Historical masterpiece, revised
Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: Voices of the Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (revised edition)
by James R. Gibson
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024
$47.95 / 9780228007319
Reviewed by Kenneth Favrholdt
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This important book spans five decades and a global geography. In its ten chapters, historical geographer and professor emeritus at York University, James R. Gibson weaves together the complex economic and transportation history of the maritime fur trade along the northwest coast of North America in a remarkable study.
From the Pacific Coast to the Hawai’ian Islands, to Canton in South China, and across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean to Boston in New England, Gibson writes this history in great detail with unexcelled dexterity. In his 2024 preface, he summarizes:
From the mid-1780s – when Russian galiots penetrated the Gulf of Alaska and British snows reached Nootka Sound – until the 1840s the fur trade was the dominant economic activity on the Northwest Coast…. approximately glacier-ringed Icy Bay to redwood-studded Cape Mendocino. For more than half century the so-called Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian (Ts’msyen), Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth), Salish, and Chinook (lower Chinook, Clatsop, Willapa, Wahkiakum, and Kathlamet) natives in particular spent much of their time hunting fur-bearers and trading their pelts (especially the “black skins” of sea otters) to Russian, British, and – mostly—American shipmasters for a changing variety of goods, including metals, firearms, textiles, and foodstuffs.
This revised edition is an update to the first published in 1992, adding new information (and almost 90 pages) to the historiography of the Northwest Coast fur trade, largely through the 1998 publication of Mary Malloy’s “Boston Men” on the Northwest Coast, the American Maritime Fur trade 1788-1844.
Gibson’s book is surely the most complete digest of the sea otter trade but by his own admission lacks the voices of native Americans and Chinese who comprise a major part of this history. In 1992 Gibson stated, “It remains for someone else to tap Indian [sic] oral histories and Chinese written records for additional perspectives on the maritime fur trade of the Northwest Coast.”
Still, Gibson provides the necessary background of the Indigenous presence: “The Northwest Coast was one of the most distinctive aboriginal territories of the continent.” Gibson describes the pre-contact Native trade when hunting took place with harpoon and bow and arrow. Firearms were first introduced among the Haidas in the 1790s. The sea otter skins were brought by canoes to the merchant ships.
Sea otters (Enhydra lutris) were the mainstay of the maritime fur trade. They were the largest member of the weasel family but the smallest marine mammal. The Russians encountered the sea otters in the early 18th century when they expanded into Kamchatka, and were first described in 1741 at Bering Island by Georg Steller, the famous German-born naturalist and explorer.
The Russians enjoyed a lead of nearly half a century. Rival Euroamericans did not enter the scene until the mid-1780s. They were followed by the Spanish and British, and then American coasters, out of Boston, who came in force.
“The maritime fur trade…. launched in 1778 as a result of Captain James Cook’s discovery at China’s busy port of Canton that sea otter was highly prized in Cathay for its beauty and warmth.” In exchange, textiles, particularly blankets, became one of the most popular Euroamerican trade goods among the Indigenous Peoples of the Northwest Coast.
Gibson loves data and his book does not disappoint when it comes to providing it. There are nine tables starting with the names of trading and hunting vessels on the Northwest Coast from 1785 to 1841, dominated by the Americans after 1797 (although there was a revival by the British after the HBC Cadboro appeared in 1827); a table of the value of American exports to the Northwest Coast from 1789 to 1817; the value of American fur sales at Canton from 1820 to 1841; the Hudson’s Bay Company ships in the coast trade, 1825-41; and American and British returns of sea and land furs from the coast trade,1835-38; the number of foreign ships trading at Canton, 1787-1833; fur imports by American vessels at Canton for various years; commodity composition (by value); and prices in Spanish dollars of prime sea otter skins at Canton for various years.
From Canton (Guangzhow), the entrepôt of southern China, teas, silks, porcelains, and other exotic goods made the return journey to Europe and the east coast of America.
There are chapters on the modes of the trade, on the problems, on the changes, and finally on the impact of the trade. Here, in the final chapter, Gibson returns to a description of the First Peoples. “The maritime trade did not revolutionize coastal indigenous society. They were “decidedly mercantile and commercial before ‘white’ contact…”
Gibson elaborates:
Generally, Euroamerican goods supplemented rather than supplanted native products, and they served to further, not initiate changes. Thus, trinkets did not completely displace dentalia as valuables or ornaments; blankets did not completely displace cedar-bark or even fur robes; … broken English or even the Chinook jargon did not completely displace native languages; metal tools did not completely displace stone or bone implements; and so on.
But by the 1840s the coastal trade in sea otters had declined. The end of the trade was caused by the depletion of fur bearers, depression of the market, depopulation by disease, and warfare among native peoples.
Among his sources, Gibson consulted records of the Russian-American, British East India, and Hudson’s Bay companies, and a host of unpublished journals of ships and business correspondence. Gibson’s tome includes a vast amount of notes (over 100 pages), followed by a 33-page bibliography of primary and secondary sources, then ending with an index.
There are maps on the inside covers, one of “The Golden Round” which became the pattern of trade after the American Revolutionary War, a map of the Northwest Coast, and a select number of original drawings (although fewer that Gibson’s earlier edition). I wished for more illustrations but that would have made the book longer!
Gibson dedicates his work to William Sturgis (1782-1863) and Frederic Howay (1867-1943) as two important sources to his comprehensive work. Sturgis was a prominent Boston merchant who between 1810 and 1850 carried on more than half of the trade between the Northwest coast and China under the company Bryant & Sturgis, leaving a collection of business records to the Harvard Business School; Howay was a Canadian historian, lawyer, and prodigious writer of British Columbia history including maritime topics.
Gibson’s book is an economic and transportation history par excellence, a scholarly masterpiece.
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Kenneth Favrholdt is a freelance writer, historical geographer, and museologist with a BA and MA (Geography, UBC), a teaching certificate (SFU), and certificates as a museum curator. He spent ten years at the Kamloops Museum & Archives, five at the Secwépemc Museum and Heritage Park, four at the Osoyoos Museum, and he is now Archivist of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. He has written extensively on local history in Kamloops This Week, the former Kamloops Daily News, the Claresholm Local Press, and other community papers. Ken has also written book reviews for BC Studies and articles for BC History, Canadian Cowboy Country Magazine, Cartographica, Cartouche, and MUSE (magazine of the Canadian Museums Association). He taught geography courses at Thompson Rivers University and edited the Canadian Encyclopedia, geography textbooks, and a commemorative history for the Town of Oliver and Osoyoos Indian Band. Ken has undertaken research for several Interior First Nations and is now working on books on the fur trade of Kamloops and the gold rush journal of John Clapperton, a Nicola Valley pioneer and Caribooite. He lives in Kamloops. [Editor’s note: Kenneth Favrholdt has recently reviewed books by Patrick Brode, Taiaiake Alfred, Wayne McCrory, Michael Hood & Tom Jenkins, Rueben George with Michael Simpson, and Jo Chrona for The British Columbia Review.]
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