Nature's Evil

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.