Pinart Alphonse. La Caverne d’Aknañh, Ile d’Ounga (Achipel Shumagin, Alaska)

Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1875. — 11 p. (incl. a map) + 7 lithographed color plates of masks and other ritual objects.Alphonse Louis Pinart (February 26, 1852, Bouquinghem, Marquise (Pas-de-Calais) - February 13, 1911, Boulogne-Billancourt) was a French scholar, linguist, ethnologist and collector, and a specialist on the American continent. He studied the civilizations of the New World in the manner of the pioneers of the time, mixing the empirical observation of anthropological, ethnological and linguistic elements.
The son of a wealthy forge master who had learned English, Russian and some Asian linguistics with Stanislas Julien, by the age of 15 he was fascinated by the question of the origin of the American Indians and the Eskimos. He spent the fortune of his family and his two wives on the exploration of America and the purchase of objects and books related to his interests. These were subsequently greatly valued by many museums and other collections, starting with the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadero of which he was the first donor, and the castle museum at Boulogne-sur-Mer in his native region.
At the age of 19 he accomplished his first plan for exploratory travel at his expense. From Spring 1871 to Spring 1872 he was in Alaska, a region that had just been acquired by the United States after nearly a century of Russian occupation, and he also visited the Aleutian Islands. He returned to France with sixty masks from the Kodiak archipelago and eight others discovered in a burial cave at Akhanh on the island of Unga (Aleutian Islands). His youth and energy allowed him to perform such feats as a solitary kayak trip from Unalaska to Kodiak, which facilitated his search for objects and very much impressed the local population.