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"THE VALUE OF A PERSON LIES IN HIS HERZENSBILDUNG" Franz Boas' Baffin Island Letter..Diary, 1883-1884 DOUGLAS COLE When Franz Boas was twenty-five years old, he travelled to Baffin Island to undertake anthropological and geographical research among the Eskimo. In view of his later eminence as reigning patriarch of American anthropology during the first third of the twentieth century, the letter-diaries that he kept during his erstlingsreise (Boas 1894:97) have a special interest for the history of the discipline. Boas had secured his doctorate from Kiel University in the summer of 1881. Although his dissertation had been in physics, he had already chosen one of his minor fields, geography, as his future speciality. After pursuing for a time certain problems of the psychophysics of sense perception suggested by his doctoral studies, he began to focus his interests on the relationship between people and their natural environment. By April 1882, during the year of his required military service, he had begun planning "an investigation of the dependence of contemporary Eskimo migrations upon the physical relationships and forms of their land" (BPP: FB/A. Jacobi 4/10/82; cf. Kluckhohn & Prufer 1959, Stocking 1968). Douglas Cole is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University. He has published on the history ofCanada and its art, including From Desolation to Splendour: Changing Perceptions of the British Columbia Landscape, and on the history of anthropology . He is currently finishing a book on museums and Northwest Coast anthropological collecting, and researching a study of Franz Boas' early years. 13 14 DOUGLAS COLE The reason for selecting the Eskimo (or Inuit) is not apparent at first glance. Boas seems to have felt that their environmental dependence was the most simple case with which to begin, though the paucity of information available upon the region and its natives weighed against the advantages of apparent simplicity. Perhaps the choice was a quite personal one, its roots lying far back in Boas' youth. As early as 1870, when he was but a boy of twelve, he wrote to his sister of undertaking an expedition to the north or south pole after completing university (BFP: FBrr. Boas 12/3/70). The probability that polar exploration was a long-standing idea and not a passing boyhood fantasy receives support from the course he took in 1878-79 at Bonn on the geography and research of polar areas. Having decided to study the Inuit and their environment, Boas set about his preparations for an expedition. He moved to Berlin, where, among other things, he studied meteorological, astronomical, and magnetic observation with W. J. Forster of the Berlin Planetarium and anthropological measurement with Rudolf Virchow, as well as cartographic and topographical drawing . He also worked at both the Inuit and Danish languages, consulted Heymann Steinthal on linguistic points, examined the Arctic collections at the Berlin museum under the eye of Adolf Bastian, and learned photography. Through his developing Berlin acquaintances Boas was able also to organize the practical matters of launching the expedition. Bastian put him in touch with Georg von Neumayer, chairman of the German Polar Commission, which at that time was supporting scientific parties at Baffin and South Georgia islands. Neumayer promised transportation to Baffin Island with the Commission 's ship and generously allowed Boas to have his pick of the returning station's instruments and supplies. Boas persuaded the editors of the Berliner Tageblatt to advance 3,000 marks against fifteen promised articles. Much remained to be done, but the means for the expedition and its planned outline were clear. He would travel to Baffin Island's Cumberland Sound with the Germania, a ship built in 1869 for Arctic use. She would take him deep into Cumberland Sound to Kingawa, where Dr. Wilhelm Giese's scientific party had spent the International Polar Year of 1882-83. Should the Scottish station at Kikkerton Island seem more favorable as a base than the Kingawa hut, Boas had a letter from Crawford Noble, its Aberdeen owner, asking the resident master for his cooperation. Boas planned to take with him an assistant and a servant. Although Lieutenant von den Goltz, Neumayer 's recommendation as assistant, backed out at the last moment, servant Wilhelm Weike, who had been in the Boas family service, remained. With the advice of old Arctic hands, Boas secured in Hamburg a large stock of provisions, guns, ammunition and trade goods, a thirteen-foot dinghy intended for the interior lakes, and a small steel sled. His research...

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