Making Haste from Babylon

by Nick Bunker

  Beaver hat making had a language of its own to express the sequence of thirty expert steps needed to produce the finished item. Because the hatters of France were the masters of the trade, the principal source for our knowledge of the craft is an article in the Encyclopédie published by the French philosopher Diderot in 1753. Although some innovations may have intervened, between the time of Bradford and the age of Louis XV the process seems to have remained broadly the same. Indeed only with the help of Diderot’s description can we understand what William Bradford says about the skins that he shipped home.11

  Diderot’s article makes a distinction between castor gras and castor sec. The castor gras appears under the name of “coat beaver” in Bradford’s history. It refers to a beaver pelt that has been scraped, greased, and worn inside out like a coat by a Native American hunter, such as those who lived by the Kennebec. Rubbed and abraded and smeared with sweat, the guard hairs fall away. The hunter’s perspiration gives the beaver wool beneath something that Diderot called “a particular quality … best for hat making.” The castor sec, or “parchment beaver,” is a pelt that has remained unworn and been left to dry in the sun. Coat beaver was the more valuable commodity, fetching, according to Bradford, some twenty shillings per pound, compared with about fifteen for an unworn pelt. When mixed with castor sec in a ratio of one to four, the coat beaver gave the fur the body and firmness needed for strong, glossy felt.

  To remove what remained of the guard hairs, and leave just the beaver wool—the poil fin—required first the use of a knife three feet long, wielded by a man. Then a woman took a shorter knife and carefully finished the job. Pinning the outstretched pelt to an easel, she separated the poil fin from the beaver’s skin. She cut as near to the root as possible, taking the utmost care not to pick up tiny fragments of skin—chiquettes—which might cause imperfections on the surface of the felt. She divided the wool into three grades, depending on the part of the pelt from which it came.

  On the beaver’s abdomen grew pale fur known as fin blanc, best for gray hats. On the animal’s back was the dark beau noir most suitable to make a jet-black model. Between them, on the flanks of the beaver, hatters found the finest, longest wool, known as l’Anglois. It was so long that it could be mixed half and half with silk and knit into clinging, sheer, luxurious stockings to suit the finest legs. Or, if kept by the hatter, l’Anglois made the grandest beaver hats, called chapeaux à plumet. They had a slightly raised pile like brushed velvet. And at this point in the process, any necessary blending could be done, by adding vicuña or fine wool from Spanish merino sheep, to make the raw material for a species of felt hats known as demi-castors. These appeared on the market early in the seventeenth century as a cheaper substitute for the best beaver variety.

  When the various grades of fur had been sorted, there followed the most delicate maneuver of all. They used an instrument called an arçon, shaped like the bow of a violin, to sift the cut beaver wool into a mass of clean, fine hair free from dirt or tangles. The craftsman vibrated the string of the bow through the poil fin above a panel made of willow to form dense pudding-shaped piles of hair called capades, each an inch thick. A raw beaver skin of about 1.7 pounds yielded half a pound of usable poil fin. At least one pound was needed to make the four capades required for a single hat.

  Next, the hatter inserted the capades into a conical canvas mold, called a feutrière, or “felter,” resembling a lamp shade. Then, against the sides of the felter, with his thumbs and fingers he kneaded the wool until it formed a firm sheet of an even consistency. He soaked each sheet in a mixture of wine lees and water. He rolled it flat on his workbench, carefully checked it for points of weakness, and repeated the process. Next he used a wooden mold to shape the felt into a hat. He began with the crown, formed over a pointed or curved wooden block. Then he bent and stretched the sides and brim. At last the hat was recognizable. It was sanded, brushed, trimmed with scissors, dyed and sealed with glue and gum, left to stand in a steam bath, and then dried again in a stove. Passing next to the milliner, the beaver hat was ready to be adorned with the linings, hatbands, and plumes described in the Bacon Papers.

  BUCKINGHAM, THE BEAVER, AND PRINCE CHARLES

  If men and women wanted beaver hats, they did so only because they wanted many other luxury goods as well. In Anthony Bacon’s bills, the beaver hat dressed itself in silk, in a counterpoint of elegance of complementary kinds, the shades and textures of the fabric and the felt enhancing each other’s expensive appeal. Like London’s thirst for wine that kept Christopher Jones in business, the English gentry’s greed for silk served as a sort of stock market index. It connoted affluence, and imports of silk soared during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successor. By 1600 London was said to have three hundred silk weavers, ten times more than in the 1550s, and by 1627 an expert on English trade saw this as one of the kingdom’s most essential industries. “I will here remember a notable increase in our manufacture of winding and twisting only of forraign raw silk … in the City and suburbs of London,” wrote Thomas Mun, a director of the East India Company, its principal importer. “At this present time it doth set upon work above fourteen thousand souls.”12

  Only a minority could afford silk, of course. Nevertheless, the landowning classes were becoming wealthier, and so were London’s small but dynamic class of large overseas traders, not to mention lawyers enriched by a boom in litigation. Prosperity of this kind became available to allow the purchase of luxuries, among which the beaver hat was one of the most prominent. The most visible sign of the new enthusiasm for consumption was the first designer shopping mall, in the shape of London’s New Exchange. It was opened in 1609 by the king himself. Located in the Strand, appropriately close to the site of the modern Savoy hotel, the New Exchange offered everything the Jacobean consumer could desire: two arcaded floors of retail outlets, with milliners and haberdashers on the upper story. In 1622, the Council for New England decided it needed new office space, and so it chose the New Exchange: where else?

  Luxury goods were far more than frivolities. Before the invention of steam power, at a time when agriculture dwarfed every other activity, if the state wished to make the economy grow more rapidly, it had very few means at its disposal. The productivity of farmers grew painfully slowly as they fought a yearly battle against the weather, weeds, and pests. When handicrafts like beaver hats were perfected, they at least helped to circulate wealth, and they created some well-paid jobs for those who made them.

  Unlike those who worked on the land, skilled men and women in the luxury trades did not waste the winter months in idleness. They also helped improve the balance of payments, a subject that worried statesmen endlessly. If a brisk retail trade promoted manufacturing, and generated exports that earned bullion from abroad, then so much the better. But of course this required the input first of raw materials, carried home by sea. The goal was to create a trading nation that shipped back from its colonies goods such as raw silk and raw sugar, fish oil, walrus oil, fur, and potash, and sent them out again as finished products: taffeta, marmalade, satin, soap, hats, and gunpowder.

  Hence luxury goods were a tool of policy, and the yearning for them led to North America. Hating tobacco as he did, King James hoped that silk would replace it as the staple product of Virginia. Worms wriggled their way to the New World in their thousands, sailing alongside human emigrants, to take part in silk-farming trials beside the Chesapeake. As for the beaver hat, nobody did more than the king’s son Prince Charles to stimulate demand, and so, perhaps ironically, the royal family played its part too in securing the future of Puritan New England. During the years when the Pilgrims first planned the Mayflower project, and then began to execute it, the beaver hat reached its apotheosis of glamour. It did so in the apparel of the prince.

  Wasteful expense was a hallmark of the reign of King James. Royal fecklessness reached its most extreme point in 1617, thanks to the royal visit to Scotland, and the Crown’s deficit came to nearly £140,
000 for the year. This was a huge sum. The numbers become still more scandalous when we remember that England was at peace, and when we see how much Prince Charles spent on clothes, wall hangings, and accessories for his household. In the space of fifteen months, he lavished no less than eleven thousand pounds on his wardrobe: for one thousand pounds less, the East India Company could build two ships fit to sail to Java, each one six times larger than the Mayflower.

  Five volumes of the wardrobe accounts of Prince Charles survive, in manuscript form in the National Archives in London. Beautifully written, immensely detailed, but never published, they depict in all their splendor the garments that the prince wore. We read of his tennis suit, delivered in 1618, made from nine and a half yards of green and light blue satin, striped with silver. Lined with taffeta, the suit was stitched with seventy-two silver buttons and trimmed with seven yards of ribbon and a yard of lace. In all, it cost eighteen pounds and nine shillings to kit out the prince for a game, excluding the racket.

  Alongside the tennis suit, we find four pairs of yellow silk tights, for which he paid a total of six pounds. His robes for attending Parliament had to be perfumed, and this cost ten pounds and eight shillings. Of course, he needed to redecorate at St. James’s Palace, and for this tapestries were an ornamental necessity. To make his twenty-one new wall hangings required 2,384 skilled man-days, and for this the bill came to £159. Close by, in the same accounts, we find listed the beaver hats bought by Prince Charles, and the prices paid: sixty-four beaver hats in 1618, fifty-seven in 1619, forty-six in 1623, and forty-three in 1624. They cost about fifty shillings each, before allowing for the hatbands and the plumes, which added perhaps another thirty-five. At the time, eighty-five shillings was the same price as the most expensive horse sold at a country fair, or eleven weeks’ wages for each of the men who wove the hangings.

  These beaver hats bore little resemblance to the tall, pointed specimens seen in imaginary Victorian paintings of the Pilgrims. French sources, and portraits of Charles I, suggest that by the mid-1620s the up-to-the-minute beaver hat was a model called a mousquetaire. It had a low, rounded crown and a very wide brim, sometimes sweeping up or down in an elegant curve, and it was adorned with a gold or silver hatband and ostrich feathers. The hats changed their color from year to year, matching the shades of the prince’s suits of clothes. From this we can see how the court of King James and his son acted as the arbiters of taste, setting fashions that diffused through the remainder of genteel society.

  The beaver hats purchased in 1617 were mostly black, with one white beaver model lined with taffeta. To go with them, the prince’s staff ordered brightly colored hatbands, in crimson and gold, rose pink, nutmeg, and silver. Red seems to have been the color of the season, because the prince also purchased a suit of crimson satin. To adorn a favorite hat, he bought a rich plume for his personal use, for seven pounds. In 1618, the colors changed to green. The grandest hat that year was “a grassegreene Beaver lyned with taffeta,” doubtless for the prince himself, and it cost seventy shillings. Green remained in vogue in 1619. The accounts include bills for four white beaver hats for pages, each with a green and gold hatband. That same year the prince’s pack of beagles wore green collars and strained at green leashes as they trotted to the hunting field.

  Four years later, the beaver hat reached its moment of ultimate splendor. It did so in circumstances that show how it became an international style, transmitted between the royal courts of baroque Europe. In 1623, Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham paid an ill-fated visit to the king of Spain, so that the prince could woo the king’s sister, the infanta. Their wardrobe expenses alone came to more than £9,344, because they had to clothe eight footmen, three grooms, and twenty-six gentlemen-in-waiting.13

  To grace some outdoor gathering in Madrid, they ordered a great tent, a pavilion made of silk and velvet. Beneath it the prince sat in a velvet-upholstered chair embroidered with gold and silver. The tent was tawny in color, and so too were the costumes of his retinue. From a London haberdasher, Prince Charles bought twenty-six silk-lined black beaver hats for his gentlemen-in-waiting. They had twenty-six hatbands embroidered with silver and twenty-six “faire plumes of tawny and white.” To match their plumed hats, they wore suits and cloaks of tawny velvet trimmed with silver lace, silk stockings, and twenty-six pairs of tawny garters.

  By the 1620s, the beaver hat had become an item as essential to the dignity of rank as a crown and scepter were to medieval monarchs. For that same reason, it became an emblem of status for members of the peerage and the landed gentry too, and so we can roughly quantify the demand for pelts. By this time, after the death of Anne of Denmark, there were in effect three royal households—the king’s, the prince’s, and Buckingham’s—and let us assume that each one needed fifty hats each year. Perhaps the hundred-odd peers of the realm bought half as many, say twenty-five each. Say, too, that the twenty thousand or so families of the landed gentry each ordered just one.

  We come to a minimum requirement of nearly twenty-three thousand beaver hats each year. These figures are guesses, but they serve their purpose, conveying the order of magnitude of the trade. At the very least, the English needed each year about the same number of beaver skins, even if they blended the felt with Spanish wool or vicuña. Where was the fur to be found? There were only two possibilities, and one lay at the far end of an especially perilous sea voyage.

  CONVOYS TO RUSSIA

  On October 20, 1621, boatmen on the Thames saw moored in the river five ships that had recently returned from the distant north. They came from the White Sea port of Archangel, six weeks away from London, and their journey there and back took them around the North Cape of Norway. The voyage to Arctic Russia was shorter by five hundred miles than the passage to America, but extreme cold, fog, the currents around the North Cape, and the danger of pack ice rendered it far more dangerous. It was undertaken for the sake of access to products that only Russia could supply.

  On board, the five vessels carried the skins of hundreds of seals, ermines, and squirrels and that of a single wolverine. Most precious of all, on board a ship called the Encrease, were two thousand sable skins, imported by a man named Ralph Freeman. They made sable muffs, prized accessories since Queen Elizabeth ordered one of the first from Paris. For London’s hatters, Freeman brought home nearly four thousand beaver wombs, the segment of fur from the animal’s abdomen.14

  Freeman was the uncrowned king of the fur trade. More than half the pelts that came into the Thames that autumn were his. He served his turn as lord mayor, he belonged to the board of the East India Company, and he invested in Virginia and Newfoundland. At his death Freeman left legacies equivalent to about eleven thousand acres of farmland. His supremacy in fur came about because, in 1620, he led a consortium that bought the exclusive rights to send ships back and forth from London to Archangel, rights that belonged to the Muscovy Company. With this deal, Freeman acquired complete control of English trade with Russia, and he kept it for the next decade, giving his rivals a new incentive to look westward across the Atlantic.15

  From the moment that beaver hats became fashionable again, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a choice existed with regard to the source of pelts, and the principal countries concerned took different routes. The French went west. They obtained their skins from North America with a chain of supply that led from the St. Lawrence to the Louvre, by way of a royal hatmaker, based in the Rue de la Lingerie in the heart of Paris. In London, the haberdashers chose to take their skins from the east, from Archangel, but by the early 1620s this was becoming a less and less attractive option. A new source was necessary, even before Freeman made it essential to find an alternative.

  Archangel was never an ideal trading partner. Ice closed the White Sea for eight months of the year, and so ships bound out from London would sail in convoy, between April and June, aiming to reach the port in time for its summer trade fair. They had to hurry back, or risk being trapped when the se
a froze, and it was all too easy to stray out into the North Atlantic, or founder along the hazardous eastern coast of the British Isles. By 1620, the Archangel fair had become one of the busiest in Europe, with forty-odd ships arriving each year, both English and Dutch, but they did business there only because Russia had lost its more obvious outlets to the west. In 1581, the Swedes captured the Russian port of Narva, on the Baltic about 150 miles west of St. Petersburg, and it was because of this that Ivan the Terrible first established a haven on the White Sea.16

  For the English, the Archangel connection rapidly became a strategic necessity, even though their relationship with the Romanovs was far from untroubled. For their masts, pitch, rosin, and rope, England’s navy depended almost entirely on the link. So did the East India Company, for the ships it launched from its slipways into the Thames. In an average year in the reign of James I, the Royal Navy bought four hundred tons of cordage, and the best was made from Russian hemp. Grown by peasants in the hinterland of Smolensk, it was spun into yarn in fishing villages in winter and then carried fifteen hundred miles by sledge to Archangel to be sold. A single warship needed fourteen barrels of tar and two tons of rosin each year to seal and grease its timbers. This too had to come from Russian forests, and as England’s merchant fleet expanded, its needs multiplied also.

  This was why both Elizabeth and James I tried to maintain friendly relations with the tsars. The connection was simply too important to lose, not only for the sake of the Royal Navy, but also for the access that Archangel gave to the overland silk and spice route to Persia, by way of the Caspian Sea.17 Sadly, the Kremlin did not make a safe, reliable ally, because of Russia’s internal instability, and because of its frequent wars with the Swedes and the Poles. In 1617, the Swedes forced the Russians to hand over the entire coastline from Latvia to Finland. The following year, the Poles attacked Moscow and carved a vast slice out of the western territories of the tsar. In order to fight the Poles, in 1618 the beleaguered tsar asked James I for a loan of £100,000. Since James was even more insolvent than usual, he asked the City of London’s merchants to raise the money. This they did, but it was a heavy burden and repayment was by no means guaranteed.