| How
Dr. Cook destroyed the Yahgan language
|
 |
||||
|
|||||
| October: 2004 Hi. I've been personally involved in trying to undo some of the damage done by Cook in another area- the loss of most of the life work of the Reverend Thomas Bridges on the language of the Yahgan natives of Tierra del Fuego. The Bridges family entrusted these to Cook after the 1898-9 Belgica expedition to Antarctica, on the promise that he would see certain of the materials published in the US. This now impacts directly on the future survival of the Yahgan language, now critically endangered with just two elderly speakers. Although nobody knows for sure, Cook (or other supporters) may have "disappeared" most of these materials after he tried to make it look as if he was the primary author of the massive dictionary of Yahgan by Bridges (Cook on his specimen title page did put in fine print at the bottom that Bridges "had been instrumental in collecting the words". How magnanimous). The materials may have included many letters from literate Yahgans, myth texts, the 32000 headword final dictionary draft and a grammar manuscript. Surviving materials are all of much lower scope and quality (early drafts, etc.) making it that much harder to put together adequate teaching materials to help save the language. I keep hoping that Cook did not destroy or throw out what he had on hand (which he had promised to return to the Bridges family, but never did), but perhaps lent, gave or sold them to some collector somewhere who might be willing to let them see the light of day again. Maybe he's buried with them. Who knows? I've already contacted the Cook people- they claim to have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the Bridges works, and examination of the inventories of the Cook collections in various libraries has turned up only odd tidbits, all by Cook himself, concerning them. One bad nightmare I've had is that Cook took them to the Arctic to work on them (he was supposed to retranscribe the dictionary), and they ended up feeding a fire. Jess Tauber |
|||||
May 11, 2003,
Jess Tauber;
phonosemantics@earthlink.net I have a beef with "Dr." Cook, a personal one. For the past five years I've been working on Yahgan, a nearly extinct native language of Tierra del Fuego, now with only one elderly speaker left. I've been trying my best to obtain all extant documentation on the language in order to re-edit it for language revitalization. As some of your readers may know, this was the language which was the life work of Reverend Thomas Bridges, of Ushuaia (and later Estancia Harberton) in Tierra del Fuego, who died in 1898 after verbally contracting with Cook to have the materials published in the United States. Fearing their possible loss in Antarctica, Bridges wisely (so he thought) decided not to give over the documents (which included several version of a very massive dictionary, grammar, and many other manuscripts dealing with other languages of the region and life habits of the native peoples) until the return leg of the Belgica voyage. Of course the ship ended up stuck in the ice, and Bridges died while on a trip to Buenos Aires to meet with Argentine government officials. After the Belgica managed to get to Punta Arenas (Magellanes), Cook hired a boat to go to meet with the Bridges family to pick up the materials, which were all bundled together without any inventory remaining behind, a poor choice since no complete record thus exists of what Cook ended up with. It was agreed that the materials should be published and returned to the family in the space of two years. Two years went by- then nearly ten, with no word by Cook as to the status of the project. Other explorers to Antarctica regularly passed through Ushuaia, and from some of these the family learned that Cook was getting the materials published under his own name, as his own work (save for the small print at the bottom of the title page that Thomas Bridges had been "instrumental in collecting the words"). Cute. This was being done in Belgium, under the auspices of the Royal Belgian Observatory, then under the directorship of Georges Lecointe, who had been first mate aboard the Belgica. The Bridges family forthwith sent off one of their sons to deal with this and set things aright. Confronting Lecointe (@1908 or 9), it was agreed to cut Cook out of the loop, and give Bridges fair credit for his life's work. Belgian government money was provided, and the publication was scheduled for late 1914. Of course WWI intervened, and the project went into limbo. The family feared the manuscripts were lost again. In the late 1920's, a German linguist/anthropologist, Hermann Hestermann, contacted the family to get further information about the manuscript version of the dictionary he had on hand (apparently since about 1908). Another family member went to meet with him, and this resulted in the publication of the dictionary in 1933, though in an extremely poorly edited version almost impossible to use due to massive abbreviations and @10 percent printing errors, omissions, etc. Hestermann asked the family whether he could hold on to the ms for further study, and they agreed. WWII broke out, and both Hestermann and the ms disappeared. Later the family managed to have the Allied group in charge of recovering antiquities and art stolen by the Nazis track down the ms, and they found Hestermann, who led them to the ms. hidden in a cabinet in an old farm house. Part of this had been lost somewhere (and this 60pp. loss may make recovery of several thousand words iffy at best). The ms is now at the British Library, where I've visited it. The Bridges estate has provided me with photostat copies which have greatly helped in reconstructing the dictionary. But there is a problem. Back around 1908, earlier in the story, it is unclear whether the larger, final version of the dictionary ever ended up in Belgium, or the other documents as well. Certainly the version published in 1933 was from an earlier manuscript only 2/3 as large as this lost one, and there is no indication that Hestermann ever saw the larger one. So where are they? Letters to the Cook Society have gone unanswered. I suppose this means either that they know something I don't, or just consider this another minor irritant to be ignored. I know that if I were in Cook's shoes, given the controversy of the time, I would either have sold the manuscripts off to monied buyers, or deep-sixed them. And to hell with Bridges, the native Yahgans and their language, or any other concerned citizen of whatever nation. This is too bad, since the "discovery" of the manuscripts would go far towards redeeming part of FAC's good name- Saviour of Yahgan! If any pro-Cook folks are reading this, take due note!!!! In any case I've had to make use of whatever materials I've been able to obtain, to try to reconstruct as best I can the grammar and full dictionary of the language. The last remaining speaker of the language, who lives on the Chilean side of Beagle Channel in the hamlet of Villa Ukika with about 100 others who consider themselves ethnically Yahgan (though she is the last fullblood) lost her sister earlier this year, the only other person conversant in the language. Revitalization of this language is going to be difficult now, due to loss of opportunities for recording the normal give and take of conversation (though I can manage it after a fashion, though the living dialect is somewhat different than that documented by Bridges). Wish me luck, though. So there you have it- my personal beef with Frederick A. Cook, who may singlehandedly have doomed a language to extinction. Nice addition to the resume, eh? Jess Tauber, phonosemantics@earthlink.net; END May 11, 2003 |
|||||
| "Saving Yahgan would be a real plus for the soul of the man, and in my mind at least make up for a great deal of what had gone before." | |||||
| Thu, 15 May 2003 OK, OK ! enough is enough. I appreciate the spirit of the website, but I am a serious scholar of Yahgan, in fact am fast approaching being able to speak the language, and trying to get endangered language grant funds (and no, Dr. Crook, you can't have any) to help revitalize it in the community of about 100 souls calling themselves Yahgan on Isla Navarino in Tierra del Fuego. But I would appreciate a serious discussion about Cook with someone who is equally dedicated here. There is now some serious question about where the bulk of the Bridges notes (a very large stack of bound papers according to the family) ended up @1908 or so. From the little I can find from published sources and the family itself (with which I'm regularly in touch), Cook promised to have the materials published in two years in the US and then returned, but sat on them for a decade. Initially he apparently did send some correspondence about it all to the Bridges family, but it pretty quickly petered out, and that was that. Since Cook was often "elsewhere" it was impossible for the family to keep track of him, or the status of the papers. When Cook finally shows up in Europe, that is when the fun begins. He must have been there for some time, as it would have taken a while for the arrangement for publication with his old colleague Lecointe (former first mate of the Belgica, then director of the Royal Belgian Observatory)- quite a bit of money was set aside for this by the government (which appears always to have taken an interest- in 1998 there was a centennial held in Belgium of the expedition, and the King himself opened it (and of course there were a couple of Cook-detracting papers presented). If Cook did not object to the shift of credit after one of the Bridges came to Belgium to argue for rightful title, as I've read, then something must have been up. He was a tenacious streetfighting kind of guy, and it seems unlikely he would have relinquished his hold so easily. What did he know that nobody else did? At the same time some of the materials ended up in the hands of Hermann Hestermann, then a young scholar, later a professor at Hamburg. The family assumed they ALL ended up with him, after they were initially contacted about it in the late 1920's. The Observatory had scheduled publication of the dictionary for late 1914, an infelicitous choice of date as we now know, and Belgium was overrun by troops. Poof! The family thought all the materials were gone. Maybe they were. If Belgium had most of them (though some were in Hestermann's possession), then they might well have been destroyed in the fighting. On the other hand, back in 1908/9, did Cook in fact give over these documents to the Observatory? Only the dictionary itself was the issue at hand, and not the others, so why give over the entire kit? As I've mentioned, letters to the Cook Society itself have gotten me nowhere. No smoking gun, but logic and circumstantial evidence would point to Cook having retained possession (though of course others might have been his proxies). Its really too bad. Once in heavily defensive mode, I suppose its now impossible to admit culpability, and try to rectify the situation through good works. Saving Yahgan would be a real plus for the soul of the man, and in my mind at least make up for a great deal of what had gone before. By the way, I've already checked the Ohio State library, even got copies of some materials from them (thanks). The majority are from much later than the time of the relevant issues, and more towards defense than anything else. Some must also be from his daughter as they postdate the man himself. So what's the deal with the Cook family itself? Are they completely out of the picture? Are there any descendants? Best, Jess Tauber phonosemantics@earthlink.net |
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
