by Nick Bunker
Like their friend Ames, the Pilgrims had made powerful allies among the Dutch. Given the politics of the day, Carleton had no wish to offend them for the sake of an affair that had blown over. With Robinson lending his support, the synod at Dordrecht had also ended well, settling the religious dispute in favor of the Calvinists and Prince Maurice. With that accomplished, and Oldenbarnevelt dead, Sir Dudley hoped to strengthen the Anglo-Dutch accord by striking deals with the prince to end the disputes about fishing rights and the East Indies that endangered the relationship.
For their part, the Dutch reminded him that King James was penniless, while they were rich: the Dutch paid the wages of English soldiers in their country. If James wished to play in the politics of Europe, the only card he had was his friendship with the Dutch, and they knew this perfectly well. So did King James. He fulfilled his pledges to Brewer, who was released unharmed. As for the Pilgrims, in the months ahead they came even closer to their Dutch friends. Until April 1620, less than six months before the Mayflower left Plymouth Sound, they were still hoping to sail to America under the Dutch flag. If they had done so, their future might have taken a very different form.
FAIR OFFERS FROM THE DUTCH
When Bradford came to write his history, he touched briefly on an alternative proposal. He says that “some Dutchmen made them faire offers aboute goeinge with them.”18 In fact, as Winslow later explained, two sets of Dutchmen came up with two alternatives. The first was for the Pilgrims to leave Leiden, but to remain in the Dutch Republic, and to move south to Zeeland and the town of Middelburg.
This would have made some sense. In Zeeland the political and religious leaders were refugees themselves, exiles who had fled north from the Spanish many years before. Pro-English and pro-Puritan, they had already offered to help by intervening with Prince Maurice on behalf of Thomas Brewer. When the Pilgrims communicated with England, they did so by way of Middelburg, which had an English business community. The man who carried their mail was John Turner, concierge of the English merchants’ house. His name turns up in the customs records, ferrying over from London cargoes of pewter and English beer.19
Neither Bradford nor Winslow explains why the Pilgrims rejected the Zeeland offer. The reasons were most likely very simple: prospects would be no better there than at Leiden, and if the Dutch and the Spanish went to war again, Middelburg was even closer to the front line. A second proposal carried more weight. It came from the New Netherland Company, which saw in the English exiles potential settlers for the islands that it knew existed at the mouth of the Hudson. Once again, however, the Pilgrims found themselves caught up in the vagaries of politics.
Ten years before, Henry Hudson had first sailed up the river that bears his name and told merchants in Amsterdam about it. Since then, Dutch seamen and merchants had made voyage after voyage, with varying success, trading for furs up the Hudson as far as Albany and often clashing with the native people. More creatively, the Amsterdam skipper Adriaen Block made accurate maps of the coastline, from Manhattan as far as Marblehead Bay to the north of Boston.
So, in 1614, a consortium of Amsterdam merchants with interests in fur and whaling formed the New Netherland Company with a patent from the authorities in The Hague. It gave them exclusive rights for three years to explore and to trade in the zone between the fortieth and the forty-fifth parallels, from the Delaware north to Nova Scotia.20 By 1620, their time had run out, before they could establish a permanent base. The Pilgrims offered one last chance. In February, the company told Prince Maurice that they had found at Leiden an English preacher—John Robinson—willing to take four hundred families to the Hudson River. There, they said, he would plant “a new commonwealth” under Dutch protection and convert the natives to Christianity. To make the idea more appealing, they mentioned the abundance of timber, ripe to build oceangoing hulls. From Prince Maurice, they needed two Dutch warships to protect the Pilgrims from rivals, including King James, who claimed the same territory for England.
Expressed in such a way, the project had not the slightest chance of approval. With war against Spain approaching, the prince needed no more quarrels with England. In any event, plans were already being made for a much larger venture, a West Indies Company, led by such men as Ames’s friend Reynier Pauw, to challenge the Spanish in Brazil and elsewhere. On April 11, after consulting the prince for less than twenty-four hours, the Dutch authorities vetoed the Robinson scheme.
Even so, their talks about the project gave the Pilgrims a glimpse of a new opportunity. For the first time, they crossed paths with the mammal that came to be their salvation: not a beached whale, but the North American beaver.21
Chapter Twelve
THE BEAVER, THE COSSACK, AND PRINCE CHARLES
The bever … is as bigge as a dogge, long, gentle, of blacke and shining haire, with a very long taile, and feete like a goose.
—PIERRE DE LA PRIMAUDAYE, THE FRENCH ACADEMIE (1618), A BOOK OWNED BY MILES STANDISH IN NEW PLYMOUTH1
In 1591, a yeoman called John Hall went to the gallows for theft, committed on a highway leading out of London. His punishment was routine, but his felony was not. In Middlesex, where Hall was indicted, each year seventy criminals met their end by hanging, but in his case the stolen property contained something new and still very unusual.
The items he took were clothes fit for a man of style: a pair of sea green satin breeches, a velvet jerkin, and a black silk and mohair cloak lined with taffeta. They belonged to a clergyman, one Everard Digby, fellow of a Cambridge college and author of England’s first coaching manual for swimmers. The stolen goods were valued at fourteen pounds at a time when the average minister earned little more than twice that in a year. Among them was the finest fashion accessory of a gentleman: a beaver hat worth twenty shillings, or one pound.2
Hall was perhaps the first man in England hanged for stealing a hat made of felt from the fur of a beaver. First reported in Paris in 1577, beaver hats reached London a little later, in the early 1580s, perhaps on the heads of the Duke of Anjou and his entourage when he came to seek the hand of Queen Elizabeth. From the very first they fascinated those who saw them. In 1583, the chronicler of exploration Richard Hakluyt inspected in Paris a haul of furs brought back from Canada. He described “divers beastes skynnes, as bevers, otters, marternes, lucernes, seales,” and coming as he did from a nation of shopkeepers, Hakluyt swiftly appreciated the trading opportunity that the French had found in North America. As for the hats, the earliest literary reference in England dates from the very same year. Amid ranting disapproval, the writer recognized the commercial draw of this new luxury.
In The Anatomie of Abuses, Philip Stubbes condemned the wicked vanities of maypoles, the theater, and the ruff. Among the marks of sin, he included extravagant hats, and especially the new variety made from beaver felt. “And as the fashions bee rare and straunge, so are the things wherof their Hattes be made,” he wrote. “Some of a certaine kind of fine haire, far fetched and deare bought … Bever hattes of 20, 30 or 40 shillinges price fetched from beyond the seas.”3 Stubbes spoke like another true Englishman, censorious but eager to appraise this new commodity in cash.
Whether or not the beaver hat was an emblem of vanity, it rescued the Plymouth Colony from extinction. By the 1620s, the beaver hat had ceased to be a foppish, eccentric novelty, and instead it became an almost universal object of codified desire. As Coco Chanel once said, a hat is more than just something you wear in the street. Its shape, its color, its style, and its erotic charge, the material from which it is made, its price, its maker, and the conventions that govern the display of a hat have a host of meanings in the life of their time. The beaver hat was far more than an item of headgear. When worn in London, it served as a gilded fetish, bearing little resemblance to the austere black cone familiar from Puritan imagery.
At the peak of their activity, in the 1630s, the Mayflower Pilgrims sent more than two thousand beaver pelts home to England, where their sole use was to make a h
at. Without the fur trade, the colony would have failed, and the name of the ship would have faded into oblivion. This is something historians have long acknowledged, but only in passing and with little comment. More than fifty years ago, in the classic account of merchants in the new colonies, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn referred to the central role the beaver played in the opening phase of Puritan settlement. Nobody has followed Professor Bailyn’s lead, and the early days of the New England fur trade remain a neglected subject, alluded to and then forgotten.
In the 1990s, a brilliant French-Canadian scholar, Bernard Allaire, used the superb archives of Paris and provincial France to examine the French end of the business. The English records are more fragmentary, but they complete the picture. We start with a set of manuscripts preserved in the library of the archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace in London.4
BACON’S BEAVER HATS
Among the most curious archives at Lambeth are the Bacon Papers. They include bills for beaver hats of the highest quality, supplied between 1594 and 1597 to Anthony Bacon, elder brother of Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher and politician. The novelist Daphne du Maurier, the author of Rebecca, wrote a biography of Anthony Bacon, an exotic figure, a spy as well as a member of Parliament, and a man touched by scandal. He was a homosexual at a time when death might be the penalty. Indeed the bills include items for trimming and lining two old beaver hats belonging to a young manservant who was apparently Bacon’s lover.
The hats came from two haberdashers, a father and son called Richard and Samuel Arnold: or rather, le Chapelier Mr. Arnould, as the latter liked to be known.5 Anthony Bacon never paid his bills on time, and so the Arnolds kept sending new invoices for silk, velvet, and taffeta nightcaps, as well as for beaver hats and their repair. Because they did so, the Bacon Papers document the early beaver hat almost as completely as we might wish.
Anthony Bacon bought fourteen hats from the Arnolds, five made from beaver felt and nine made from wool, but the beaver hats were by far the more expensive. They cost five times as much as the inferior woolen model. Even the cheapest of Bacon’s beaver hats carried a price tag of thirty-five shillings. It was big, black, and lined with taffeta. Above the brim, it had a hatband made of “Sypres,” meaning a transparent, gauzy crepe silk, imported from the Middle East via the island of that name. A forty-two-shilling hat came with a finer surface, and an even more extravagant interior: “a blacke smoth bever lyned with velvet with a duble Sypres.” The most expensive cost forty-six shillings, and sat grandly on the wearer, because it was black, smooth, and “lynd with tafyta and quylted in the head and a three pleat Sypres band therto.”
When beaver hats wore out, or fashions changed, they could be repaired, re-dyed, and lined with new material. The cost varied from as little as one shilling (“for mendinge an old bever”) to as much as sixteen, for a hat dyed and lined with taffeta and velvet. Because it could be reconditioned, and its shape or trimmings modified, the beaver hat became a flexible marker of status. Among the invoices, the cheaper alterations applied to the hats worn by Bacon’s young friend, while the more expensive were Bacon’s own. In an age obsessed with rank and degree, the beaver hat’s adaptability gave it a special appeal. Soon hatmakers found a host of ways to give each hat a character of its own, with gold and silver wire and silk in many different shades. A dull old hat with obsolete trimmings would tarnish its owner’s status, while a new beaver hat would elevate it. The same prestige applied to the men who sold the hats, and the Arnolds were far more than mere artisans.
Beaver hat makers were prosperous people, and the Arnolds lived for four decades in the wealthiest wards of the City, west of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where they ranked among the highest taxpayers, near neighbors of Shakespeare. The Arnolds stood at the very top of the hierarchy of the Company of Haberdashers, the body to which by tradition hatmakers belonged. With as many as 1,500 members, in a city with a population of no more than 200,000, the Haberdashers came second only to the Merchant Taylors as the largest and most powerful of London’s livery companies. In the 1590s, Richard Arnold served twice as warden of the company, and he belonged to the committee that ran its affairs.
They were aristocrats of commerce, the Arnolds, and they embodied links between exploration, luxury, and the Protestant faith. When the king granted a patent to the Newfoundland Company, among its thirty founding members were four haberdashers and eight merchant taylors. At his death in 1618, the chapelier Samuel Arnold left five pounds to “my loving ffrend Mr. Samuell Purchas, Minnister of the parish at St. Martens at Ludgate.” A cleric of many talents, Purchas made his name as a zealous anti-Catholic pamphleteer, but also as the editor of Purchas His Pilgrimes, a sprawling compendium of seamen’s and travelers’ tales from all parts of the world. First published in 1617, it was read by the Pilgrims. It contained a sea captain’s description of the neighborhood of New Plymouth, written only a year before the Mayflower’s voyage.6
Later historians have often portrayed Puritan merchants as troubled souls, afflicted by an inner conflict between religion and the stress of commerce. This does not seem to have worried men such as the Arnolds. As senior haberdashers, they supported Puritan clergymen, such as John Downam, a divine who acted as the company’s spiritual adviser and wrote books that William Brewster collected: in America, Brewster owned seven copies of Downam’s sermons and manuals of prayer. At the same time, they sold beaver hats with no sign of unease. Godly the haberdashers might be, but they saw nothing wrong in making a profit from the lure of the exclusive.
Versatile, sensuous, durable, but chic, visibly expensive but open to subtle reinvention, the beaver hat became a Jacobean version of the tweed suits designed by Miss Chanel. Worn by women as well as men—a portrait of Anne of Denmark, King James’s queen, shows her wearing a splendid plumed example—it retained the status of a fashion classic for nearly two centuries. It did so because new aspirations found an outlet by way of the special qualities of the fur. Half the history of England in this period can be found written on the surface of felt hats.
THE WOOL OF THE BEAVER
I said that beaver hats were first heard of in Paris in the 1570s, but this is not strictly true. People wore them in the Middle Ages—King Henry III had “a beaver hat of the greatest beauty” in 1261—but they suffered a long eclipse after about 1450, when hunters all but wiped out the animal in Europe and western Russia. When they arrived in London in the reign of Elizabeth, beaver hats swiftly revived a passion for sleek and gleaming felt, and that was the core of their appeal: the gloss and texture of a material long affiliated with monarchy and wealth.
For many centuries, felt signified power and prestige, like the tall felt hat that the Greek writer Xenophon saw on the head of the king of Persia. When the three wise men visited Jesus, they might have kept warm with something of the kind, because another Greek speaks of the felt turbans worn by Persian priests, or magi. These associations between felt, monarchy, and spiritual power had their origin in the very nature of the stuff. The best felt required not only the finest wool but also a long, exhausting process of preparation. The hairs had to be sorted and sifted, kneaded and molded into a mat, and then bound together by rolling to form a dense, smooth surface. Owing to the effort and expense involved, felt making stood far above weaving in the hierarchy of textile manufacture.7
Because of the life the animal leads, beaver fur has a special aptitude for the purpose. “Water is his natural element, and he cannot trust himself far from it with personal safety,” wrote the American naturalist Lewis H. Morgan, in a superb account of the beavers he met in the 1860s, when he was a director of a railroad company. Beavers spend nearly five hours each day swimming and foraging for food, and in Canada they sometimes remain beneath the icebound surface of their ponds for nearly half the year. So the beaver must keep warm and waterproof. Their tails must be big, to serve as a rudder or to thrash the pond water as a distress signal, but this requires a large surface area, prone to heat loss
. Hence within the beaver’s tail are thick layers of fat and networks of blood vessels that circulate warm blood and retain heat at the animal’s core. The fur plays an essential part too, by way of insulation and protection.8
It comes in two forms. Shielding the beaver from injuries are the outer guard hairs, two inches or more in length. Too coarse to be used for felt, the guard hairs were discarded by hatmakers. Beneath them lies the inner fur, or beaver wool, like the soft down on the breast of a duck. This was the secret of the beaver hat. An average square inch of the wool contains nearly three thousand hairs, making beaver fur much finer and denser than a rabbit’s. When the poet Ben Jonson wished to describe a woman’s beauty, he likened it to newly fallen snow, swan’s down, or “the wool of the beaver,” and this was wonderfully apt. The fineness of the beaver wool gave its felt a smooth, silken quality that invited a stroking hand.9
Within its anus, the beaver has a gland that produces a creamy, viscous substance, a grease that lubricates the fur, making it waterproof. This too makes the end product ideal for wearing on the head. It also lacks the scaly layer of protein, which covers rabbit hairs like a sheath. Felt made with rabbit fur was coarse, and hatters preferred not to use it, until in the eighteenth century they discovered that a solution of mercury and nitric acid would remove the scales. Before that, beaver fur reigned supreme. It gave by far the best felt, resilient but pliable, fit to make a wide variety of shapes, to form the curves, crowns, and brims of hats of many different kinds. Its only rival was Peruvian vicuña, prized by the Incas and their Spanish conquerors.10
