man steering. Together the two small boats and the crew’s own small boat “pulled our old Germania into the harbor.” Boas recounted, “We pushed slowly through the ice. We then saw the American station. They sighted us soon and raised their flag. We heard the dogs howling and saw snow tents of the natives. Then the Scottish station . . . soon raised their flag.” Just before three in the afternoon, the Germania dropped anchor. Boas noted that they “had arrived safely in the harbor of Kikkerton,” and “at 4:30 the captain and I went ashore in the Marie.” In the story that he would later write for his children about his time in the Canadian Arctic, Boas described the Inuit women who had helped to pull the Germania to shore and who had come on board: “They wore long jackets made of sealskin, with enormous hoods in which they carried their little babies. They wore high boots made of sealskin, and short pants, which reached down to their knees. But they had put on their holiday dress to meet us, and [had] thrown gay petticoats over their fur dresses. They all brought little clay pipes, such as you use for making soap bubbles; and the first thing they did was to ask for tobacco.”11
Boas’s initial plan for the journey to Cumberland Sound had entailed traveling to K’ingua, where the seven scientists and four servants of the German Polar Commission would board the Germania for their trip back to Germany. Boas wrote, “There I shall take over the houses and inventory of the station and unpack my belongings.” However, Boas came to realize the difficulties and expense of maintaining a facility with only Weike’s help. Additionally, as Müller-Wille and Gieseking note, “he would have been isolated from the Inuit, who lived in dispersed settlements and around the whaling stations farther south in Cumberland Sound.” A month prior to his departure, Boas had changed his plans: he wrote Crawford Noble in Aberdeen, Scotland, requesting that he and Weike be allowed to stay in his whaling station. Finding hospitality and friendship in Kekerten, Boas and Weike used the whaling station as their base from September 13, 1883, to May 6, 1884.12
The Scottish whaling station was made up of three storage buildings and living quarters in a “much-modified original house brought by William Penny in 1857.” In his article of September 14, 1883, for the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas described his first view of Kekerten: “There were the tents of the natives. We saw the friendly home of Mr. Noble of Aberdeen and the Scottish station that stands next to its three supply sheds. Closer to the shoreline were the houses of members of the American station of Williams and Company of New London. On the beach there were lots of dogs, who now, during the summer, played around lazily.” The ever-helpful James Mutch and Alexander Hall were in charge of the Scottish whaling station; and Captain Roach was in charge of the American whaling station.13
Aware that the Germania was to transport the staff from the station, Dr. Wilhelm Giese, leader of the German polar station, had sent a letter to the Scottish whaling station with Inuit who traveled by whaleboat, “asking whether the Germania had arrived and whether she could” reach K’ingua. Boas recorded in his letter-diary, “As the sound was blocked with ice I put myself at their disposal.” He traveled to K’ingua with the crew of six Inuit in their whaleboat “as fast as possible.” Before departing, however, Boas had “borrowed an Eskimo suit, as mine is not ready.” In a letter that Boas sent to Marie via the Scottish ship, which was soon to depart, he wrote,
You know that I travelled to Kingawa to bring news to the expedition there. But you do not know how beautiful parts of the trip were, how nights when I lay awake and the stars shone down upon me so bright and clear I thought of you and the glorious future when I shall hold you in my arms and your clear, true eyes will always tell me how much you love me. I shall always look to them for confidence and strength and all my happiness. And then when I looked at myself in my Eskimo costume, at the sleeping forms around me, at the drifting ice, it almost seemed as though I were dreaming.
Boas concluded, “Everything here is so strange and the joy in our love always new.”14
After the rigorous three-day trip, battling heavy ice the whole way, they arrived at the opening to the K’ingua Fiord. There they found the Lizzie P. Simmons, the American whaling vessel commanded by Captain John Roach, that had last been seen in Kekerten two months before and was known to have “drifted northward with the ice.” Captain Roach, the mate, the harpooner, and Boas sailed in a small craft and were followed by the six Inuit in the whaleboat to the station of the German Polar Commission. In his journal entry for September 7, 1883, Dr. Giese had noted the arrival of Captain Roach’s boat. “To our amazement,” he wrote, “it was followed by a second boat, in which, as it approached closer, we could distinguish only Eskimos.” Dr. Giese approached the shore to greet Captain Roach, “but to his left another man unknown to me, pushed forward.” Giese continued, “Outwardly he was dressed in native costume but by his walk he was immediately recognizable as a European. While still at a distance he shouted to me, ‘Greetings from Germania.’ It was Dr. Boas.” With great relief, Dr. Giese determined “that tomorrow we would start packing up.” The Lizzie P. Simmons would carry the crew, the provisions, and the instruments to the Germania. In a matter of days, they had closed down the station and nailed the doors and windows shut. While Giese had expressed his hopes that “Dr. Boas . . . will be in a position to make use of the houses,” Boas did not visit the station again during his time in the Cumberland Sound.15
Boas’s welcome in Kekerten had been facilitated by a letter of introduction from Noble, owner of the Scottish whaling station, who requested that James Shepherd Mutch render all cooperation to Boas in his scientific endeavors. Born in Scotland in 1847, and a servant in Noble’s home, Mutch had first come to the Canadian Arctic in 1865 on board a whaler and returned to the Cumberland Sound two years later to assume the management of Noble’s station. He was to remain in the Cumberland Sound for seventeen years, only occasionally traveling back to Scotland in the spring and returning to Kekerten in the fall. Married to an Inuk woman and fluent in Inuktitut, Mutch was to be “a most welcome and willing help” to Boas in all matters. Boas acknowledged Mutch for his generous help “in my long and tedious conversations with the Esquimaux, until I was myself able to talk to them.” He continued, “It was with his dogs and sledges that I made a great number of my journeys; by his help I managed to get my skin clothing ready in time to start the winter travelling.”16
Settled into a comfortable dwelling that was “nice and warm,” Boas and Weike had a commodious living space and sleeping area with bunk beds to accommodate four people. Of the station manager of the Scottish whaling station, Boas wrote, “Jimmy Mutch is as friendly and cooperative as possible and since we have combined our provisions we can eat very well.” “Wilhelm,” Boas remarked, “is becoming a more perfect cook day by day.” Weike seemed both surprised and proud of his growing ability to cook. “I was making an excellent bean soup,” he wrote, “to which I added barley and lentils; and then I cooked my rabbit. This made an excellent meal.” Boas had employed Ssigna as his Inuit guide after having witnessed his skilled performance as the helmsman on the challenging three-day voyage to K’ingua. Born in Davis Strait but having spent most of his fifty years on the Cumberland Sound, Ssigna had been in the employ of the American Station’s Captain Roach, who had released him so that Boas could hire him for the year. Ssigna had knowledge, Boas noted, of “the coast of Cumberland Sound in almost all its extensions.” Boas offered reassurance to his family: “I have hired an Eskimo [Ssigna], who understands English well and is very reliable, for the entire winter, and now have no further worries.” In partial payment, Boas had given Ssigna the Mauser rifle in order to hunt for them. “In addition,” Boas wrote, “he will receive a weekly ration of bread, molasses and tobacco.”17 Ssigna often brought Ocheitu (who had worked as resident servant at the German Polar Station in 1882–83), Utütiak (also called Yankee), Nachojaschi, and Shanguja on the land and sea travels, as he had done on that first trip to K’ingua. There were to be many excursions over treacherous waters and across frozen terrain that Boas and Weike would not have survived had it not been for the skill and attention of Ssigna, Ocheitu, Shanguja, and other Inuit who travelled with them. Boas was both cognizant of this and grateful for it.
Boas observed soberly, “At home I believed that I would have time for many things during the winter but that must have been an illusion because my time is always filled either with cartographic or ethnographic work.” Boas reflected, “I have decided that I must limit myself to these two if I wish to accomplish anything—one year is too short a time.” Boas began immediately to chart the terrain for his topographic surveys and, simultaneously, to learn Inuktitut vocabulary. After barely disembarking from the Germania, Boas visited an Inuit dwelling, a tupik (driftwood covered by caribou and seal skin to form a tent for use in summer) where he spent the morning collecting vocabulary: “I already have quite a number of words about furnishings of the tupik and parts of the human body.” Boas never missed an opportunity to add to his vocabulary list. Just after noting that he had set sail with six Inuit for K’ingua in his first boat trip on the sound, Boas listed Inuktitut words and he added additional words the next day.18
Boas used Inuit place names on the maps he drafted. In his 1884 article “A Journey in Cumberland Sound and on the West Shore of Davis Strait,” Boas stated succinctly, “I prefer to adopt the native names instead of the English ones.” Expanding on this point, Boas wrote in 1885, “‘It is truly to be deplored if indigenous names get lost, because, like the Eskimo ones, they are so fitting; I have experienced such considerable anger, annoyance and inconveniences from numerous English names and the absence of indigenous names, that the situation has prevented me from making use of the explorer’s naming rights anywhere. It is certainly more valuable scientifically to preserve the indigenous names than to write names of all meritorious or not so meritorious friends à la Ross and Hall on bays and foothills.’”19
Boas came to realize with frustration “that all the information I had received in Europe was worth nothing.” He expanded, “In Cumberland sound there was a very rough resemblance between the shores and the old chart, as some of the fjords, at least, were marked down, though in a wrong shape. The real shape of the gulf is very different from the one given to it up to this date.” In his 1885 manuscript on “The Eskimos of Baffin Land,” Boas wrote, “The coast that was rediscovered by Ross and Parry at the beginning of this century is seen by ships almost every year, but no traveler has ever disembarked on the rough shores, so that the topography of the land has remained quite unknown. Islands and long peninsulas hide fjords that cut deep into the land, so that the passing mariner gains the impression of a uniform un-indented coast.”20 Boas had planned to travel west from Cumberland Sound to Lake Kennedy, known by the Inuit as Lake Nettiling. When he was finally able to do so in April 1884, he found that both “the shape and position” were wrong. Instead of one lake, there were two, Lakes Nettiling and Amakdjuak, and neither was located as indicated on the chart.21
Boas realized that the weather would perforce determine the pacing of his work. He wrote Marie, “My present plans are to travel about in the vicinity of Kikkerton, as I have done up to now, then when it begins to freeze to stay here until Christmas and to do ethnographical work.” As the months passed, even when the weather should have precluded his travel, Boas journeyed “almost uninterruptedly around the southeastern coastal areas of Baffin Island to make observations of the terrain and carry out topographic surveys.” Whether by small craft, larger vessel, dog sled, or on foot, Boas’s travels were physically demanding and often breathtakingly beautiful. On October 19 he wrote, “And now when I look through the tent door and see the ice and snow, hear the sea roar, everything seems almost as if in a dream.” From a point “seven miles inland from Kignait Fiord,” Boas wrote Marie during a rest stop after a five-mile hike, “I am writing you while I am lying on a bank of moss. The sun is shining on my back. To the right is a huge snow-covered mountain, partially covered by clouds, to the left a high waterfall rushes and roars and directly below it, rises a high mountain. Signa has gone to hunt rabbits . . . and I am lying here thinking of my distant love.” The next day from another camp, he wrote, “We hiked with full load, i.e. rifle and provisions, for 8 hours, but not on a level route; it was uphill and downhill through bogs and water, over rocks and stones. Moreover, we are now wearing genuine native Eskimo boots, . . . which do not have a firm sole, so our feet are still sore today.”22
In appreciation for their knowledge of their own land, Boas asked the Inuit to draw maps of the area. He gave them lead pencils and thick carton paper. On November 5 Boas wrote Marie, “Almost the whole of Kikkerton is engaged in drawing maps for me, from which I hope to get on the track of my questions.” James Mutch had identified for Boas a total of about ten to fifteen Inuit men and women whom he knew to be specialists in the configuration of the land and in place names. Boas had found that it was “better to question the Eskimos individually than several of them together, because it seems that they are shy in front of each other.” He concluded, “One can never get as much out of them when there are several together as from one of them alone.” So the Inuit would come to the station, singly or in small numbers. Boas noted, “In the morning Pakkak and his . . . [wife] were here, mapping [the areas of] Kignait and Padli for me. Since I am giving the natives tobacco for their maps, they are arriving on their own accord; thus in the evening Bob arrived with a [sketch] showing the Davis Strait coast from Padli to far to the north.” Boas wrote in his diary for November 3, “The sketch maps are always valuable.” Boas, Weike, and Mutch would open the table to its full extension, spread out an expanse of paper, and hoist themselves up on the table. Lying flat on their stomachs, they would begin sketching the outline of the maps that the Inuit had given them.23
In “Inuit Geographical Knowledge One Hundred Years Apart,” Ludger Müller-Wille and Linna Weber Müller-Wille remark, “The working sessions with the Inuit experts were considerable linguistic and cross-cultural challenges for Boas. He was a native German speaker and had had training in classical languages and French in school. He had also learned English, the lingua franca of the whalers, and some smattering of Inuktitut (the Greenlandic variety) on his own before the arctic sojourn.” Boas related that the conversation would be “seven-eighths in Eskimo and one-eighth in English.” Mutch spoke with the Inuit in Inuktitut. Boas communicated with Mutch in English; with Wilhelm in German; with the Inuit, in the Pidgin English that the Inuit spoke, and Boas had acquired; and he made a valiant effort to use Inuktitut, which he resolutely attempted to learn. “The language,” he admitted, “is quite abominably difficult!” Boas recounted how Pakkak had brought him a sketch map of the coast, on which Boas was asking him to identify the summer camps used for hunting caribou: “He is always greatly amused when I pronounce the local names.” Boas also joked about the English he was learning at the whaling station: “‘Oh well, Doctor, I will there go on land,’ as they say here.” Of his and Weike’s acquisition of Pidgin English, Boas noted, “At first we could make ourselves understood only with the jargon that has gradually grown out of the intercourse between the whalers and the Eskimos. This is a colorful mixture of Eskimo and English words with some foreign admixtures, and with the most elementary grammatical structure.”24
In the intensive interview sessions Boas continued his collection of place names and entered these on the maps following the directions of the Inuit. He combined this with his exacting and precise “geographic observations and geodetic surveys.” From his eighth day in the Cumberland Sound, when he undertook the boat trip with the six Inuit north through the ice floes to the German Polar Station, Boas was resolute: “He would get to know the land, sea, and ice with the Inuit by acquiring skills in their language, learning their place names while traveling with them extensively throughout the area and seeing and experiencing all named spaces and places in situ.” Boas had identified the key to slicing into the “complex relationships between Inuit and the arctic landscape,” through recognizing the importance of the people’s own place names for their land. In his Erstlingsreise, his first voyage, Boas had identified as primary the native terms of classification.25 A worldview in anthropology would grow from this fertile point.
Shortly after Boas’s arrival, many Inuit inhabitants of Kekerten were struck ill with diphtheria and pneumonia. In October Boas was called to assist a woman who was stricken with a high fever and who had severe difficulty in breathing. He gave her “turpentine for her chest, quinine to combat the fever, ammonia to relieve her respiration, and opium against her cough, but he could do nothing more.” The woman died two days later. On November 18 Boas wrote, “This morning I sat in a tiny, tiny snow hut at the deathbed of a poor little Eskimo boy. The Eskimos are so confident that the Doctorádluk, as they call me, can help them when they are sick that I always go to them when they call me. And I always feel so unhappy when I am with those poor people and cannot help them.” To Marie, he wrote, “This is the second deathbed I have attended here!” Boas continued, “I keep telling myself that I was not to blame for the child’s death yet it weighs upon me like a reproach that I was unable to help.” Another woman had had pneumonia but, though she had been deathly ill for three or four days, she had fortunately survived. “These poor people, man and wife,” Boas continued, “lay sick together, and although the other Eskimos supplied them with meat, they would have been in a bad way if I had not brought them food and drink.” On November 3 Boas had sent a stricken woman some hot cocoa and, to her and her husband, “some bread and meat because they had nothing to eat.” Twelve days later, he wrote, “I am still having to feed Joe and his wife.” To Marie, Boas wrote, “I shall never forget, in a small snow hut, seeing a mother beside her sick child, who scarcely showed a sign of life, and how she spoke most lovingly to him.”26
Death continued to leave sadness and devastation in its icy path. In his diary he noted, “The Eskimos are very afraid of dealing with the dead, since they believe that their spirits would kill them.” Boas explained the customs surrounding serious illness and portending death. According to the season the Inuit would build a small tupik or igloo and the stricken ones were “carried through an opening in the back. This opening is then closed, and subsequently a door is cut out.” Boas continued, “A small quantity of food is placed in the hut, but the patient is left without attendants.” However, if the Inuit did not feel that death was imminent, then “the relatives and friends may come to visit.” The wrenching tragedy of losing a child was the same for the parents no matter the culture, nor the customs surrounding illness and death. On October 30 Boas wrote, “This morning Jiminie’s child, who also had pneumonia, died. I saw him carry the box away, while his wife carried the dead child in her arms, sinking to her knees every few steps. The day before, Mutch had found the mother standing outside her house weeping over the loss of her child.”27
On his initial arrival, when Boas had made it through the ice floes of the Davis Straits and had disembarked from the Germania, another devastating epidemic was plaguing the Inuit of Baffin Land: “I arrived just when many dogs had died from an illness that has flared up, now here now there, for a long time.” In “A Journey in Cumberland Sound,” Boas recalled, “In the fall of 1883 the dogs’ disease, the horror of the Esquimaux of Cumberland sound and Greenland, spread at an awful rate over every settlement. No team was spared, and in December about one-half of all the dogs had died.” Of Ssigna’s ten dogs, two remained, and of Mutch’s thirty dogs, eight remained. Boas wrote his parents that, with sea and land frozen, “these dogs represent the only mode of travel.” He continued, “But it was precisely during this past winter that it raged especially virulently, so that at the time when I was able to start on my major trip [to Lake Nettiling], absolutely no dogs were to be had, and I could not stir from the spot.”28
From October to mid-December 1883 Boas was tied close to Kekerten. He was unable to assemble a dog team for travel and, just as important, he and Weike did not have the skin clothing requisite for winter travel. The deaths of Inuit from diphtheria and pneumonia placed restrictions on the women who were working with the skins. Boas’s sympathy and concern for the Inuit who were ill and dying warred with his desperate desire for the completion of the clothing. He had traded for furs and caribou skins in September and October. He wrote Marie, “I have bought furs and all I need now is a sleeping [bag].” He noted that he had traded for twelve caribou skins from the Inuit who had just returned from summer hunt. He added, “Now that I have them a weight has truly been taken off my mind, because for a long time I had been unable to buy any caribou skins, without which it is impossible to travel in winter.” In the “Eskimo Story,” Boas wrote, “As soon as they reached Kikkerten, and had unloaded their boats, I bought the necessary caribou-skins from them, paying them with tobacco, biscuits, molasses, caps for their guns, powder and lead. Then I secured the services of two Eskimo women, who were to work the caribou-skins into clothing for Wilhelm and myself.”29
Boas did all he could to facilitate the completion of the work. By the end of October Boas wrote to his family, “I hope the women will soon start working so that I will get a complete new suit. They only begin when the ice has become firm, and they may not work for 3 days after somebody has died; so there is now no prospect of getting winter clothing custom-made.” To Marie he wrote, “Unfortunately there are again two children very sick with diphtheria-like sickness, both died.” The result, he said, was an “unpleasant interruption” in the sewing of his caribou clothing. After the three-day cessation of sewing on the caribou skins, the women would ask those in mourning for permission to take up the work again. Finally, at the beginning of December, the women were completing Boas’s skin clothing: “My caribou pants are ready, as well as the boots which Betty [Ssigna’s wife] has been adjusting.” He was learning the nuances of the mortuary customs, “My bird slippers will be finished, although I was afraid that they would also not work on these, but it is only sealskin and caribou skin which they are forbidden to make into new clothing.” He noted that the women could work on new European items and new clothing made from birds, or on old skin clothing.30
During the winter months, when Boas’s travel was limited due to the decimated dog population, he perforce spent more time with the Inuit, either those at Kekerten or those in the areas to which his travels along the eastern shore of the Cumberland Sound took him. “Detained at Kikkerton,” as he characterized it, he began “in earnest” his ethnographic work. In “A Journey in Cumberland Sound,” Boas wrote, “Every night I spent with the natives who told me about the configuration of the land, about their travels, etc. They related the old stories handed over to them by their ancestors, sang the old songs after the old monotonous tunes, and I saw them playing the old games, with which they shorten the long dark winter nights.” By the end of December Boas noted that the language was coming easier to him, “Yesterday evening I again had a long conversation with an old woman who has come here from far to the north and whose knowledge extends as far as North Greenland! Gradually I can make myself understood somewhat with the Eskimos.” He added the persistent refrain, “Their language is horribly difficult!”31
In November Boas and Weike had set up their tupik on the ice in the Kekerten harbor to make tidal observations by means of improvised techniques—by lowering a stone tied to a cord of specific length through the ice into the water, and then, when that didn’t work, by lowering a twenty-five-foot mast from Mutch’s boat. With the two of them alternating shifts to monitor the equipment and to record the tidal measurements, they also had to keep an eye on the ice. In his entry for November 8 Boas noted that “in half an hour the ice had moved out about 2’. . . . I considered it advisable to go ashore and take everything important with me. So I closed up the tupik, and at midnight headed home with some effort, against the raging storm.” In his entry for the same day, Weike conveyed their swift departure from the tupik with more excitement: “It was almost high tide; travel across the fast ice was difficult, there were great cracks in it all over the place; we were constantly almost running into them.” On Sunday, November 11, they were back on the ice, with Boas taking the watch from four to eight in the morning, during which time he spotted activity on shore, with people running about and shouting excitedly.32
Leaving Weike to tend to the tidal measurements, Boas went ashore to find the Inuit celebrating the “great festival” of Sedna. In his “Eskimo Story,” he wrote, “I had not heard before about the festival, and was very much surprised when, one morning, I saw all the men running from hut to hut, screaming and jumping. They stop at the entrance of each hut, and when the woman of the house hears them, she steps out of the door, and throws a dish containing little gifts of meat and pieces of sealskin, among the yelling crowd, who scramble to get possession of the presents.” After the distribution of the gifts, the people divided into two groups, those born in the summer and those born in the winter, for a tug-of-war. If those born in the summer win, “then it will be nice weather during the winter,” but if those born in the winter win, “it will be a very cold winter.” Boas continued with a detailed description of the subsequent events of the festival and offered an explanation of its purpose: to please the “old woman who is mother of the seals,” and to insure good weather and good hunting for the people.33
For Boas the festival of Sedna and the narratives about her provided an increased understanding of the culture of the Inuit. As he wrote, “The belief in Sedna and her father is actually the foundation of Eskimo religion.” As told in the narrative of Sedna, the mammals of the sea were created from the severed digits of her fingers. In an attempt to rescue his daughter from an abusive husband, who was a fulmar, the father placed her in his kayak and paddled swiftly away. Pursued by a flock of threatening fulmars, the father forced his daughter from the kayak. When she clung to the side, “The cruel father then took a knife and cut off the first joints of her fingers. Falling into the sea they were transformed into whales, the nails turning into whalebone. Sedna holding on to the boat more tightly, the second finger joints fell under the sharp knife and swam away as seals . . . . when the father cut off the stumps of the fingers they became ground seals.” In agony and anger, Sedna sank to the bottom of the sea, where she took revenge on those who did not observe the proper customs of the hunt. She would not release the sea mammals from the pool at her side, in which they swam until she was placated by the attentions of the shaman and received the proper respect from the people: “As all sea animals have originated from her fingers the Eskimo must make atonement for every animal he kills.” When the hunter brought the seal to his wife, she must stop all work until it had been butchered; when a walrus or a whale was taken, all must rest for three days. Boas continued, “Not all kinds of work, however, are forbidden, for they were allowed to mend articles, made of sealskin, but they must not make anything new. Working on new [caribou] skins is strictly prohibited. No skins of this kind obtained in summer may be prepared before the ice has formed and the first seal is caught with the harpoon.” Boas wrote, “These regulations are observed very strictly and consequently the traveler who is not familiar with these customs is likely to meet the most unexpected difficulties in his undertakings in which he has to rely on the help of the natives.”34
Boas had been subtly seduced into a pleasing relationship with the ethnographic, with the people. Patience was not an innate part of him. He strained in frustration against the customs that prevented the women from sewing his skin clothing even when he came to realize the significance of the restrictions. He was poised to be off on his voyages without quite realizing that a world was unfolding before him. Gone were the disciplined hours of study: “The amiable Eskimos come and go continually.” Of the first few weeks in Kekerten, Boas remarked, “I hear continually—Herr Dr. here, Herr Dr. there!” Everyone was trying to show him “a kindness,” as he wrote, “and I had no peace until the Germania sailed away on Sunday morning, the 16th. Now I am alone here in the Cumberland sound, but I have found such a kind and friendly welcome . . . that I feel quite at home here.” Boas was soon to find that the “friendly welcome” meant that he was seldom alone. With no place to seek quiet refuge, Boas had lost control over his space: “When I am at Kikkerton I am in such great demand that I can’t get on with anything.” Returning from a cartographic trip, Boas wrote his parents, “I have now been living in the house again for some time, but my numerous conversations with the Eskimos don’t allow me to rest.”35
On one of his early trips in October that took him north of Pangnirtung Fjord, Boas watched a settlement spring up before his eyes in what had been an empty expanse: “We were busy unloading our things when we suddenly spotted a sail that was heading towards the same spot. Soon my people recognized the Eskimos in it; one of them, Yankee, spotted his brother; they then quickly ran down to help them unload.” Unbeknownst to Boas, this site at the fjord entrance was used frequently as a stopping point for travelers due to its location on a well-frequented crossing point for various boat routes. The people were returning from the summer hunting season for caribou at Lake Nettiling and were traveling in “high-sided whale boats, 30 feet long, full of men, women and children.” Boas continued, “Fore and aft they were piled high with skins. . . . In the middle lie the dogs which from time to time raise a dreadful music; astern tows a small kayak, the landing boat of the Eskimos. . . . Another boat arrived, which had been travelling with the first one, and now we were an entire village on the small headland where previously there had been nobody. 4 Eskimo tents and myself with 2 tents!” Boas visited the Inuit in their tupiks and gave them tobacco as a gift. Later, the Inuit visited Boas and “made themselves comfortable in my tent.” Passing out a glass of rum and tobacco for all, Boas entertained until ten o’clock in the evening.36
On December 11, with the loan of Mutch’s dogs, Boas, Weike, and Ssigna set out to survey the northeast portion of the Cumberland shore as far as Anarnitung. Equipped with “guns, lamps, provisions and sleeping bags” but minus the crucial kerosene stove that they had forgotten to pack, they traveled by dog sled, stopping each afternoon in time for Ssigna to hunt seal on the ice and to build a small igloo for the night. With the help of Weike, Boas took readings for the survey map. On December 14 the temperature began to rise and the snow to fall. Slowed by a two-foot accumulation of snow, the three could travel no more “than three miles a day.” Having made such slight progress, they took refuge in their igloo. Waking in the morning, Weike and Boas “invented a lamp, that is almost our greatest necessity. To make it we used an old butter tin and cut three holes into the lid. We also made a pot out of an old tin can. Now we have glowing lamps and can quickly brew coffee and our igloo is also warmer.” At this point neither Boas, Weike, nor Ssigna realized the precipice of danger on which they were poised. “Someday,” Boas wrote, “when I shall relate this adventure it will sound terrible and dangerous.” He continued, “Now we are laughing at our bad luck and the surprise of the people in Anarnitung when they see three men arrive from Kikkerton on foot and with two dogs. . . . We have a long trek ahead, fifteen miles without a path or sign post!”37
As they settled into their igloo on the next night, December 20, with the temperature plummeting to minus 45°F, Boas took measure of their situation. The resupplies that Mutch was to have sent had not reached them due to the heavy snow. With food running low, no kerosene stove, little blubber for heating water and for cooking, a broken gun, and only one cartridge left for the other gun, Boas resolved “to leave everything and to travel to the next settlement, Anarnitung, which was distant about twenty miles.” At five in the morning on December 20 they set off by the light of the moon shining brightly off the snow and kept trudging into the brief sunlight of the Arctic winter. At noon Anarnitung was within sight. Then, at twelve thirty, a dense fog settled, the sun went down, and they lost site of the settlement. Continuing in the dark, they scrambled over rough slabs of sea ice, jutting up to over six feet: “The holes between the pieces were filled up with soft snow, and we were obliged to crawl and stumble over the projecting points and edges of the slabs.” By seven in the evening on December 20 they heard the howls of a dog team, changed course towards it, and came to land at ten o’clock at night. Totally ignorant as to where they were, Boas, Weike, and Ssigna spent the night moving about over a small space of ground, blessedly covered only lightly with snow, to try to keep warm. Boas recounted that Weike “had frozen his feet in the evening while crossing the rough ice, and could only walk with great difficulty.” As the moon rose, they found sled tracks: “But our bad luck was not yet at an end; we took the wrong direction.” Having gone too far north, they turned around, “and at last we arrived in the morning in Anarnitung after a walk of twenty-five hours, tired and hungry.” Weike recorded for the December 21 entry, “As we entered Ocheitu’s iglu the [Inuit] moved out from under their covers and we crawled under them. A young woman . . . even pulled the covers up over me. Ocheitu and his wife took care that we received dry clothes, and in due course his wife prepared our supper, so that we could first rest somewhat.”38
For Weike the treacherous trek to Anarnitung resulted in third-degree frostbite of his feet. In his diary entry for December 13, Boas had noted, “I had almost gone alone with Ssigna because Wilhelm’s suit was not finished, but Mr. Mutch took pity on me and lent him his outfit.” However, the clothing did not fit—the pants were too large; the boots, too narrow—and thus Weike could stay neither warm nor dry. Unaware of the extent of Weike’s injuries, Boas was up the next morning and off with Weike, Ssigna, and Ocheitu to survey the mouth of the K’ingua Fjord, “but I had to return to Anarnitung, as my servant’s feet grew very bad and he only told me then that he had frozen his left foot.” Weike recorded the details of his frostbite in very matter-of-fact prose. On December 23 he wrote, “This morning Ocheito and Singnak [Ssigna] went hunting. Herr Dr went with them. I had to stay in my sleeping bag with my blessed feet. During the night one of them had swollen so much that I had to cut the bandage away with my knife; everything inside my sleeping bag was covered with pus. When Ocheito bandaged me up again, he said that that foot was still frozen inside; on the other the frostbite was on the outside.” Earlier, on the surveying trip with Boas, Weike had been incapacitated with pain and was taken back on a dog sled wrapped in his sleeping bag and tied to the sled. Weike noted that Ssigna and Ocheitu “derived great pleasure from tying up a ‘gentleman,’” meaning a European. Weike continued, “I was tied up so tightly that I couldn’t make the slightest movement; and this is how I was transported. When I reached Anarnitung three men grabbed my sleeping bag and carried me to the entrance to the iglu and then I was pulled inside.” Weike’s recovery from the third-degree frostbite was due to the initial emergency care by Ocheito and his wife. Without their expertise in treating frostbite in these crucial days, Weike might well have lost his toes if not part of his foot.39
With temperatures “too cold to transport him,” Weike was left at Anarnitung in the care of Ocheitu and his wife, who fed him and tended to him with great care. Since Ocheitu had learned some basic German from his employment at the German polar station (1882–83), Weike likely communicated with greater ease than he did when he was returned to Mutch’s care in Kekerten to spend the months of January to May in recovery. At the station Weike spoke with Mutch “half in English, half in Eskimo.” He wrote, “I string together the words that I know, so that he can understand; then he says it correctly in English. I can understand well enough, but can’t compose a reply.”40
Before Boas had started on his return trip to Kekerten, Ocheitu caught two seals, and the whole camp joined in “a great feast.” Everyone came to Ocheitu’s igloo to receive a piece of seal meat. In his December 23 diary entry Boas wrote, “Isn’t it a fine custom among these ‘savages’ that they endure privations together, but all happily share in the eating and drinking communally when some game has been killed?” Boas continued,
I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over the “savages” and the more I see of their customs, I find that we really have no grounds to look down on them contemptuously. Where among us is there such hospitality as here? Where are there people who carry out any task requested of them so willingly and without grumbling! We should not censure them for their conventions and superstitions, since we “highly educated” people are relatively much worse. The fear of the old traditions and the old conventions is truly deeply implanted in humankind, and just as it controls life here, it obstructs all progress with us. . . . The Eskimos are now sitting alert, their mouths full, eating raw seal liver and the blood stains on the other page will tell you how I was assisting them.
Boas continued with reflections on the import of this experience for him: “I believe if this trip has for me (as a thinking person) a valuable influence, it lies in the strengthening of the viewpoint of the relativity of all cultivation [Bildung] and that the evil as well as the value of a person lies in the cultivation of the heart [Herzensbildung].” Boas observed, “The quality is present or absent here among the Eskimo, just as among us. All that man can do for humanity is to further the truth, whether it be sweet or bitter. Such a man may truly say that he has not lived in vain.”41
Throughout his time in Kekerten and in the Cumberland Sound, Boas had shifted to a realization that he liked ethnography—studying the people, their customs, and stories—better than he did the scientific tasks that accompanied his geographical work. As he wrote to his parents at the end of April during the preparations for departure from Kekerten for Davis Strait, “My work on the Eskimos has given me more satisfaction than my trips.” In “Under the Arctic Circle,” Boas reflected on how “by listening one becomes only half acquainted with the mode of life of a people.” He continued,
One must see and observe most of the habits and customs, and share in their activities. I learned about the secrets of their magicians, the Angekoks, when I was visiting an Eskimo whose wife suddenly became ill and soon died. . . . Similarly I learned the customs of the natives when we made journeys together by sled, and for days had to work and hunt together and share hunger as well as good times. . . . To learn intimately their character and their customs, to gain an understanding of their many curious customs, demands prolonged and faithful work, and paying the strictest attention to every manifestation of their living, no matter how seemingly unimportant. Every new observation provides new matter for thought, and is a link between other isolated observations, until the whole finally unfolds as a beautiful picture, in which we recognize, under the strange and foreign mode of life, the thinking and feeling human being, who resembles us in his character more than we could imagine from our first superficial impression.42
Boas had expressed this immersion into Inuit life by writing about his time in Anarnitung, when he journeyed there in February to hunt seals: “As you see, my Marie, I am now truly just like an Eskimo; I live like them, hunt with them, and count myself among the men of Anarnitung.” He continued, “Moreover I scarcely eat any European foodstuffs any longer but am living entirely on seal meat and coffee.” On the trip to Anarnitung, Boas had begun driving the dog sled by himself for the first time, though, as he said, he was “not managing it properly. The whip is quite long and my voice is not accustomed to the shouting and cursing.” Boas went out seal hunting “exactly like an Eskimo with my harpoon and all the accessories.” In these his first days of seal hunting, Boas stressed his patience: “I sat there just like the Eskimo at the water’s edge behind my ice floe and waited patiently for a head to appear. You can’t imagine what an impression it makes, to sit so near the water at this cold time of year, and to hear the roaring and rushing again.” He was honest about the effect that two days of sitting on the ice had had on him: “I am heartily bored with seal hunting.”43
While Boas had professed to Marie that he thought “nothing of the saying ‘sacrifice for the sake of science,’” in fact the pursuit of science undergirded the drive in him that at times manifested itself as imperious and demanding. Boas lambasted the shaman who threatened to interfere with his work. In “A Journey in Cumberland Sound,” Boas wrote about the conflict that arose as a result of the diphtheria epidemic. A shaman in the settlement of Imigen on the west coast of the Cumberland Sound had identified Boas as the cause of the disease and had told people that the only safeguard was to deny any help to him. “As soon as I heard this,” Boas wrote, “I visited the settlement and told the men that every trade between myself and them would stop until they would invite me into their huts, even if I saw them in a starving condition I would not give them a piece of bread.” Boas’s message “had the desired effect, for one of them asked me to stop with him, and sometime afterwards the others came to Kikkerton to regain my goodwill by presenting me with a few sealskins.”44
While outwardly there had been a resolution of the rift with the people of Imigen, Boas recognized the internal resistance. When he returned to the settlement in February, he found the diphtheria epidemic “affecting the children . . . raging terribly here.” Boas continued, “I will suffer seriously from the sicknesses that are prevailing here, since I know that many Eskimos only reluctantly have any dealings with me, though they dare not express it to my face. Now none of them wanted to lend me any dogs, but when I asked for them, they did not dare refuse.” As Knötsch expresses it, the Inuit “saw death following in his footsteps.” With his persistent determination and with help from Mutch, Boas was able to put together two dog teams, with a total of fifteen dogs, for his week-long journey to Lake Nettiling. He left at the end of March, reached Lake Nettiling on April 1, and returned to Kekerten on April 7.45
Boas was balancing on a fulcrum that required the cooperation of the Inuit and, at the same time, that acknowledged the Inuit view of him as bringing disease to their families and to their dogs. He tipped decidedly toward insuring the success of his undertaking. Boas might have proclaimed to Marie that he did not support “the saying ‘sacrifice for the sake of science,’” but he was in all his actions in Baffin Land focused on his science. He recognized fully that the Inuit associated him with death, but he adamantly insisted that they help him to meet his needs, whether this be for sled dogs or skin clothing. Of course, Boas knew that this relationship was predicated on cooperation, his goods in exchange for the Inuit assistance. Friedrich Pöhl remarks on this period in Boas’s fieldwork, “When diphtheria was spreading and some Inuit suspected him to be the cause of the disease and would neither offer him to come into their tents nor loan or sell him their dogs, he worked with all his power to resist a change in role assignment. Boas played up his power.” He faced off against the shaman Napekin whom Boas knew to be “the leader of the conspiracy against him.” Napekin, as Pöhl notes, had “only a bad rifle and hardly any ammunition and was planning a longer journey, [and] Boas threatened to break off relations completely.” Thus, while Boas recognized the connection that the Inuit made between his arrival and the onset of deadly diseases, he did not yield his position as a scientist on a mission, to garner the truth and to succeed. He did, however, exercise restraint when tempted to gather skulls from graves. “I went ashore,” he wrote on October 10, 1883, on the journey to Pangnirtung Fiord, “and found traces of rabbits and three graves, which were very old. In two there were skulls overgrown with moss and lichens. . . . Unfortunately I cannot take away the skulls that were in the two graves, because of my Eskimos.”46
On May 5, 1884, Boas and Weike left Kekerten for their journey to the Davis Strait. Boas wrote, “Since Mutch is willing to lend me dogs and a sledge, I shall take everything up and over the rocks in one haul.” They departed on two sleds, piled high with supplies and pulled by twenty-five dogs. Three Inuit drove one sled; Boas and Weike, the other, with “flags flying from our sledge.” Three days later, Boas wrote, “For the last time we saw Kikkerton, far in the distance, for the last time we saw the immense island Kikkertuktjiuk, which I drew for you, and we are now near the end of Kingait.” In a strenuous journey, over hills, down flooded trails, with intermittent snow and blowing winds, they reached Davis Strait two weeks later, absent the crates they had left behind on the trail and with only “the absolute essentials” remaining. Nearly thirty years later, Boas would remark, “Most of my photographs were lost on my trip overland from Cumberland Sound to Davis Strait and on the broken ice of Davis Strait.47
Boas journeyed up the east coast of Baffin Land to make surveys from May 19 to July 20. Unhappy with the results, Boas wrote Marie, “It is really distressing that my great travel plans have been reduced to such a modest scale and yet I must be satisfied.” Having charted the coast as far north as Cape Kater, Boas noted with resignation, “Even though my original plans have been distressingly foiled, at least I have travelled and mapped a substantial stretch of country here.” Suffering from snow blindness, “bad weather and deep snow,” and “dead tired from travelling,” Boas thought incessantly of Marie, of family, of returning to his loved ones: “All my thoughts are of you and my family in Minden. My conversations with Wilhelm are always about home.” As the time for departure drew near, Boas and Weike ceased to speak of “home and those at home” and instead spoke “only of the edge of the ice.” Together, they imagined what their homecoming would be like: “Yesterday Wilhelm and I were picturing how it will be when we arrive; we have no clothes, because they are on top in Kignait [in boxes left behind]; for better or for worse we will have to go ashore in Eskimo clothing.” Anxious beyond measure that he spot a ship in the Davis Strait, Boas said, “I promised one pound of tobacco to the first one to bring the news that a ship has arrived. Think of it, I shall be riding on a sled to the edge of the ice!”48
From July 20 to August 20 Boas and Weike stayed with the Inuit in the camp at K’ivitung, waiting and watching for whalers. On August 19 one of the Inuit had spotted a ship while he was out seal hunting, but then it was gone. Consumed with worry—would there be a ship? could they reach it over the ice?—Boas wrote, “I had been working until it grew dark, then played the concertina and sang, our usual activity when it got dark. I saw Wilhelm’s face as his blood (like mine too) went to his heart. What news will I hear from home now? What things may have happened?” Then he added, “Wilhelm is coming now with the trunks, and then we will be off!” This letter to Marie, dated August 20, 1884, was the last entry in Boas’s Arctic diary that he had begun on June 23, 1883. However, it was not until eight days later that they loaded the sleds and headed to the edge of the ice, only to encounter a gap of water thirty feet wide. Boas recounted, “The man in the crow’s nest had, of course, seen us—6 sleds with many dogs. Three sailors came to meet us. . . . With their help we got across the rift. But do you think I could speak English? Without my volition Eskimo words [came from] me instead of English.”49
Boas and Weike boarded the Jan Mayen, a whaler out of Dundee, Scotland, spent the night and moved the next day to the Wolf. Boas preferred the Wolf because it would sail to its home base, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and from there he could sail on another vessel to New York. Captain Burnett told Boas that he had met Inuit “at Cape Roper with whom [Boas] had left a letter for the captains which he had read. As he had not heard that there was an explorer in that neighborhood he had thought the note a joke.” Welcoming Boas and Weike aboard for the trip to Newfoundland, the captain said the ship would depart in the morning. Boas went ashore to make the final arrangements for his departure. “Hurray!” Boas wrote. “I have given all my things to the Eskimos.” The next day the captain sailed to Exeter Sound to have some repairs made to his ship and to take on water for the voyage. Boas encountered two Inuit and their children, who recognized him in spite of the European clothing that Captain Burnett had let him borrow. Boas wrote, “As I expected the Eskimos whom I had seen at Cape Mercy during the winter were here.” Boas served as interpreter between the Inuit and the captain, who was hoping to trade for furs. “The Eskimos,” Boas continued, “were very much surprised that I could speak Eskimo so much better now and we conversed about old acquaintances and about everything that had happened in Cumberland Sound since that time.” With generosity and, undoubtedly, good sense, Boas had given his Inuk friend Aranin the two puppies that he had taken on board the Wolf to bring with him to New York and to Marie. In June when his sled dog, Pegbing, whelped, Boas had written to Marie in his letter diary, “My pups are now giving me a lot of fun; they can see now and are crawling around very amusingly. Perhaps I will bring one home with me.” At three months, the puppies would have been a handful for Boas, or more likely a handful for Weike on board ship, but would prove invaluable to Aranin, whose own dogs had run off.50
On August 31 the Wolf weighed anchor and set a southern course for St. John’s, Newfoundland, where they arrived on September 7, 1884. Boas rushed to the telegraph office to send telegrams to his family in Minden, to Marie and Jacobi in New York, and to the Berliner Tageblatt in Berlin, all with essentially the same message about his safe arrival in St. John’s. In her response, Marie telegraphed, “Am well and happy at Bolton, Lake George. Awaiting you.” With the kind monetary assistance of the owner of the Wolf, Boas was able to purchase clothes for both Weike and himself and the two of them took a room in the Atlantic Hotel. Because of his exclusive contract with the Berliner Tageblatt, Boas had to dodge the reporters who had heard about the European explorer who was returning from the Arctic. He wrote his parents, “How much I wish I had you all here instead of all the strange faces, could see you and hear your dear voices. Instead I am surrounded by newspaper reporters, who wish to suck me dry. But I send them all away.”51
Boas and Weike boarded the passenger steamer, the Ardandhu, on September 10 for a stop first in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then on to New York Harbor, where they arrived on September 21, 1884. Just before weighing anchor for Halifax, Boas noted, “How strange do I feel here now among the many people and with my poor English-Scotch-German-Eskimo language.” Once in Halifax, Boas wrote Marie, “I would have liked nothing better than to board a train immediately and hurry to you, but I must take Wilhelm and my belongings to New York.” To his parents, he wrote, “All my thoughts are now centered on my reunion with Marie, as you may well imagine. I am so glad that she knows that I am back and that I can write her. How happy I will be when I shall have her again!” Then, as if remembering the longing of his parents to see him, Boas added, “And you dear parents must also be happy although I cannot come to you immediately. As soon as I shall have put my belongings into some sort of order I shall send you my diary which however is often incomplete.” As he drew nearer to New York, Boas grew more agitated. As if trying to calm himself, he wrote to Marie, “Patience, a few days more and I shall be with you and may kiss your lips for the first time.” Then he confessed that he should have been writing to his parents rather than to her: “This sheet of paper should really have gone home, but before I knew it, it was addressed to you and I am talking to you instead of to my parents and sisters.” Boas concluded, “It seems more difficult for me to wait the few days until at last, I shall see you than it was the long time in the cold north.”52
The third week after he had arrived in New York, Boas wrote to his parents describing his trip from Halifax that went “quite quickly.” He continued, “On the evening of the 19th we saw the lights from Cape Cod and docked in Martha’s Vineyard. They were glorious days; we made fast progress and on the 20th in the evening we saw the lights of New York lighting up the sky. We had to anchor at Hell’s Gate and the next morning at 5 o’clock we moved on by daylight. Naturally I had hardly slept at night and was astonished by the wonderfully beautiful display as we passed by this Giant City under the enormous Brooklyn Bridge and rode into the wharf at 6:30.” Boas said he had left everything on board the ship and along with Wilhelm: “I took the ferry across to New York. In a drugstore I looked up Meyer’s address and rode up with the horse car. They were just at the point of sitting down to breakfast as I rang and came in.”53
Anticipating the arrival of her nephew and of Wilhelm, Aunt Phips had roused everybody in her household from bed at 6 a.m. on Sunday, September 21. In her letter to Boas’s mother, Aunt Phips wrote, “At 9:30 when we were just sitting down to breakfast, the bell rang and they are here! To begin with I took at least 6 kisses and want to tell you right away Franz and Wilhelm look very well.” She continued, “I had imagined they would have come back starved!” Aunt Phips pulled them in, sat them down, and fed them breakfast. Then Boas read through his stack of letters while poor Weike sat dejectedly with no news from home. The friends and relatives began to stream into the house. As Boas wrote to his parents, “A terrible lot of company was here in the afternoon and I was really completely dazed. Almost everything I saw and heard confounded me.” After dinner, they walked over to see Jacobi. Aunt Phips wrote, “We came back at 9:30 and I sent Franz to bed soon. He wanted to re-read his letters and I thought it would be good if he were alone.” She added, “You cannot believe how excited he is. Everything seems so new and different.” First thing Monday morning, at seven, Boas sat down at the piano to play. His cousin Lizzie, who was in the next room, heard him play and said he played very well, but Boas insisted “his fingers are like wood and more used to direct the whip than the keys.” At ten o’clock, his uncle took Boas and Weike shopping for clothes. Aunt Phips wrote, “He wanted to go to Lake George at 6 o’clock. His longing is tremendous. I think he has no plans yet for the next weeks. He wants to have some good days with his beloved.” Then she concluded, “Wilhelm just came back and says Franz had gone. You know, Sophie, I would not say it to anyone, I am . . . heartsick that he has gone again. How all of you must feel!”54
Arriving at Bolton Landing, Boas had hired a carriage to take him to Alma Farm. Marie, however, had gone to Caldwell, Boas wrote, “below Bolton and had naturally not found me. In the meantime, I was at the farm and . . . horrified not to find Marie again. I had to be patient for 4 more hours before she finally, finally came.” Boas continued, “Do you believe that we are now happy? And what painful happiness it was when I could hold Marie for the first time alone in my arms. Let me pass over these hours that belong only to us. Happy days we had at the lake, especially before Mr. Meyer came up. When we were all alone with the mother and Helene [Marie’s sister]—those two days after we came. This place will always be unforgettable.”55
Soon after his arrival at Alma Farm, Boas and Marie both wrote letters to the Boas family in Minden. He explained, “Marie ran into the other room to write to you also, since the carriage which will take the letters along leaves in 10 minutes and when we are together we do not write.” In her letter, Marie wrote with unrestrained exuberance,
My dear Franzenmenschen [Franz’s people]
He is here, finally, finally I have him! . . . Oh! how can one find words to describe our happiness. It is hardly to be believed. It still seems to me often that I am dreaming when he is not actually with me, when I cannot see his eyes, kiss his mouth and pull his black, black locks. I cannot believe it. How does he look? So healthy and brown and wonderful as never before! His curls are not yet long enough. He had to cut them very short but I am pulling on them so much so that they may have a nice length shortly.
Marie wished they could all be together, that Franz and she could “quickly come together to you!” Admitting that she hardly knew what she was writing, she said, “I only know that I feel he is here, he is mine. He has been given back to all of us.” She sends them “a thousand kisses,” and tells them that she will “take good care of him, our Franz. Oh so good that he shall forget his worries and his hardships. I believe this long year is already almost forgotten. In my happiness it is to me as though I had never cried about him, never worried and fretted! He is now with me and I want nothing more now, and I know nothing more and I feel nothing else!” In his letter to his parents, Boas wrote, “Oh how joyful, how happy I am now after all these long, long torments. You must now make our engagement known right away.” He said he would send a list of addresses and asked that they date the engagement “as of May 30, 1883.” In a letter sent to his parents in October, Boas noted, “We want to wear rings but I must earn the money myself.” To this end he applied his fifty-dollar honorarium for his talk in November before the Deutscher Gesellig-Wissenschaftlicher Verein von New York (German Social and Scientific Association of New York).56
On July 11, 1883, just off the coast of Greenland on his way to Cumberland Sound, Boas had written to Marie, “This afternoon I read my birthday letters again. It is too funny how everyone firmly believes that I have gone out to attain fame and honour.” He continued, “Not true; they don’t know me at all, and I would stand very low in my own estimation if that was the purpose for which I was investing trouble and effort. You know that I am aiming for something higher than this and that this trip is only a means . . . to that goal.” It was true, Boas said, that perhaps he wanted “recognition for my achievements,” and acknowledgment as “a man of action.” He concluded, “Empty fame is worth nothing to me.” Wasn’t it natural for him, he queried, “to wish to plan for our future and to hope that what I am doing will help.” In another letter to Marie on the same theme, Boas wrote, “The only measure of one’s accomplishment is the knowledge to have done one’s duty, whether the success is great or small. Believe me, Marie, flattery will never turn my head. I have no doubt as to my goal. I know what I have to do and the value of my work.” Each person who “goes out to make a discovery” does so for his own reasons. Boas continued, “You know what my reasons were—a desire to build a foundation for an independent existence and scientific interests, and this even before I knew that my beloved loved me.”57
As Boas was preparing to depart Kekerten, he had written his parents on April 30, 1884, of his own harsh critique, “Not one of the expectations with which I came here has been realized. Luck was not very favorable.” In 2016 Igor Krupnik offers a different evaluation: “The very pattern of scientific anthropological research among the Inuit originated with Boas’s yearlong fieldwork on Baffin Island in 1883–1884.” Trained as a geographer and “proficient in the use of maps,” Boas broke with previous researchers of Inuit culture, who focused on natural history. Instead, Boas studied “the human-culture-environment relations” and scribed “a more modern type of research.” Krupnik continues, “He acted as a true pioneer by creating a focused research niche for himself and thus opened the path to the next cohort of Eskimo scholars.”58
In “Franz Boas’ Expedition to Baffin Island, 1883–1884,” Cole and Müller-Wille have appraised this undertaking one hundred years later: “This plan was extraordinary for its time, breaking with almost all practices of previous polar expeditions in its emphasis upon a detailed study of a limited region over an entire year and in its reliance upon a small, virtually one-man expedition living in large measure off the land.” Cole and Müller-Wille note, “Boas did not shut himself up in Mutch’s whaling station, a well-equipped compound with most of Cumberland Sound’s Inuit population close by.” During the 364 days that Boas was on Baffin Land, he spent 209 days in tupiks or igloos, frequently travelling to other settlements. While at Kekerten, Boas “spent a full 30% of his nights away from the station or ships.” From August 29, 1883, to May 6, 1884, Boas completed “five boat trips to the northern and southeastern reaches of the sound, into Pangnirtung and Kingnait fiords and close-by islands during September and October, and twelve extended sled journeys between December and April covering practically the complete coastline of Cumberland Sound and the route to Lake Nettilling to the west.”59
Boas charted a course for others to follow in the use of native place names, that would, for anthropologists, expand to a focus on the native terms of classification and to a people’s own view of their world. In 1883–84, as Müller-Wille remarks, Boas “carried out the first extensive survey of place names among the Inuit of Baffin Island.” He engaged the Inuit in drawing maps of their own land, which would show the people’s graphic view of their lived-in spaces. Boas combined the maps drawn by the Inuit with the extensive and precise data that he collected on the configuration of the land and “on the weather and the sun’s position, on tidal fluctuations, and on ice conditions.” He drew this complex mass of information together into “the first map of this area that was based on exact geodetic measurements, and its validity endured well into the twentieth century.” There were, as Müller-Wille and Weber Müller-Wille note, “no better maps produced” for the area he surveyed until the 1920s and 1930s, at which time the Canadian government published new maps of Baffin Land “using Boas’ map of 1883–84 . . . as the baseline.”60
Boas’s work resulted in “a collection of 930 toponyms fully documented on his surveyed maps, covering both [Cumberland Sound] and the eastern coast.” Müller-Wille writes, “The topographic surveys, which led to Boas’s cartographic masterpiece, printed by the renowned Justus Perthes publishing house in Gotha . . . , and the documentation of place names from oral tradition . . . , which he began right from the beginning and carried out consistently and in detail with the Inuit, are the expression of his research initiative at grasping human environmental relations in the arctic habitat of the Inuit.”61
In 1984 one hundred years after Boas’s Baffin Land work, Ludger Müller-Wille and Linna Weber Müller-Wille presented to the people of Pangnirtung the collection of 930 Inuit place names and the maps that Boas had created with the Inuit.62 They write, “Among the Inuit experts Aksayuk Etuangat, the oldest person in Pangnirtung at that time, stood out and was the link between distant past and present. Reviewing the names . . . triggered his recall of his parents’ and grandparents’ stories of Inuit knowledge, including place names as well as tales about Boas and his sojourn among the Inuit in Pangnirtung.” Recognized as the expert with “encyclopedic local knowledge,” Etuangat “easily knew and confirmed” from 35 to 40 percent of the place names listed by Boas; he “remembered another 30 percent when they were mentioned or shown to him on the map.” The rest of the place names from Boas’s collection were not part of the current “repertoire of Inuit toponyms . . . and thus remained as part of the historic record of Inuit life of over a hundred years before.”63
Müller-Wille and Weber Müller-Wille presented Boas’s maps, lists of place names, and notes to the five men, who had been selected by the community for their expertise. Ranging in age from fifty-one to eighty-three, the Inuit experts of Pangnirtung “expressed astonishment that Inuit place names known to their parents and grandparents existed on maps published in Germany in the 1880s which they had never seen.” As Allan Angmarlik and Josephie Keenainak remarked on viewing the Boas material, “Why is it that Germans had Inuit maps already in 1885 and till today Canada still has none with Inuit place names on it?”64
From this first fieldwork in Baffin Land to his later research in the Northwest Coast, Boas recognized the importance of cartography and the people’s own place names as a way of encapsulating the lived and visualized spaces. As Müller-Wille notes, “Boas used cartography as a means to convey the importance of geographical dimension and interpretation. In many publications over the span of his career he included maps, which in almost all cases he had either surveyed, drawn, or designed himself. The visualization of space and spatial organization of both physical and human elements were an integral part of his presentations.” The geographical grounding that lay solidly at his intellectual core escaped many who knew him well. Student and longtime colleague Robert Lowie remarked in Biographical Memoir of Franz Boas, 1858–1942 that, because of Boas’s critique of simplistic environmentalism, “for years I failed to grasp how carefully he took cognizance of geographical factors.”65
In his work on Baffin Land, as Müller-Wille explains, Boas positioned himself “between the prevalent approach of spatial Entdeckung or discovery of unchartered lands carried out by expedition, and the novel application of stationary Feldforschung, field research as it was being conducted in polar sciences.” Boas, fortuitously for those who followed him, elected for field research, referring to his work “among the Inuit a Forschungsreise a research journey, not an expedition.” Müller-Wille notes that Boas was likely influenced by the International Polar Year (IPY, 1882–83), as “planned and designed as of 1875 made the first major step to get away from the itinerant expeditions that only produced measurements and data for many places for short, mainly summer periods. The new approach was to conduct observations and collect data in one place (stations) over a fixed period and collect data simultaneously in fixed locations at the same time.” This was the model for the IPY and was reflected in the work at the Kingua station. Müller-Wille continues, “Still the IPY activities were called expeditions.” The stationary approach “was widely discussed in the 1870s in the natural sciences as well as in geography and ‘social sciences.’ Clearly, Boas derived from this approach that a one-year period was essential” with respect to “topographical, environmental, and logistical” factors.66
Boas had recognized the opportunity to augment his fieldwork by having Wilhelm Weike keep a diary that would provide a way of checking his own record. As Müller-Wille and Gieseking note,
In various respects Franz Boas was a pioneer in his perceptions and ideas. Thus he was unusual in that as a young scientist he wanted to ensure that he had a second observing voice, by asking Wilhelm Weike, who accompanied him as his servant, to keep a regular journal. And Wilhelm Weike fulfilled this duty faithfully; he thus created and bequeathed a first-hand vision of the everyday affairs of an arctic expedition, of his relationship with Boas, of the social interaction of the whalers of widely differing nations, living in the Arctic and of his encounters with the numerous Inuit.
Written in a refreshingly natural style, Weike’s journal is a counterpoint to Boas’s own diary and journals. While Boas’s records, save for his family letters and his love letters to Marie, had the disciplined focus so characteristic of his work, Weike’s entries were full of humorous accounts, notes on his activities, and records of the meals he had cooked. Boas could not have anticipated the tone and flavor of Weike’s diary entries when he required that Weike begin a record, and likely the freshness of Weike’s accounts was not of importance to Boas. Nonetheless, by having Wilhelm Weike keep a diary, Boas ensured that the year on Baffin Land would be recorded from two perspectives: that of himself as scientist, and that of Weike, as assistant.67
While Weike was Boas’s servant, he was also so much more. He was the cook, challenged to prepare a leg of caribou, a couple of ducks, seal meat, caribou tongues, or anything that was brought into the kitchen at the station or into the tupik or igloo. He was the research assistant who helped to stack the rocks for the cairn, to position the theodolite, to put up the tupik, to harness the dog team, and to drive the sled. Cole and Müller-Wille remark on the “invaluable” contributions of Weike to Boas’s research: “At the station he worked at odds and ends and cooked meals for ‘Herr Doktor’ (his diary refers to Boas in no other way . . .). He cleaned, washed clothes, sewed and boiled coffee, their beloved and indispensable ‘arctic beverage.’ In the field Weike helped with all duties. He enjoyed fishing and hunting, especially for rabbits, ptarmigan and, later on, caribou with the Inuit companions.” Weike helped to make “observations and surveys,” and he usually carried Boas’s “expeditionary flag,” which Marie had made for her fiancé. In short, a world apart from his accustomed employment as gardener and servant for the Boas family in Minden, Weike was there to assist Boas in all his work in a setting that called on Weike to be creative in ways he could never have anticipated.68
Almost simultaneous with his landing in Kekerten, Boas recognized in James Mutch a generous man who would help him in every way. Clearly a people person, Mutch had the same effect on others as he had on Boas: he inspired trust and respect because he extended these to others. Mutch became the person who made all things possible for Boas. He served as Boas’s “mentor and mediator for negotiating among cultures, languages, and people.” When Boas needed dogs for his travel, Mutch let him borrow his; when Weike needed winter clothing for their near-disastrous December trip, Mutch loaned him his; when Boas needed Inuit to draw maps for him, Mutch identified Inuit especially gifted in their knowledge of the land; when Boas needed help understanding Inuktitut, Mutch translated; when Boas had to abandon crates on the strenuous trip to Davis Strait, Mutch had Ssigna retrieve them, and Mutch sent them on by ship to their destination.69
This cooperative and collaborative relationship between Boas and Mutch continued after Boas left Cumberland Sound. Over the years, from 1885 to 1922, Boas and Mutch exchanged letters. Among other forms of assistance, Boas engaged Mutch in the purchase of a collection of six hundred material culture items for the American Museum of Natural History; Mutch sent Boas the requested information about “the floe edges for all the years since 1894”; and, perhaps most important, he made a collection of “Notes and Stories,” which was published by Boas in Second Report on the Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay, with James S. Mutch listed as one of the contributors. Thus, in this initial fieldwork experience, with Boas having just gotten his feet wet in the Arctic, he seized the positive advantage by working with James Mutch and subsequently continued this relationship for years to come, as he would with other collaborators in other fieldwork settings. Harper notes that Boas would continue in future fieldwork to develop “a relationship with untutored men in the field, men who could assist him, collect for him, provide him with the raw material to interpret in popular and scientific journals, texts and lectures.” For Mutch, the collaboration must have been rewarding: he had found someone who was vitally interested in hearing about his years of experience with the Inuit of Baffin Land.70
The young Boas, on his Erstlingsreise, his first voyage, recognized the importance of learning the language of the people and of living with the people to learn from them. As he wrote in 1885 in “Under the Arctic Circle,”
Without an intimate knowledge of the language, without an understanding of the thinking and feeling, of the religious concepts and traditions, all patterns of life of native peoples, who live completely beyond the pale of the manner of our thinking and living, must seem absurd and unworthy of human society. The appellation of “savages” for many aboriginal peoples has found such wide acceptance only because the traveler observed the life and activity of the natives from the viewpoint of his European social background. The investigator who lives completely as a member of the tribe which he is studying learns to recognize, under strange and foreign mode of life, the thinking and feeling human being, who resembles us in his character more than we could imagine from our first superficial impression.
Requiring “years of hard work and unselfish devotion,” the ethnographer, poised between two cultures, “must try his best to translate himself into the views and modes of thought of the people.” In addition to “living completely as a member” of the people, the ethnographer must record “the raw material . . . in a scientific manner,” by employing “methods of observation appropriate to the particular circumstances.” In The Central Eskimo (1888), Boas presented his expansive approach of including detailed aspects of the life of the Inuit that he had recorded and material that others had compiled. One hundred years later, resident of Pangnirtung Allan Angmarlik (1957–2000) had happened upon a copy of Boas’s The Central Eskimo and “devoured it, finding through it a link with the disconnected past.”71
While not recognizing it himself, Franz Boas had realized a large measure of his goals for his voyage to Baffin Land. Admittedly, he had not succeeded in charting all of the vast territory as he had planned: life and death in Cumberland Sound intervened. His firm plans yielded to requisite flexibility—not a trait that came easily to Boas. Knötsch remarks on his adaptation to “external circumstances” that necessitated change of plans, “Boas was constantly obliged to function within the limited breathing-space left to him.” And Herskovits notes, “We have here a valuable lesson in the importance of flexibility in the field situation, and of recognizing and following new leads, whenever they may appear and whatever reorientation in objective they may necessitate.” Serendipitously, while he waited less than patiently for the completion of his skin clothing and for the acquisition of a dog team, Boas settled into life with the Inuit of Kekerten. In so doing, he found that the ethnographic profoundly augmented cultural geography. Boas did not abandon modern geography: it remained present in his work as a firm and formative layer. The Inuit of Baffin Land showed Boas graphically in their sketch maps, and ethnographically in their daily lives, what he had known intellectually at the Christian-Albrecht-Universität in Kiel and in his study in Minden: that to understand a people, one must understand their lived relationship with the land. Boas had infused Ratzel’s interplay between “Mensch and Erde/Umwelt, humanity and earth/environment,” with the essence of the lived experiences of the peoples of Baffin Land. Boas left the Canadian Arctic in 1884, never to return, but marked forever by his experiences.72