In my fascination with Uncle Petrus, I had not, to tell the truth, seen the natives as much more than local color, but I understood Amos’s point completely. Another scholarly possibility!
“I’m betting Jonken had a number of native informants and collaborators who were more influential over time than the boy who first took him into the ruins,” Amos continued, “though he’s usually the only name mentioned.”
“Jonken’s diaries may help out there. I was surprised to find they’ve hardly been touched.”
“Who’s had the time until now? But the big NEH grant makes this project a priority, and we’ll be able to employ some grad students…”
I nodded my head. We could both envision one or more fascinating dissertations based on the Jonken papers, and we soon found two promising students, Kristen Boisvert and Matthew Dinatale, for the transcriptions. The plan was that I would supervise their work and the cataloguing of the still quite chaotic bequest, while Amos arranged for the displays and explanatory documents and handled the grant money. I offered to begin examining the diaries, myself, to give him a head start, but it was really to satisfy my own curiosity that I found my way into the yellowing pages and copperplate script of Uncle Petrus’s records.
These were kept in a high and grandly proportioned storage room constructed to the architectural taste of the last century. The long windows were equipped with yellowing blinds to protect the shelved volumes, while the even more perishable manuscripts and diaries were stored in massive flat files. I can still remember my emotions when I unlocked the first drawer.
I’d come up alone to do the initial inventory, and as the drawer slid open, revealing an assortment of green and buff leather bound books and untidy bundles of photographs and letters, I was returned for a moment to my childhood dining room and the mysterious jungle with my princely relative. There in the Special Collections room, I recovered the sense of mystery and adventure I’d felt as a child whenever I looked at Uncle Petrus’s photograph.
Jonken had left two different sets of diaries: the green bound work volumes, meticulous notations of every detail of each expedition’s discoveries, with—yes—records for every worker and, more to the point for Amos’s exhibition, notations about whoever turned up any significant artifact. One of the students could manage a roster, surely, and perhaps we could coordinate the names with some of the faces in the photographs. This was excellent news already.
I put Kristen onto that, and only two days later, she had the first tentative ID—Hector, mentioned as uncovering an outstanding silver mask, turned up in one of the browning photographs holding just such an artifact. Amos was delighted and snatched the just catalogued photograph to have it enlarged for the exhibition. Very soon we had a growing list of Jonken’s local collaborators, and the work diaries were yielding other useful insights.
As there was more than enough material in the green volumes to occupy both graduate students, I reserved the little personal diaries for myself. I was naturally anxious to learn about the man who had played such a large role in my life, and I wasn’t disappointed. Reading his accounts, admiring his vigorous and exact style, wondering at the omnipresent reports of fever, I knew I hadn’t been wrong to see him as one of the warriors of archeology.
Nothing deterred him, not floods, not sickness, not disease-bearing insects, venomous snakes nor hunger; not difficulties with workers nor backbreaking labor. Through every hardship, he displayed an exuberance, a joy, in archeology, first, and then in all the flora and fauna of the jungle. Here was a man who had been born for discovery and adventure and who was alert to everything in his environment.
Including his collaborators. I found especially enthusiastic references to Henry Devolt, one of his students, and, in affectionate tones that surprised me just a little, to Jose Antonio and Ernesto, two of his long time local contacts. The latter, especially, seemed to have been not just an employee, but a confidante, a friend. When I passed their names on to Kristen, she nodded her head.