Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  Tempted by the promise of riches, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French colonists are claiming vast territories in the New World. The wealth of the Americas feeds the royal treasuries of Europe. It also offers unprecedented opportunities to anyone with the courage, imagination, and wherewithal to cross the ocean and settle in an untamed wilderness. With talent and luck, a man can own land, escape the feudal hierarchies of Europe, and create wealth. Russia, too, has begun to expand, across Siberia, through north Asia, and ultimately, drawn by its abundance of natural resources, into the New World.

  By the early seventeenth century, fur-bearing mammals in western Europe had become endangered species. The search for new sources of luxury furs drove European expansion into the wildernesses of Siberia and North America.

  ATTACK OF THE SIBERIAN TUNGUS

  SIBERIA. 1638. SEMYON DEZHNEV LEADS A SMALL party through the dense pine trees of the Siberian wilderness. Snow crunches under their feet and swirls through the air. It has been a successful trip. Now they are on their way back to the outpost at Yakutsk, carrying the “sable treasury” of furs taken in tribute from the native peoples of the Yana valley region. It’s a good haul: 340 prized sable pelts and two of the even more prized black fox skins.

  An illiterate Russian peasant, Dezhnev left his family behind to hunt for fur—both for himself and on behalf of the tsar. His primary target is an elusive animal called the sable. This valuable creature is small and weasel-like with luxurious, dark-brown fur. It’s the fur of choice for Russian aristocrats and monarchs. Dezhnev is carrying hundreds of pelts belonging to the tsar. Just three sable pelts could buy him fifty acres of land with a good cabin, five horses, ten head of cattle, and twenty sheep. Six would allow him to live in comfort for the rest of his life.

  Dezhnev and his three companions are focused totally on the hunt, but they are not alone. This portion of Siberia is the home of the Tungus, a seminomadic tribe. They are dressed entirely in deerskin, from warm boots to close-fitting caps made from the head skin of reindeer, with the animal’s ears still in place. Their coats are decorated with goat fur and glass beads. Their leggings and boots are embroidered with reindeer hair. The Tungus hunt with razor-sharp arrows and spears made from animal bone.

  The Tungus move quietly through the forest, stalking Dezhnev’s hunting party. They have the numeric advantage: more than forty Tungus hunters against Dezhnev’s small band.

  Suddenly, they attack with a volley of arrows. Dezhnev and his comrades raise their muskets and fire. A few Tungus fall, but the rest continue to shoot arrows at the Russians, able to aim and fire several bone-tipped arrows in the time it takes to reload a musket. Dezhnev is hit in the knee by an arrow. He drags himself behind a rock, reloads, and fires again. More Tungus fall—a few are dead and even more are wounded. The rest flee.

  And so ends another day in the wilds.

  RUSSIA COLONIZED SIBERIA for one reason: sable, the finest fur in the world.

  The influx of gold and silver from the New World and the increase of trade with Asia created a period of prosperity in Europe. More people could indulge in luxuries: pepper, tea, tulips—and fur. Fur became a matter of fashion rather than survival. Once possessed only by aristocrats and the very wealthy, now furs were in the reach of wealthy merchants and even the new and growing middle classes. For a century and a half, the wealthy, aristocratic, and powerful wore fur-lined coats, fur collars, fur capes, fur muffs, and most important of all, beaver hats. No gentleman would appear in public without one. The style of his hat indicated his social status.

  The quest for fur linked the planet in new ways, leading Europeans to explore regions known previously only to their nomadic inhabitants. As fur became increasingly rare in Western Europe and Russia, the hunt for “soft gold” led Europeans to explore and conquer the Siberian tundra and the virgin forests of America, taking the first steps toward creating what would become two world superpowers: the United States and Russia.

  Siberia’s greatest resource was its abundant furs, especially the valuable sable pelts. The best quality sable pelts were not ripped and kept tails, bellies, and paws intact. Here, Canadian furs are shown fully intact.

  Sable not only drove Russians to conquer Siberia, it paid the cost of conquest. Like their counterparts in the forests of North America, Russian fur trappers were drawn to the Siberian frontier by a spirit of adventure as well as the prospect of personal gain. Cossacks in the service of the Russian tsar searched for new lands and collected tribute in the form of furs from the native peoples of Siberia. Traders, trappers, and hunters arrived in Siberia, drawn by a “fur fever” comparable to the 1849 California gold rush. By the very nature of their work, they became explorers and conquerors. Some worked on their own. Others were employed by the state or by wealthy merchant agents. The line between the two groups was blurry. Many Cossacks amassed fortunes trading and trapping for themselves, often illegally. Traders and hunters frequently worked for the state at the request of local commanders. Independent fur traders and state employees were equally eager to trap sable. Sables with their feet still intact and untorn across the midsection sold for ten to twenty rubles; black fox pelts were worth one hundred to three hundred rubles. A single hunting season could make a poor man rich.

  Russians did not find an empty wilderness when they first arrived in Siberia in the 1580s. Nomadic reindeer-herding peoples—the Tungus (known today as the Evens), the Yakuts, the Chukchi, and others—lived in the coniferous forests of the Siberia tiagra. Seminomadic fishing peoples lived along the rivers and the Pacific shore. Relatives of those who first crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas during the Ice Age, they lived by hunting elk, deer, mountain sheep, and wild reindeer, and fishing in the many Siberian rivers in the summers. Their herds of reindeer were too valuable to slaughter for hides and meat; instead the Tungus and other tribes trained them as saddle and pack animals for long-distance hunting.

  Conflict was inevitable. Russians traders were in Siberia to exploit the fur wealth of the hunting and grazing lands of the nomadic tribes. Where Russians saw fur-bearing animals only as a commodity, Siberian nomads combined the necessity of hunting with reverence for the animals they hunted. As Russians exhausted a hunting ground, fur hunters like Dezhnev pushed into new territories, traveling down the rivers in flat-bottomed boats and overland in sledges and horse-drawn carts. It was ultimately easier for Russians, armed with guns, to impose their rule on the indigenous population and force them to pay tribute in furs. With no central political organization and armed only with arrows and spears, the Siberian tribes were no match for Russian Cossacks with guns. Within eighty years, Russians had gained control of Siberia, a region twenty times larger than the state of Texas. Like the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Peru, Siberia was less a place for settlers than a source of material wealth.

  THE LITTLE ICE AGE

  The Russian and North American fur trades were aided by the fact that between 1500 and 1850 CE, the earth got colder—so cold that glaciers overtook communities in the Alps, and Manhattan Harbor froze over in winter.

  We don’t know for sure what caused what’s known as the Little Ice Age. It has been attributed to changes in the earth’s orbital cycles, weakened activity on the sun, and an increase in carbon dioxide due to the return of farmland to forest after the Black Death. Recently, an international team of scientists suggested that the Little Ice Age was the result of a chain of events kicked off by four massive eruptions of tropical volcanoes over a fifty-year period around 1300 CE. The volcanoes sent up enough particles into the atmosphere to blot out sunlight and make summers cooler. According to computer simulations, these years of volcano-cooled summers caused sea ice to expand and send huge glaciers down the relatively temperate Greenland coast. When the sea ice reached the North Atlantic, it melted, disrupting ocean currents. Cooler water made its way back to the Arctic, creating a self-sustaining climate feedback system and proving once again how fragile the earth’s climate is. It also p
rovided a stage on which humans could test their ability to adapt, survive, and in some cases, thrive.

  FUR

  Reptiles have protective scales. Birds have feathers. Most mammals have fur. We humans, on the other hand, are virtually naked from the day we’re born until the day we die. Even the hairiest human is bare compared to other mammals. It’s not surprising that for thousands of years people in northern climates relied on animal fur to keep them warm.

  With up to a million hairs per square inch, fur is the world’s best natural insulator: twice as effective as wool and twelve times more effective than human skin. It also resists wind and repels water.

  Most fur is made up of two very different layers of hair. The outer coat is made up of long, straight guard hairs. Underneath the guard hairs, most mammals have a dense layer of soft, fine underfur. There are a dozen underfur hairs for every guard hair. The underfur traps air in pockets that help insulate the animal’s body against both heat and cold.

  The Russians’ conquest of Siberia was a world-changing event that almost no one noticed. With the final capture of the “sleeping land,” Russia quadrupled in size. The fur trade paid for Peter the Great’s transformation of Russia from a backwoods state with one foot in Asia to a great European power. Fur bought arms from Europe for the emperor’s Western-style army, funded his wars against Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, and built his new capital of St. Petersburg.

  As for Semyon Dezhnev, he earned a place in history as more than just another Russian fur trapper. Dezhnev seems to have shared the restlessness that drove many others to leave their homes in search of adventure and fortune in the seventeenth century. He pressed farther and farther east during his years in Siberia. In 1648, he led an expedition that sailed around the eastern tip of Asia from the point where the Kolymar River empties into the Arctic Ocean all the way to the Pacific, sailing through the Bering Strait eighty years before Russian explorer Vitus Bering made the same voyage and gave the strait its name.

  HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD from Siberia, western Europeans hunted and traded for furs in the woods of northeastern America. Where the fur trade in Russia was largely driven by the desire for luxury furs, the North American fur trade was based on the insatiable demands of the felting and hat-making industries and the fashion for beaver hats. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the fur trade was the biggest business in North America.

  English fishermen traded for furs in Newfoundland as a sideline to cod fishing on the Great Banks from the time of John Cabot at the end of the fifteenth century. For more than a decade after landing in 1620, the Pilgrims depended on beaver pelts for the income to buy supplies and pay off their debt to the joint stock company that paid for their passage. The first Dutch settlements were fur trading posts, established by the New Netherlands Company at New Amsterdam (modern Manhattan) and Fort Nassau, near modern Albany, in 1614. But it was the French who dominated the early years of the fur trade in North America.

  THE BIRCH BARK

  CANOE

  The wilderness of the Great Lakes region was home to many waterways. It was also the perfect habitat for white birch, white cedar, and spruce trees. The Native Americans of the region combined all three to create the ingenious vehicle that became the semi-tractor and trailer of the fur trade: the birch bark canoe.

  Canoe makers created a frame of white cedar branches and covered it with the outer bark of the birch tree, lashed together with spruce roots. They caulked the seams between the panels of bark with spruce resin to make them watertight. The result was a tough, lightweight watercraft that could carry three thousand to six thousand pounds of men and gear.

  French fur traders knew a good thing when they saw one. They quickly copied Native American construction techniques, making canoes up to thirty-six feet long.

  Ojibwa Indians making birch bark canoe.

  The French first traded for furs on the St. Lawrence River in the 1530s. The river and its hinterlands became the heart of a fur-trading empire. Unlike the British colonies on the Atlantic coast, the vast French territories of New France (modern Canada) and the Louisiana Territory were thinly settled. No more than three thousand settlers lived there by the middle of the seventeenth century. (The British colonies had a combined population of seventy thousand at the same time.) Most French colonists were hunters, trappers, or missionaries.

  “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,” detail of oil on canvas by George Caleb Bingham, 1845

  The French traders known as “wood runners” (couriers de bois) were the lifeblood of the North American fur trade. Most of the wood runners were born in New France. They spent their summers clearing and farming small homesteads along the St. Lawrence. In the fall, they traveled inland and spent the winter trapping and trading. When the ice on the rivers broke in the spring, they took their furs to Quebec to sell. Born in the colonies, often illiterate, and generally of low social rank, they had three counts against them with the French colonial officials who administered the fur trade from Montreal. Unable to get official trading licenses, they ignored the rules and sought their fortune in the forests. Their unlicensed, illegal trade flourished because no one else had the wilderness or Indian language skills to succeed at supplying furs.

  As in Siberia, the trader drove trappers into new territories. From the beginning, French governors of New France supported exploration. The first expeditioners traveled through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi River. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, French expeditions were traveling west from Lake Superior, hoping to find a river route to the Pacific.

  The fur trade continued to drive North American exploration and expansion long after the British seized Canada from the French in 1763. The North American hunters who pushed west in search of beaver pelts and buffalo robes were precursors to Lewis and Clark, exploring the plains drained by the Missouri, Yellowstone, and Platte Rivers and the passes through the Rocky Mountains. Russian hunters crossed the Bering Strait in search of sea otter and seal pelts, founding trading bases in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and as far south along the Pacific coast as the Gulf of California. By 1800, fur traders had spread from east and west to embrace all of North America north of the Rio Grande, opening the continent for further expansion of a new nation.

  Over time, agricultural settlement and mining displaced the fur trade in the West. By 1890, it was in decline, thanks to a combination of increased settlement and the virtual extermination of the fur-bearing animal population, particularly beaver and buffalo.

  The fur trade destroyed more than animal populations. In the United States and Canada, Europeans expanding westward pushed Native America peoples off their lands and into reservations. A similar process occurred when Russians introduced mining, logging, and prisons into Siberia, taking over land that the nomadic tribes used for hunting and grazing. In the 1930s, the Soviets moved the remaining nomadic clans and their reindeer herds into sedentary communities on collectivized farms. After thousands of years, the life of nomadic hunter-gatherers had come to an end.

  IN 1602, A HUNDRED YEARS after the Spanish first settled in the New World, Bartholomew Gosnold, a sea captain from Suffolk, England, began exploring New England. His ship, the Concord, carried eight sailors and twenty-four passengers, twelve of whom intended to establish a trading post and stay. Gosnold and his crew sailed down the rocky coast of what is now Maine and fished in a cape they named Cape Cod because they caught so many of the fish that they didn’t have room to keep them. Ultimately, they decided they did not have enough supplies to last the winter at a new settlement. They had hoped for gold; instead they sailed back to England with a profitable cargo of sassafras bark.

  Gosnold returned to America in 1606 as the second in command on one of the ships bringing settlers to Jamestown, Virginia. They hoped to find treasure in North America that would equal that in the Spanish colonies of New Spain and Peru. Instead they found a continent bursting with natural resources: virgin timber, rich furs, plentiful game, lush sc
hools of cod, and an astonishing diversity of plant life.

  Thousands of Europeans followed the Jamestown settlers over the course of the next hundred years: fortune hunters, religious refugees, indentured servants, and convicts. They cleared land, built houses, founded towns, created industries.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, England’s North American colonies were booming. With a population of two million, the colonies were bursting at the seams. Settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia began moving west across the Appalachians into territory claimed by the French and their Indian allies: rich lands along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and northward along the St. Lawrence River into Canada. To block British expansion, the French built a series of forts along the frontier, triggering a war that spiraled out of North America and into Europe.

  When the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the British were the dominant power in North America.

  THE FUR TRADE TODAY

  Today’s fur trade is controversial, though it is still a large and profitable international business. Supporters argue that the fur business is “green”: producing natural products that are more effective and sustainable than their petroleum-based substitutes. Animal rights activists argue that wearing fur is cruel, and stage high-profile, often controversial campaigns against those who wear it.

  Many furs are expensive luxury goods: a sable coat retails for $150,000 and is just as much a status symbol today as it was in seventeenth-century Russia. In the extreme cold of the far north, however, fur is still seen as a practical item—the best way to protect against the bitter weather. Parkas are often trimmed with wolverine fur because it protects the face from the wind and doesn’t become encrusted with ice as water condenses from the breath of the person wearing it.