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“As Fine a River as Can Be Found”

Henry Hudson.

THE ENGLISH EXPLORER HENRY HUDSON AND HIS CREW OF sixteen sailed the eighty-five-foot Halve Maen (Half Moon) out of Amsterdam on April 4, 1609, to find a northeasterly route to the riches of the Orient. There is no record of what Hudson thought as he watched the city’s sky-line recede into the distance, but he was convinced he was on a fool’s errand, so a sense of foreboding, perhaps resignation, must have prevailed. In 1608, in the employ of the English trading giant the Muscovy Company, Hudson had sailed in the same direction with the same charge, only to have his progress blocked by impenetrable pack ice. His own experience and those of other explorers, including the famed Dutchman Willem Barents, had shown, Hudson believed, that the northeasterly route was a dangerous illusion. Moreover Hudson was growing increasingly persuaded by intelligence brought back by the English explorers John Smith and George Weymouth, on their voyages west across the Atlantic, that the fabled passage to the Orient likely lay in that direction somewhere along the coast of the New World. Despite these misgivings Hudson apparently didn’t share his concerns with the directors of the Dutch East India Company, who were bankrolling the voyage. After all, they still viewed the northeast route as the only viable course, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Some of Hudson’s doubts about the voyage, however, must have filtered back to the company, because just before he departed the company amended his instructions, explicitly ordering him to sail the Half Moon to the northeast and “to think of discovering no other route or passage.”¹

One month later the Half Moon ran headlong into a “sea…full of ice” off the northern coast of Russia. Not surprised, Hudson took advantage of this opportunity and gave his increasingly disputatious crew a choice: They could return to Amsterdam, having failed to discover anything of significance, or they could take a gamble and strike out across the Atlantic, using either Smith’s or Weymouth’s journals as their guide. Following Smith would take them far down the American coast, where Smith believed there was a sea that led to the Orient, while Weymouth’s course would have them seek the passage in the northern reaches of present-day Canada. The crew chose to gamble, and Hudson placed his faith in Smith. Hudson now had what he most desperately wanted—a chance for vindication.²

After a stormy voyage that battered the ship and split one of the masts in two, Hudson and his men reached Nova Scotia in mid-July. They sailed in a southwesterly direction for more than a month, coming close to the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, and then traveling a bit farther south before doubling back up the coast. Toward the end of August, Hudson and his men became the first Westerners known to enter Delaware Bay, but the phalanx of sandbars and shoals they soon discovered dispelled any thoughts that this was the passage to the Orient.³ So they left the bay, proceeded farther up the coast, and in mid-September, as the sun beat back the last wisps of morning fog, the Half Moon sailed “between two headlands, and entered…into as fine a river as can be found, wide and deep, with good anchoring ground on both sides.”⁴ The Half Moon was riding on the river that would one day bear Hudson’s name.

Fervently hoping that he had finally found the passage he was looking for, Hudson slowly made his way upriver. Things looked promising at first. The river was “a mile broad,” bounded by stark palisades, and as deep as fourteen fathoms in places.⁵ Over the course of a little more than a week and roughly 150 miles, however, the river’s banks closed in and the bottom rose up to the point where the Half Moon could go no farther. Hudson had reached a dead end in the vicinity of what is now Albany, New York. After retracing his steps Hudson sailed out of the river’s mouth in early October, then back across the Atlantic to inform his employers of the disappointing news.

Hudson didn’t deliver the news himself. For reasons that remain unclear, instead of sailing straight for Amsterdam he put in at Dartmouth, England, only to be detained by English authorities who wanted him to “serve” his “own country” rather than work on behalf of England’s bitter rival, the Dutch.⁶ Although Hudson never made it back to Holland, news of his voyage did, in the form of his log and an accompanying report written by Emanuel van Meteren, a Dutchman living in London who had been instrumental in getting Hudson to sail under the Dutch flag in the first place. When Dutch merchants heard of Hudson’s discoveries, they were intrigued because he had brought back information that suggested great profits, courtesy of the Indians he had encountered on his trip.⁷

What the merchants learned was that when Hudson had anchored the Half Moon below the river’s mouth, the ship had been visited by Indians clad in “deer skins,” “mantles of feathers,” and “good furs.”^* In fact they were eager to trade, “very civil,” and “very glad” to see the Europeans. Many times over the course of the next month, as Hudson made his way up and down the river, the Indians offered the Europeans corn, oysters, beans, grapes, tobacco, pompions (pumpkins), and beaver and otter skins in exchange for “trifles…beads, knives, and hatchets.” Unfortunately such amicable relations were not the rule. One of Hudson’s men was killed by an arrow through the neck while returning from a reconnaissance mission to check the depth of the river, and then, just a few days before the Half Moon returned to Europe, two vicious skirmishes left as many as ten Indians dead.⁸ These skirmishes were overlooked, for van Meteren’s report spoke of “friendly and polite” Indians along the “upper part” of the river, having “an abundance of provisions, skins, and furs, of martens and foxes, and many other commodities.”⁹ Reading about those skins and furs was understandably exciting because the fur trade was a lucrative business in Europe, in which the Dutch sought to play a larger role.

 

THE ROOTS OF THE FUR TRADE GO BACK TO PREHISTORIC TIMES, when humans relied on furs to protect them from the elements, an eminently sensible and necessary survival strategy, given that humans are one of the least hirsute or, if you prefer, the most naked of all mammals.¹⁰ Indeed, the Bible informs us that, prior to banishing Adam and Eve from Eden, God “clothed them” in “garments of skins [furs].” As humans multiplied, so too did the use of furs, worn not only functionally for warmth but later for beauty and to signify rank and luxury. Ancient Egyptians traded with the Arabians and the Phoenicians for furs, coloring them with vegetable dyes. The Greeks imported furs from the Libyans as well as the Scythians, who lived north of the Caspian Sea and trimmed their clothes with beaver and otter skins. The Romans imported animal pelts from Germany, and when their senators replaced their traditional wool togas with “Gothic furs,” people called the senators Pellete.¹¹

During medieval times an astonishingly wide array of skins entered the stream of commerce and were traded north and south, east and west. Furs flowed from Germany, Ireland, and Scotland to London; from Spain, North Africa, and Sicily to Paris; from Sweden, Portugal, and Bulgaria to Bruges, and in other directions as well. Russia, to the east, also emerged as a major entrepôt, sending skins to the West. All these furs were cleaned, cut, stitched, and dyed by an ever-growing cadre of professionals, and made into a wide array of products, including robes, hats, gloves, and bedding. As a result the expanding fur trade helped to bring formerly insular countries and cultures into the nexus of an increasingly interdependent and connected world.¹²

Furs became an incredibly important sign of class distinction and wealth, creating a symbolic divide between nobility and commoner. A torrent of sumptuary laws put furs and people in their proper place. In 1337 King Edward III of England limited the wearing of fur to the royal family, to “Prelates, Earls, Barons, Knights and Ladies,” and to church officials who had a yearly benefice of at least one hundred pounds.¹³ In 1429 King James I of Scotland declared that silk clothes adorned with the best furs and ornamented with pearls or gold were to be worn only by men who had attained at least the rank of knight, or who had earned more than two hundred marks annually. Town councilors and aldermen were allowed to wear fur-lined gowns, while others of lesser rank were “enjoined to equip themselves in such grave and honest apparel as befits their station.”¹⁴ Wealthy merchants “of humble origin,” spent extravagantly on furs to show the world that they were worthy of ascending a rung or two higher on the rigid ladder of social success.¹⁵ As for commoners, they weren’t literally left out in the cold. They too wore furs, but usually had to content themselves with the least desirable ones, such as those taken from more common animals, like goats, sheep, cats, dogs, and rabbits.¹⁶

The widespread use of furs notwithstanding, it was the nobility and the royal families who had the biggest impact on the fur trade. To help anchor their station within the rarefied air of the aristocracy, nobles purchased immense quantities of furs, but they were mere amateurs when compared with the royals, who, having almost unlimited resources, bought furs without restraint. King Henry IV of England, for example, had a single nine-part robe composed owf no fewer than twelve thousand squirrel and eighty ermine skins. And for her wedding to the French king Charles VIII, Anne of Brittany was clothed in a flowing robe adorned with gold thread, jewels, and 160 sable skins. The enormity of such extravagance becomes clearer when one considers that in the early 1200s it could take an English carpenter forty days to earn enough to purchase a single rabbit lining, and that one of King Henry VIII’s gowns, which included 100 sable and 560 squirrel skins, cost roughly two hundred pounds, or about six thousand times the daily wage of one of the plasterers working at the time for the king at Eltham Palace.¹⁷

Not all monarchs viewed the wearing of furs in an uncritically positive light. Although Charlemagne, king of the Franks during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, willingly wore fine furs on state occasions, he held a dim view of those who believed that clothes made the man. So, when he became concerned that his courtiers had grown too fond of their luxurious wardrobes, he commanded them to put on their best clothes and go hunting with him on a particularly cold, rainy, and windswept day. The elements didn’t bother Charlemagne in the least, since he was wrapped in a thick, water-repellent sheepskin cloak. His entourage, however, was soon drenched to the skin, their fancy silk and fur robes caked in mud. The stage was now set for Charlemagne to teach his noblemen a lesson. He led the shivering party back to the castle, and had them stand by the fire. As the robes dried, they shrank and shriveled, becoming very expensive rags. According to the Scottish historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, Charlemagne “gloried in his own plain sheepskin cloak, which had neither suffered by the storm nor by the heat, and exhorted the tattered crew by whom he was surrounded, to reserve silk and furs for days of ceremony, and to use in war and in the chase the plain but serviceable dress of their ancestors.¹⁸

While Charlemagne enjoyed poking fun at his noblemen’s slavish attachment to their furs, the medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen perceived something far more sinister in the fur fad sweeping Europe in the eleventh century. The pious cleric took a particularly dim view of the flood of furs emanating from Russia, where, he said, “they are [as] plentiful as dung,” and he worried that, “for our damnation…we strive as hard to come into the possession of a marten skin as if it were everlasting salvation.” As a final salvo he claimed that it was because of this sacrilegious longing for furs, and the pernicious role of Russia in providing them, “that the deadly sin of luxurious pride” had enveloped the West.¹⁹

Sinful or not, demand for furs remained strong while dynasties waxed and waned. By the early 1600s, however, a problem arose because the European supply of furs was diminishing. For centuries trappers had combed the forests, meadows, streams, and rivers of Europe and lands farther east, killing an untold number of animals for their pelts.²⁰ The populations of fur-bearing animals were everywhere in steep decline. That is why Hudson’s report of furs elicited such excitement in Holland. Just as the traditional sources of furs were petering out, another source was ready to be exploited, in America.

 

HUDSON WAS HARDLY THE FIRST WESTERNER TO discover the bounty in furs that lay across the Atlantic. That distinction belongs to the Norsemen, who sailed to North America early in the eleventh century and established a fleeting settlement in a place they called Vinland, whose location is still debated among historians but was most likely somewhere along the coast of Canada.²¹ When the Icelander Thorfinn Karlsefni and his crew met the local Indians, they soon began trading, according to the saga of Eric the Red. The Indians were particularly interested in “red cloth, for which they offered in exchange peltries…. [F]or perfect unsullied skins the Skrellings [Indians] would take red stuff a span in length, which they would bind around their heads.”²²

Five centuries later Europeans began arriving off the coast of North America in greater numbers, witnessing firsthand the almost unbelievable abundance of furs in the New World. Though many of these Europeans were explorers searching for a route to the East, or gold or silver mines, and were not particularly interested in obtaining furs, they gladly did so when the opportunity arose. In 1524, for example, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano sailed La Dauphine into Casco Bay, in present-day Maine, and came across Indians “clothed in the skins of bear, lynx, sea-wolf, and other animals.” Possibly suspicious or fearful of Europeans as a result of earlier contacts, the Indians refused to let Verrazano land. “If we wanted to trade with them for some of their things,” Verrazano wrote, “they would come to the seashore on some rocks where the breakers were most violent, while we remained on the little boat, and they sent us what they wanted to give on a rope, continually shouting to us not to approach the land.” In this manner, the Indians lowered down their furs, while the Europeans sent back “knives, hooks for fishing, and sharp metal,” the only items the Indians desired.²³ And ten years later, in July 1534, near Chaleur Bay in northern New Brunswick, the French explorer Jacques Cartier encountered Indians who seemed almost too eager to trade. While a few of Cartier’s men were exploring the coast in one of their boats, a large group of Micmac Indians on the shore raised furs aloft on sticks and waved them back and forth, while making gestures imploring the Europeans to land. Having just one boat and but a few men, the wary Europeans declined to be drawn in and continued on their way, whereupon seven boats full of Indians pursued them, “making many signs of love and mirth, as it were desiring our friendship.” The Europeans urged the Indians to turn back, but still they came until two warning shots fired over their heads sent them paddling away in fright. Soon, however, the Indians returned, and when they got too close, the Europeans jabbed at them with lances until they departed. The next day nine boats full of Indians approached Cartier’s two ships, “making signs that they came to traffic with us.” This time Cartier sent two of his men ashore, with knives and “other iron wares, and a red hat to give unto their captain.” These goods were warmly received, and the Indians traded all their furs, including the ones they were wearing. Before leaving, the now-naked Indians indicated that they would return the next day with more skins, and they did.²⁴

 

WHILE EXPLORERS DABBLED IN THE FUR TRADE, IT WAS fishermen who took it to the next level. Intent on satisfying growing local demand for fish, Europeans sailed across the Atlantic during the early sixteenth century to find new fishing grounds, and off the coast of Newfoundland they found what appeared to be a mother lode—enormous shoals of gigantic cod.²⁵ At first fishermen had little contact with Indians or their furs, because fishing operations were conducted offshore.²⁶ The fishermen would bait their hooks, throw the line overboard, haul the hooked fish aboard, and send it through an assembly line, with a series of stations located on tables running along the side of the ship. The first man in the chain would lop off the fish’s head, the second would slice open the belly and rip out the guts, while the third would cut out the bones and pitch the fish into the salting barrel full of brine, where it would cure for twenty-four hours, then be pressed and stored in the hold for the return voyage.

Over time this form of “green,” or “wet,” fishing was increasingly supplanted by “dry” fishing, which shifted much of the operation to land. For months at a stretch, fishermen would live onshore with their ship anchored nearby. Each morning they would row their boats to sea and return with their catch. The fish were processed in the same manner as was done offshore, with one important difference: After pitching the fish into a salting barrel to cure, they would splay them out on rocks or wooden platforms called flakes to dry in the sun. Dry fishing was more efficient and cost effective than wet fishing since it required less salt, saved on cargo space, allowed the fishermen to fish longer, and produced a rock-hard product with an almost infinite shelf life.²⁷

With fishermen on land for long periods of time, Indians began bringing furs to the fishermen’s camps to trade. Since many of the fishermen returned yearly to the same location, the trade became cyclical, the Indians saving up their furs in preparation for the trading season, and the Europeans stocking up on trade items before leaving home. And the furs weren’t always of local origin. As word spread that the Europeans were here to trade, inland Indians started packing up their furs and making annual excursions to the coast, while coastal Indians, acting as middlemen, also obtained pelts from the interior tribes to trade to the fishermen.

Originally a sideline to fishing, fur trading took center stage toward the end of the sixteenth century. Furs were almost the perfect commodities. The Indians did all the work collecting them, they could be bought with relatively inexpensive European wares, they were easy to transport, and commanded high prices back home. Of all the European fishermen who pursued this trade, it was the French who did so with the most drive, determination, and success, leading them to increasingly leave “their old vocation [of fishing] for the more lucrative trade in bear-skins and beaver-skins.”²⁸ In this way “the great fishing industry…became the mother of the fur-trade.”²⁹

King Henry IV of France enthusiastically supported expanding the French fur trade in North America. He believed that it would bolster the failing treasury, provide an outlet for French trading goods, and strengthen and expand his empire. To help achieve these goals, Henry granted a group of Frenchmen monopoly rights to the fur trade in the region of the St. Lawrence River in 1599 on the condition that they annually transport fifty colonists to the area. Although Henry’s hopes for rapid colonization were dashed—primarily because the monopolists were more interested in furs than settlements—the fur trade prospered. While these monopolists, and others who followed, established the first permanent fur-trading outpost in North America, at Tadoussac, and then another at Quebec, French entrepreneurs operating beyond the monopolists’ control were also busy gathering pelts.³⁰

 

THUS WHEN HUDSON ARRIVED OFF THE COAST OF NOVA SCOTIA in the summer of 1609, the French trade in the region was already well established. In the vicinity of LaHave, six Indians—one of whom even spoke a few words of French—told Hudson “that the Frenchmen do trade with them.” Three days later Indians visited the Half Moon rowing “French shallops [small open boats]” and looking to trade “beaver skins and other fine furs” for “red gowns,” as well as other items that the “French trade with them.”³¹ It is doubtful that these encounters surprised Hudson or his men. Europeans were well aware of the inroads the French had made into the North American fur trade, and no European merchants were more envious of their success than the Dutch.

By the early 1600s the Dutch already had a thriving trade with Russia, bartering European goods for Muscovy furs. This trade, which kept scores of ships traveling back and forth from Amsterdam to Archangel, was highly favorable to the Dutch, since the Russians kept tariffs on imports and exports very low. Still, no tariffs were better than low ones, so when the Dutch merchants learned that a bounty in furs lay across the Atlantic, a place where duties wouldn’t apply and furs could be had for various “trinkets,” they set their sights on expanding their trade to the West. Moreover, this new source of furs would help make up for the diminished supply coming from Europe and Russia. Initially the Dutch tried to horn in on the French trade along the St. Lawrence.³² But the role of interlopers in territory claimed and defended by the French was not one that the Dutch relished. Fortunately for them there was an alternative location: Courtesy of Hudson they now knew of a “fine” river, hundreds of miles from the French, with many “friendly” Indians who were eager to trade furs. And if the Dutch were lucky, most of those furs would come from beavers, whose pelts were particularly valued back home.