The conquerors encountered opposition from many tribes, including the Chukchi, the Kamchadals and the Koryaks. When they met with resistance, the Russians retaliated with ever more cruel methods, from public floggings to mass killings. A common method of extracting pelts from the locals was to take hostages (amanat ). * The Russians held local women and children hostage until yasak was paid by the men. If the kidnapped children lived to grow up they learnt to speak Russian; if christened, they could marry Russians and played their part in the creolisation of the local population. In 1788, for example, the Cossacks held 500 children from the Aleut tribe in the Northern Pacific as hostages. The Russian rulers, including the enlightened Catherine II, sanctioned this method; official documents described it as the right way to ‘pacify the natives’ and collect yasak . In 1882, the Siberian historian Nikolay Yadrintsev counted up the number of Siberian peoples that had already been exterminated but who had existed within living memory. The Kamchadals lost 90 per cent of their population; the Voguls, 50 per cent; and so on. 15 The sables disappeared as well. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a good trapper could get 200 sables per year, but, by the end of the century, no more than fifteen or twenty.
Gradually the Cossacks and the traders learnt how to bring the indigenous people ‘under the high hand of the great tsar’. The leaders of local tribes swore an oath to serve the Russian tsar under a ceremonial salute from muskets and cannons. The tribespeople were lined up as if they were members of the Russian Imperial Guard. In many respects, the Russian possessions in North Eurasia were comparable to other areas colonised by Europeans. Rule was indirect and the number of colonists was tiny. But the local tribes were exterminated on a massive scale that wasn’t possible in India. The loss of the indigenous peoples was more analogous to what happened in North America.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century a Polish observer, Bishop Jan Lasky, compared the wealth created by the Muscovy fur trade with the success of the British trade in Indian spices. But in the 1560s and 1570s the volume of the fur trade fell sharply. This time, the explanation was in the actual depletion of sable. In response, the tsar monopolised the export trade in all kinds of fur and the internal trade in sable. It did not help: when hare replaced sable in the Kremlin Treasury, the Muscovy period of Russian history drew to a close. Soon the Time of Trouble started – a civil war with foreign intervention, a major crisis of the state. The Volga merchant Kuzma Minin then saved Russia from defeat by financing the war with his profits from salt extraction. When the Time of Trouble was finally over, Russian ambitions switched from the north-east to the south-west. The cautious policy of the Muscovy state towards the southern steppe changed to an expansionist strategy. Hemp, iron and, finally, wheat replaced fur as Russian exports. Grain, the mass commodity of the future, demanded a much greater input of labour than the fur trade, and labour of a completely different quality.
Beaver
When the Breton navigator Jacques Cartier discovered Newfoundland in 1534, he was convinced that he had arrived in Asia, somewhere near China. In Newfoundland he encountered the Iroquois and took cured pelts back to France, along with two sons of their leader. The humble, easily hunted beaver turned out to be the main attraction for three rival powers, the Dutch, the French and the British. New York was founded thanks to the beaver trade; Henry Hudson, who discovered this convenient harbour in 1609, traded fur with the natives first for the Muscovy Company of England and then for the Dutch East India Company. 16 After the Swedish victory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), tall Swedish hats became fashionable all over Europe. These wide-brimmed, unbending hats which kept their shape whatever the weather were made of felted beaver. The same material was used to make military headgear: Frederick the Great’s tricorne and Napoleon’s bicorne were made from felted beaver. Military men and civilians, Catholics and Protestants – anybody who could afford one – wore a felted beaver hat. Only the Quakers made their humble hats, which they would doff to no one, out of felted wool.
In fact, it was not so much the beaver’s fur that was of interest as the nap undercoat beneath the fur, ‘beaver wool’. Combed out and processed, it made a sturdy, waterproof felt, an excellent material that is warmer than leather and stronger than wool. In the Middle Ages there were beaver ponds all over Europe, but by the sixteenth century they were found only in Scandinavia and the Russian north. In Siberia beavers had been almost eradicated, and a beaver pelt was worth more there than a sable. 17
The beaver pelts were processed using mercury, an extremely hazardous substance. The furrier’s craft was one of the most risky jobs, on a par with mining or metallurgy, which also used mercury. The most expensive hats still contain so much mercury that they cannot be safely exhibited in museums. Hatters fell ill with neurological diseases unknown to science, went mad and died young. As the beaver became rarer in distant Canada, hatters started mixing its nap with rabbit’s fur, which was fifty times cheaper. Still, this trade consumed an enormous quantity of beaver pelts – the import to France was counted in hundreds of thousands. In Canada, the French learnt the tricky art of enticing the Native Americans into bartering goods on their terms. Having no intention of populating these vast territories, they set up trading posts where beaver pelts were exchanged for weapons, alcohol or cauldrons. The most important trading partners were from the Huron tribe. Living in clusters round trading posts and adopting firearms, the Huron turned into settled traders. Their traditional skills, such as making a canoe by covering a light frame with birch bark, also came in useful; the Europeans had no means of transportation other than these canoes.
In alliance with the Huron, France prevented the penetration of these shores by the Dutch, who were collaborating with the Iroquois. In 1670 the English founded the Hudson Bay Company, which competed with the French trading posts across the Great Lakes to the south. The traditional hostility between indigenous tribes turned into proxy wars, a typical instrument of imperial influence. Between 1675 and 1687, the annual delivery of beaver pelts to Europe doubled. But on the cusp of the eighteenth century the suppliers of fur encountered a new phenomenon: the prices for beaver were falling – silk hats came into fashion. But new markets in Germany, Poland and Russia had started using beaver pelts for making fur coats. The market became specialised and global. White beaver fur went to England, where white hats were in fashion. Dutch firms first combed out the nap to make hats for local consumption and then sent the pelts with the outer fur to Russia to make fur coats. Some beaver pelts were exported to Arkhangelsk, via Amsterdam, for specialised processing; the Russian Pomors, a northern people, had a method of combing out the underhair which wasn’t known in Western Europe. 18
The British, French and Dutch colonies in America tried to limit the supply of pelts and stop the fall in prices. In 1720 New York prohibited trade with the French colonies; in response, the Iroquois started smuggling beaver pelts to English ships, avoiding customs and lowering prices. In the Seven Years’ War France lost its territories to the English. ‘You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of barren land in the neighbourhood of Canada, and that they have expended much greater sums in the contest than all Canada is worth,’ wrote Voltaire in Candide . As a result of her victory, England obtained a monopoly on beaver fur, but after the American Revolution England lost her trading posts on United States territory though she kept those in Canada. In 1821 the British Hudson Bay Company merged with the Canadian North West Company. Its rival, the American Fur Company, was even more successful; its owner, John Jacob Astor, diversified his business by smuggling opium to China and engaging in New York real estate. For a while he was the richest man in America, but the fur trade was in decline.