Authors: Timothy Brook
Native American cultures did not yet know how to work metal, but quickly learned to use firearms and acquired them through
trade. Champlain tried to block guns from leaking into Native culture, realizing that it would undercut his military advantage.
He was able to win his battle on Lake Champlain in 1609 because guns had not yet fallen into the hands of the Mohawks. Other
European traders were not so careful. The English traded guns for fur pelts, but only with their allies. The Dutch trading
out of New Amsterdam (now New York) were less discriminating. They sold arquebuses to anyone. Native traders soon learned
the value of guns and made access to them the price of trade. As a result, guns poured into the interior and were soon being
traded well beyond the reach of the Europeans. The Dutch eventually realized that the arquebuses they were selling to their
allies were ending up in the hands of their enemies, so they declared that any European trading guns to the Natives would
be executed. Unfortunately for them, that order was too late by at least a decade.
Champlain’s arquebus played one more role in his campaign. It happened the day after the battle was over. One price of defeat
was human sacrifice. The sacrifice could not be performed at the site of the battle. The Algonkians and Hurons were deep in
Mohawk territory and feared the quick return of their enemies, and in greater numbers. The surprise of the first victory could
not be repeated; they had to leave. But they would not give up the Mohawk warriors they had captured. Young males were too
valuable to waste. Some would be taken home and, if possible, integrated into the tribes of those who had captured them. But
one, at least, would be sacrificed. They hobbled the captives by cutting the sinews in their legs, bound their arms, trundled
them into their canoes, and headed north as fast as they could paddle. By sunset that day they put close to forty kilometers
behind them, enough distance to perform the business of sacrifice. It was serious business, and would take all night.
The sacrifice of one Mohawk warrior was performed to thank the spirits who had aided them in battle, honoring them for the
dream signs they had given and avenging the spirits of warriors whom other Iroquois had killed in earlier raids. It was also
a rite of the deepest seriousness for the victim, the ultimate test of courage that either would mark him as a great warrior
or humiliate him as a coward. The rite started with an invitation to sing his war chant. As he sang, his captors drew glowing
sticks from the fire and burned his torso. They did this slowly. The ordeal had to last until the sun rose. Whenever the Mohawk
warrior passed out, they poured cooling water on his back to revive him. A night of torment ended at dawn with disembowelment
and ritual cannibalism.
Champlain wanted to end the torture before it had run its course. The captured Mohawk had committed no crime, nor did he possess
useful information, and that in European terms was supposed to rule out the use of torture.
“We do not commit such cruelties,” Champlain declared. “We kill people outright. If you wish me to shoot him with the arquebus,
I should be glad to do so.” Then he stalked away, making a show of his displeasure. His Native allies were distressed, and
invited him to return and shoot their victim, if that would please him. Champlain got his way—not because the Natives accepted
that his course was right and theirs wrong, but because etiquette required them to defer to a guest’s wishes. Perhaps they
assumed that an arquebus shot was how Frenchmen conducted their victory sacrifices.
OCHASTEGUIN AND CHAMPLAIN LINKED UP again the following summer and inflicted a second crushing defeat on the Mohawks. At their
third meeting, in the summer of 1611, Ochasteguin brought with him several other chiefs from the Huron Confederacy. Both sides
wanted to negotiate an enlargement of direct trading. As a pledge of their good faith, the Huron chiefs gave four strings
of shell beads to Champlain—what is known as wampum, a form of both currency and contract in Native culture. The four strings
tied together signified that the chiefs of the four tribes of the Huron Confederacy committed themselves to an alliance with
the French. The Huron Alliance Belt, as it is known, still survives.
Along with the wampum, the Huron chiefs presented Champlain with a gift of what he most wanted: fifty beaver pelts. The Hurons
may not have understood why the French wanted an endless supply of beaver fur, other than knowing how valuable it was in their
own culture. The French did not want the pelts for the lustrous outer fur, as Natives did, to line or trim garments. What
they wanted was the underfur, which provided the raw material for manufacturing felt. Beaver fur is uniquely barbed and therefore
prone to bind well when stewed in a toxic stew of copper acetate and mercury-laced Arabic glue. (Hatters had a reputation
for being mad because of the toxic soup they inhaled during their work.) The result, once pounded and dried, is the very best
felt for making the very best hats.
Before the fifteenth century, European hatters had made felt for hats from the indigenous European beaver, but overtrapping
decimated the beaver population and the clearing of wilderness areas in northern Europe eradicated their natural habitats.
The fur trade then moved north into Scandinavia until overtrapping drove Scandinavian beavers into extinction as well, and
beaver hats along with them.
In the sixteenth century, hatters were forced to use sheep’s wool to make felt. Wool felt is not ideal for hats, being coarse
by comparison and lacking the natural ability of beaver hairs to thatch. Felt makers could mix in a dose of rabbit hair to
help the thatching, but the result was still not as sturdy. Wool felt tended to absorb the rain rather than repel it, and
to lose its shape as soon as it got wet. Wool was also unattractive because of its indifferent pale color. It could be dyed,
but the natural dyes felt makers used did not fix well, especially in the rain. Wool felt also lacked the strength and pliability
of beaver fur. The standard headgear of the Dutch poor, the
klapmuts
, was made out of wool felt, which is why it slouched.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, two new sources of beaver pelts opened up. The first was Siberia, into which Russian
trappers were moving in search of better hunting. The overland shipping distances were great, however, and the Russian supply
was unreliable, despite Dutch attempts to control the Baltic trade to guarantee the shipping of furs into Europe. The other
source opening at about the same time was Canada. Europeans fishing along the eastern coast of North America where the St.
Lawrence River opened into the Atlantic discovered that the eastern woodlands were full of beavers, and Native trappers were
prepared to sell them for a good price.
When beaver pelts from Canada began to come onto the European market in small quantities in the 1580s, demand skyrocketed.
Beaver hats made a huge comeback. The fashion first caught on among merchants, but within a few decades the style spread to
courtly and military elites. Soon, anyone with any social pretension had to have a “beaver,” as these hats were known. In
the 1610s, the price of a beaver had risen to ten times the price of a wool felt hat, splitting the hat market into those
who could afford beavers and those who couldn’t. (One effect of the price split was the emergence of an active resale market
for those who could not afford a new beaver but did not want to resort to wearing a klapmuts. European governments regulated
the secondhand hat market closely, out of a reasonable fear of lice-borne diseases.)
Status competition among those who could afford beavers, and the struggle for market share among those who made them, drove
hatters to concoct ever more outlandish creations in order to stay ahead of their competitors. Fine distinctions of color
and nap fed into the fashion whirligig and kept the style conscious on their toes. Crowns went up and down, narrowed and widened,
arched and sagged. Brims started widening in the 1610s, turning up or flopping down as fashion dictated, but always getting
bigger. Colorful hatbands were added to distinguish the truly fashionable from the less so, and showy decorations were stuck
into them. We can’t tell what the soldier in
Officer and Laughing Girl
has stuck in his hatband, but his headwear was the very latest in Dutch male fashion—it was also coming to the end of its
fashion life, and would be gone within a decade or so.
The opening of the Canadian supply of beaver pelts stimulated the demand for hats, which in turn pushed up prices for consumers
and profits for pelt dealers. This surge was a huge boon for the French then trying to establish their first tiny colonies
in the St. Lawrence Valley, for it furnished them with an unexpectedly profitable source of income to cover the costs of exploration
and colonization. Trade goods valued at one livre when they left Paris bought beaver skins that were worth 200 livres when
they arrived back there. The trade also bound Native people closer to the Europeans. In the early years, Native trappers thought
they were getting the better of their trading partners.
“The Beaver does everything perfectly well,” chuckled a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary. “It makes kettles, hatchets,
swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.” Europeans he thought gullible for the prices they paid for pelts,
particularly the English in New England, to whom he sold his pelts. “The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives
like this for one Beaver skin.” The French paid at rates slightly below the English. What the Europeans gave was of far greater
value than what the beaver skins were worth in the Native economy. Each side thought the other was overpaying, and both in
a sense were right, which is why the trade was such a success.
The year 1609 was for Champlain a crucial moment in the fur trade. The ten-year monopoly that his business consortium enjoyed
had been set to run out the previous year, and the Parisian hatters’ corporation fought hard to end the monopoly so that prices
might come down. Champlain fought back, fearing that, without the monopoly, his project would become financially unviable.
Before the monopoly expired, he appealed to King Henri for an extension. His application succeeded, but only to the extent
of gaining him one year. So as of 1609, the beaver market was open to all comers. Competitors moved in immediately, driving
the price of beaver fur down by 60 percent. Champlain’s sole hope was to use his personal alliances to position his operations
farther upriver than his competitors. To keep the Huron market to himself, he exchanged a symbolic son (having married late,
he had none of his own) with Ochasteguin as a pledge of mutual support. The loss of the royal monopoly thus had the effect
of spurring Champlain to probe farther into the continent.
Champlain pushed west in search of furs, but he went in search of something else as well: China. When he explained to Henri
why he needed the monopoly continued, he pointed out that he was not seeking simply to benefit his business partners. The
furs he was buying were needed to pay for something more important: “the means of discovering the passage to China without
the inconvenience of the northern icebergs, or the heat of the torrid zone through which our seamen, with incredible labours
and perils, pass twice in going and twice in returning.” Champlain needed to keep fur prices high in Paris so that they could
pay for the costs of getting to China.
This was not a new idea. It is set out in the terms of the original commission he received from Henri in 1603: that he should
“try to find a route easy to traverse through this country to the countries of China and the East Indies, or elsewhere, as
far as possible, along the coasts and on the mainland.” His charge then had been to search for “a passage that would facilitate
commerce with the people of the East.” That is what continued to inspire his westward penetration of the continent.
The two known routes from Europe to China, around the southern tips of Africa and South America, were notoriously long and
difficult, and were in any case heavily patrolled and defended by the Portuguese and Spanish. Then there were the Northwest
and Northeast passages, one around the Americas and the other above Russia. The Dutch and English had already shown the Arctic
routes around Russia and Canada to be infeasible, though some still hoped that the passage Henry Hudson found into Hudson
Bay might yield a connection to a route through to the Pacific. France’s sole hope of getting to the fabled East without being
knocked about by icebergs or the other European powers was to find a passage across the North American continent. Champlain
needed Native knowledge to show him this hidden way, and he also needed Native trade to provide him with commodities profitable
enough to pay for the costs. He was not interested in conquest or colonization for their own sakes. He had one dream only:
to find a passage to China.
Jacques Cartier before him had explored the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and Jean Alfonse de Saintonge had sailed along the
Labrador coast in the 1540s, though neither succeeded in finding a route to China. But that was the reason why they and others
after them were exploring these waters. When the Englishman George Weymouth sailed into the Arctic during Champlain’s first
visit to the New World, he carried a letter from Elizabeth I addressed to the emperor of China, with translations in Latin,
Spanish, and Italian just in case a Jesuit missionary who knew no English was handy to translate from one of these languages
into Chinese. Weymouth never reached his destination or delivered Elizabeth’s letter to her brother-monarch, but that had
been his hope. Champlain was fired by the same hope. He, however, decided that the route to China lay not around the continent
but through it. His hope was that the St. Lawrence River would lead to China. A memory of that dream still lingers at Sault
St. Louis, a set of rapids near the top of the St. Lawrence where Champlain had to turn back in 1603. Fifteen years later
he proposed this as the location for a riverside customs house that would tax the trade goods passing this point once the
connection had been made. The place is now called Lachine—“China.”
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