Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“You’re quite right about that, Mike. It’s the bones. I do believe she died for the bones.”

“What do you know about my country? Any of you?”

Mercer and I were silent. Mike spoke. “In 982, Erik the Red was banished from Iceland for manslaughter and shipped there. World’s largest island. Pulled the wool over your ancestors’ eyes. Went back and told everybody his new home was a ‘green land’ to make it more attractive, so he’d have some company there with him. That’s about as much as I learned. Sorry.”

“Not bad, as far as you went.” She put down her glass and talked with her hands as she told her story. “My father’s family comes from a very small village. It’s called Qaanaag. Way up on the northwestern part of Greenland, in the Arctic region.”

“No wonder you drink your bourbon without ice.”

“You don’t know what cold is. Polar Eskimos. A very small community of people, pretty well isolated from the rest of the world. And odd how my life is so wound up in this museum. Robert Peary had been searching for the North Pole since the 1880s.”

“The admiral?” I asked.

“Only a lieutenant then,” Mike said.

“The man who was president of the Natural History Museum at the time, Morris Jesup, struck a deal with Peary. Got him leave from the navy and financing for his expedition to find the pole, if Peary would agree to collect zoological specimens and geological information.” Clem winked at Mike. “Guess what Peary set out to collect?”

“No clue.”

“A meteorite. Something the Eskimos called the Iron Mountain.”

“You’re hung up on these rocks.”

“At the time, it was the largest one that had been found. It took him three years of attempts before he was able to bring it back on his ship. Landed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1897. It took fourteen teams of horses to cart this treasure to the museum.

“But Peary had much more valuable cargo on board.”

“Like what?”

“Inuits. Six human beings, from this remote little tribe that had less than 250 members. They had helped Peary over the years with his travels, his hunting, and his collecting. They had come to trust him and work with him. He and his crew were the only white people they knew.”

“But why did he bring them to New York?”

“He was considered a great man of science, Alex. That would be his reason, of course. But they were treated as spectacles and oddities, by the press and public.”

“Was this the first time he’d brought people to New York?”

“Alive, yes.”

“Surely he didn’t bring dead ones?”

“The year before this trip he had exhumed a family of Eskimos from their native burial ground-favorites of his, whom he had befriended on his earlier voyages. There was a father, a mother, and their young daughter who had died in a recent epidemic, and had just been buried.”

“Whatever for?”

“He sold them to the museum.”

“Butwhy?”

“Skeletons, skulls. For display. So rich white people could gawk at the aborigines. So scientists could study the Northern races.”

“And on this trip?”

“Four adults. Two of them were widowers with young children. So there was a little girl, and a little boy who came, too. Along with five barrels filled with Eskimo remains from freshly dug graves.” She closed her eyes and paused. “My great-grandmother was in one of those barrels.”

The thought was unimaginable. No one spoke until Clem did. “She was better off than the ones who were breathing.”

“Those who were alive, where did they live?”

“You’ve been to the great Natural History Museum? The six Eskimos were made to live in the basement of the museum.”

“How could they possibly live in the basement?” The thought of the dank, dark place was forbidding in this day and age. How inhumane to have placed them there more than a century ago, before modern plumbing, temperature control, and electric lighting.

“Not well, is the obvious answer. People came to stare at the brown-skinned curiosities. Literally, journalists and curiosity-seekers crawled on the sidewalk to peek through the grating into the basement windows.”

“Did they ever get out of the museum?”

“They had to, but not by choice. They became ill. The New York City heat was overwhelming to them. They caught colds, which developed into pneumonia for five of them. Tuberculosis for another. And all six of them wound up in Bellevue Hospital as patients. When their health improved, they were released back to the museum. Someone had the foresight to fix up more comfortable living quarters, on the sixth floor, where the caretaker was housed.”

“Were they-?”

“Within six months of their arrival, two of the adults had died. Sadly, one of them was Qisuk, the leader, which left his little boy orphaned. Alone here in a strange world with no family or friends. The child didn’t speak the language and only three other survivors spoke his.”

“Didn’t these officials think of taking the survivors, especially these children, back to their homes, to Greenland?” I asked.

“The ice and weather made it impossible to do in the middle of winter.”

“Didn’t anyone care about them?”

“Oh, yes, of course. One of the kindest was a museum employee named William Wallace. I think he was the superintendent of buildings at Natural History. He and his wife took little Mene into their home. He became part of their family. He was tutored in English, went to school with the Wallaces’ son, became quite a good athlete and a relatively happy child. But within the year, each of the other five Eskimos who had arrived with him in New York had died.”

“What did they tell the boy about his poor father?”

“Museum officials had learned a great deal about polar Eskimo funeral rites from Peary. They decided that the best thing to do, for Mene’s sake, was to reproduce the traditional burial ceremony that his tribesmen performed at home. The boy had turned eight and was old enough to understand what was being done, and to remember the dignity with which his father was to be honored.”

“So what’d they do?”

“Well, Mr. Wallace and some members of the scientific staff gathered on the museum grounds, in a lovely secluded courtyard behind one of the main buildings. The records show that the service was conducted at just about sunset.”

“The boy was there?”

“Oh, yes. And just like the tradition in my father’s village, he watched as the body was brought out from the museum, covered with animal skins and a carved mask that lay over Qisuk’s head. It was placed on a base of stones, and then layers of more stones were stacked in a mound over the dead leader.”

Clem’s hands continued to illustrate the story she told. “Then his favorite kayak and tools were arranged beside him. A very impressive ceremony, meant to show young Mene the respect everyone had for his father. It ended when the child put his mark on the grave.”

“What do you mean, his mark?”

“Another of our rituals. A loved one makes a symbol in front of the stones, between the grave site and the direction of the home in which his nearest kin lives. It stops the spirit of the dead from returning to haunt the living.”

“And Mene did that?”

“It made quite an impression on the boy. Here in this strange country, he watched over his father’s burial like the funerals of the great hunters he had seen in his homeland.”

“Coop’s a sucker for happy endings. Tell her things got better for the boy, okay?”

“They did. The Wallace family gave him a good life for a time. And because Mr. Wallace worked at the museum, Mene got to visit a lot. Upstairs, on the fifth floor, where the Eskimo artifacts were studied and cataloged.”