Katherine Routledge

Katherine Routledge, 1919

Katherine Maria Routledge (/ raʊtlɛdʒ /) née Katherine Pease , (born August 11, 1866 in Darlington , † December 13, 1935 in Ticehurst , East Sussex ) was a British historian and ethnologist .

She is particularly known for the first extensive cataloging of archaeological sites and objects on Easter Island , where excavations were carried out for the first time under her leadership from 1914 to 1915, as well as for the records of oral traditions of the islanders. In 1919 her book Mystery of Easter Island was published. The Story of an Expedition, which was so successful that it was reissued the following year. With a Prehistoric People: The AkiMyu of British East Africa , which she and her husband had written after spending two years with the Kikuyu of East Africa , was published as early as 1910 .

Life

Katherine was the second child of Kate and Gurney Pease, a wealthy and celebrity Quaker from Darlington . The daughter of the best of the family graduated from Somerville Hall , Oxford, with a history degree in 1895 . It is noteworthy that women at Oxford were able to take exams at that time (in some subjects; for example, a degree in archeology was not possible), but did not acquire a title: she only received the academic title MA later from Trinity College (Dublin) .

For the time being, Katherine taught Pease. After the Second Boer War , she traveled to South Africa with a committee that was to investigate the resettlement of British women there . In 1906 she married the ethnologist and anthropologist William Scoresby Routledge (1859-1939), who had also completed his studies in Oxford and whom she had met in Naples . The couple returned to Africa that same year and lived with the Kikuyu in what was then British East Africa until 1908 . In 1910 they published the book With A Prehistoric People about it . The AkiMyu of British East Africa . In the same year they decided to organize an expedition to Easter Island .

Mana off the coast of Easter Island

Moai

Bird people

Easter island

For this expedition, the couple commissioned a 90-foot schooner , which was christened Mana - a Polynesian term for psychic power.

The expedition was carried out in cooperation with the British Association for the Advancement of Science , the British Museum and the Royal Geographical Society . The Royal Navy brought in a naval officer, apparently to collect cartographic data. Mana set sail from Falmouth on March 25, 1913 .

On March 29, 1914, Mana reached Easter Island, where two camps were set up, namely at Mataveri and at the Rano Raraku complex . The team was also active in Orongo and Anakena . With the help of the islander Juan Tepano , Routledge recorded the oldest traditions of the natives, for which she also had to visit the leper colony north of Hanga Roa . As a result, the legends about the first settlement by Hotu Matua and the Vogelmann cult were preserved for later generations. She also noted down the first clues about the Rongorongos that had not yet been fully deciphered . Her biographer Jo Anne van Tilburg emphasizes Routledge's importance for the preservation of the islanders' cultural heritage - both for their descendants and for all later scientists.

Angata

The team uncovered more than 20 buried moais (giant statues) and cataloged them for the first time, as did Ahus , the stone platforms they originally stood on. Of particular scientific interest are her records of tattoos of the oldest natives (from the leper colony), which can be found in engravings on the back of exposed moais, because from 1860 tattoos were gradually abolished by the missionaries and therefore later researchers were no longer available.

The expedition had to struggle with all sorts of difficulties since its departure, to which the insensitive behavior of the Routledges towards the other participants had contributed a lot. Then an uprising by the islanders against the farmers hampered work. The local witch or prophetess Angata had triggered it after a vision in which she had seen her compatriots as bulletproof. The islanders stole and slaughtered a number of cattle after a written "declaration of war" on June 30th. Katherine's mediation ultimately settled the dispute. Angata died soon after. The war events that followed shortly afterwards also caused no less trouble:

First World War

From October 12, 1914, the German East Asia Squadron gathered in front of Hanga Roa , mainly to take over coal from suppliers. In addition, they sank a French yacht in front of the British. The expedition hastily hid their discoveries and collections, and Mana set out with Scoresby on board for Chile to protest against the unlawful use of territorial waters of the neutral country at the British Consulate General there. His wife did the same in front of the representative of Chile on Easter Island, the teacher. It is unlikely that the latter successfully passed on the protest.

Immediately before the squadron withdrew, a group of British and French prisoners of war, who had come from sunk ships of the Allies, were brought ashore. Some of these people were hired to do the digs.

The expedition left the island on August 18, 1915 and traveled home via Pitcairn and San Francisco . Katherine's popular science book The Mystery of Easter Island was published in 1919 and became very popular. The collections went to the Pitt Rivers Museum , and the written records ultimately went to the Royal Geographical Society .

Almost as much as the records of old legends made during the expedition are to be praised, the archaeological work was soon criticized by experts: All too often, work was not carried out according to the standards that had long been common at the time. Quarrels within the team and the unsupervised work of the ignorant islanders for too long later led to bitter criticism in specialist circles. OGS Crawford , one of the experts who left the team before reaching Easter Island, later calls the work an "archaeological fiasco". It has to be admitted that Mana "commuted" three times between the island and Chile during the work and the fluctuation in the team was considerable.

Illness and death

At the latest when Katherine Routledge locked her husband out of their shared apartment in Hyde Park in 1925, an illness emerged that was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia . It is possible that the child had already suffered mildly from it: Katherine had "heard voices" at times, and her brother Harold Gurney Pease was also "insane" (diagnosis unknown). During her time at Oxford, Katherine came into contact with spiritualists and was active as a writing medium herself .

Amazingly, the woman survived the extreme stresses during the travels apparently without symptoms. The family initially believed the curse of the witch Angata from Easter Island was the cause of the disorder, but in 1929 had the patient forcibly admitted to Ticehurst Hospital , Sussex , where she died of a stroke in 1935. The body was cremated and the ashes scattered. There is no memorial stone.

Scoresby left all of Katherine's records (which she had last hidden) to the Royal Geographical Society. As late as 1961, Scoresby's heirs found pictures and maps of the Easter Island expedition in his house in Cyprus, which he had acquired after the death of his wife, which until then had been believed to have been lost. Previously unpublished material appeared in Jo Anne van Tilburg's biography of the researcher in 2003.

Publications

The Mystery of Easter Island

• with William Scoresby: With a Prehistoric People. The AkiMyu of British East Africa. London 1910.
• The Mystery of Easter Island. The Story of an Expedition, London 1919 ( Internet Archive , 2nd ed. 1920 ).
  • The Mystery of Easter Island, Cosmo Classics, New York 2005. ISBN 1-59605-588-X (new edition).

literature

• Jo Anne Van Tilburg : Among Stone Giants. The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island . Scribner, New York 2003, ISBN 0-7432-4480-X .

Web links

Commons : Katherine Routledge  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Katherine Routledge in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 6, 2017.
2. ↑ Approximately also after Jo Anne van Tilburg 2003, p. 22ff: The father died on June 11, 1872, two months before Katherine's sixth birthday; the inheritance at today's value (2003) was 21 million USD.
3. ↑ Unpaginated title of With A Prehistoric People , 1910. See also: Jo Anne van Tilburg, Among Stone Giants:… 2003. Oxford awarded Honors Modern History : flyer to The Mystery of Easter Island, unpaginated (1920).
4. ↑ JPS: The name of the first officer is not known; he withdrew long before the expedition began. He was followed by Lt. R. Douglas Graham, who also did not participate. Ultimately, it was Lt. David Ronald Ritchie, who provided measurement data from the island as part of the expedition. Also Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, edition 1920, pp. 8-9: "The Admiralty was good enough to place at our disposal a lieutenant on full pay for navigation, survey, and tidal observation". This post was ultimately filled by Lieutenant DR Ritchie, RN.
5. ^ Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, 1920 edition, pp. 124ff
6. ^ Jo Anne van Tilburg 2003, p. ???.
7. ^ Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, 1920 edition, 142ff. From the point of view of the time, she describes the uprising as "incomprehensible," although known from other regions. Locals call them kanakas throughout . Her book does not speak of those killed in the uprising.
8. ↑ Chile had sold or leased most of the island to foreign entrepreneurs who ran cattle there. The natives had been pushed back to the edge. At the time of the Mana visit (1914-15) cows were kept. Heyerdahl, who arrived in 1955, only mentions sheep, and the farmland “owned by the government”. The ownership structure, however, had not changed: the locals were still forbidden to use the farmland.
9. ↑ The fact that a radio may have existed on the island is nowhere mentioned. The British did not trust that their research vessel would be spared by the Germans due to the Hague Convention .
10. ^ Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, 1920 edition, 159.
11. ^ Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, 1920 edition, p. 306.
12. ^ Jo Anne van Tilburg, 2003 .; Katherine Routledge: The Mystery of Easter Island, 1920 edition, p. 163: "Seven journeys" means the journey and three commuting journeys that were carried out between the island and South America.
13. ↑ On January 8, 1870, Katherine was the first to develop scarlet fever after her mother, and all the other children in the family after her. Jo Anne van Tilburg 2003, 18ff.
14. ↑ enWP, probably Jo Anne van Tilburg 2003, p. ???.
15. ^ Lecture by v. Tilburg, 2003 (English).