Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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This process of beaver destruction was not limited to Great Britain, but instead proceeded upon approximately the same schedule throughout northern Europe. By the late middle ages the aristocratic classes of western and southern Europe had become increasingly dependent upon trade with the Rus to their east to supply them with the luxurious furs that helped mark them off from their social inferiors.29
By approximately the mid-sixteenth century, overhunting for export had led to the near extermination of beaver, sable, and other furbearers even in Russian lands. To hold onto the lucrative state revenues generated by the fur trade, Ivan IV (known as “the Terrible”) of Muscovy sent his armies east to drive the Tartars from Siberia and subjugate the native hunters of the region. The Muscovites would eventually—after eight decades—win their wars and extend their fur trading empire to the Pacific. The hostilities that ensued in the meantime, together with growing fur shortages in Russia, led to rising international prices in the late 1500s.30 As Russian armies marched east, the same historical forces driving Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Siberia encouraged merchants in the Netherlands, France, and England to look west for a new, cheaper supply of furs at just the historical moment that maritime explorers were introducing the lands of northeastern North America to an expanding world economy.31
The availability of American furs to western European consumers contributed to a larger consumer revolution taking place during the Age of Exploration. As European traders increasingly integrated producers in the Americas, Africa, and Asia into an expanding world economy, luxury goods once available only to the most elite members of European society began to move down market. As furs streamed across the Atlantic, prices fell, and this luxury once reserved for kings and nobility increasingly appeared in the wardrobes of the gentry and professional classes. Besides their appeal as a traditional marker of social status, garments of beaver retained the same qualities that made their former owners so successfully adapted to semiaquatic lifestyles in often frigid climes. Beaver fur was warm, water resistant, and—once it had been felted—strikingly soft. For Europeans gripped in the throes of the Little Ice Age, beaver pelts held an obvious appeal. By the seventeenth century, lawyers, clerics, clerks, military officers, and their wives in England sported cloaks, capes, mittens, pantaloons, and, especially, hats made of North American beaver (Castor canadensis). By the 1640s, beaver hats had become the preferred headwear of a broad economic and political cross section of English society, sported by king and cavaliers, and Puritans and parliamentarians alike.32
Consequently, the Dutch and English who arrived in the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century looked out at the extensive beaver dams and ponds spread across the countryside and imagined the wealth that their architects’ hides might fetch. Strong demand and good prices in Europe meant that a cargo of New England beaver pelts guaranteed welcome profits for European merchants and settlers trying to finance their new colonies in America. As one nineteenth-century New England historian observed: “The colonist desired Indian corn and venison, but all the world desired beaver.”33 Or, at least, all the European world.
Indian hunters in the Connecticut basin and elsewhere desired the metal kettles, pots, knives, and firearms that they received in payment for their beaver pelts. Prior to the fur trade, Indian communities in eastern North America had utilized the beaver for meat and clothing, and had used its impressive incisors to make cutting tools. But for Native communities living in New England in the seventeenth century, beaver and the other furbearing mammals of the American north came to represent a much wider range of newly available commodities. Consumers in Europe may have provided the commercial demand, but it was Native American hunters (themselves also consumers) who formed the sharp spear point of the fur trade. As Massachusetts settler William Wood observed in 1634, “These beasts are too cunning for the English…. All the Beaver which the English have, comes first from the Indians.”34
European fishermen pioneered the fur trade with New England’s coastal communities in the first decades of the sixteenth century. For the sailors on these early fishing vessels, bartering furs from coastal Indians represented a lucrative sideline to the cod fishery, the primary economic motivator for their cross-ocean ventures. These sixteenth-century fishermen offered small bits of metal—nails, fishing hooks, and, perhaps, knives—and in exchange Indians often, literally, sold them the beaver coats off their backs. By the closing decades of the century, however, it had become apparent to many European merchants and statesmen that the financial returns from North American furs justified pursuing that trade in its own right.
In 1614, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block captained the first ship to sail up the Connecticut River while exploring the Long Island coast in search of trading opportunities. Block’s ship, the Onrust (“Restless”), penetrated upriver perhaps as far as present-day Hartford. Sailing east from the mouth of the Connecticut, Block established the first trade contacts between the Dutch and the powerful Pequot nation, whose territory centered on the Thames River. Over the course of the next two decades, the Pequots’ commercial relationship with the Dutch would transform the political and ecological landscape of southern New England and draw the Native nations of the Connecticut Valley firmly within the transatlantic network of the fur trade. Over the course of the late 1610s through early 1630s, the Dutch operating out of New Netherland exported approximately ten thousand beaver skins a year.35 Many of these the Dutch obtained from Native trappers operating along the Hudson River, but a sizable percentage likely came from the Pequot trade, and most of these latter furs (perhaps a few thousand) would have come from subordinate villages lying within the Connecticut watershed.
Figure 3. The mid-ground of this vignette from an early eighteenth-century map depicts Indians using metal-headed axes and spears to hunt beaver with the assistance of dogs. Elsewhere, two hunters have treed a bear while another pair course a moose in the background. Henri Abraham Chatelain, “Vignettes of Indians Hunting Beaver” (1719). Carte Tres Curieuse de la Mer du Sud, Amsterdam: 1719. Map reproduction courtesy of the Mapping Boston Collection at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.
At first, the Pequots may have taken advantage of their fortuitous placement along Long Island Sound merely to act as middlemen between the Dutch and Native communities lying farther inland. Pequot traders exchanged cloth and metal implements obtained from the Dutch and acted as a funnel through which the beaver pelts of southern New England flowed into the hands of Dutch traders. Soon, however, the Pequots sought to turn their commercial advantages into political hegemony. Direct access to Dutch firearms and other metal weaponry gave the Pequots a military advantage that allowed the nation to extend its authority over neighboring tribes.36 In 1626, Sequin, the sachem of the Wangunks, an Indian village near present-day Middletown, led a coalition of Connecticut Valley Indians against the Pequots in an attempt to break the latter’s monopoly on the Dutch trade in the region. Sequin and his allies were defeated after a series of “three desperate pitched battles” and thereafter required to pay an annual tribute to the Pequots. The Pequot demanded that a substantial portion of this tribute be paid in beaver skins.37
The strategic benefits that arose from the beaver trade spawned competition and then violence farther inland as well, in the territory lying between the Connecticut and the Hudson River. The Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had been attempting to establish their control of the beaver trade in this stretch of lands since at least the first decade of the seventeenth century. In 1628, a military offensive by the Mohawks, the easternmost of the Iroquois nations, defeated the Mahicans, whose territory had formerly encompassed the interriver region, along with their allies among the Pocumtuck, Sokoki, and Pennacook villages of the middle and upper Connecticut Valley. Reeling from this defeat, the Mahicans withdrew from the Hudson watershed to concentrate on the portions of their hunting territory that lay closer to the Connecticut. Intermittent violence followed for the next five decades. The Mahicans, Pocumtucks, and Sokokis repeatedly clashed with the Mohawks as both sides sought to control the beaver trade of the lands west and north of the Connecticut River.38 As the milliners of Europe ramped up their production of the beaver hats that had recently become the height of European fashion, violence engulfed the frontiers of Native New England.
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