Baranov ought to have been rich from his years on the frontier. His shares had paid dividends, and his salary was significant. But he harboured a deep secret: he had spent most of his money. Baranov had paid for the education of his employees’ children by sending them to Russia; he had bought and imported cattle as gifts to the Aleuts; he had always sent money to his first wife and children in Russia; he had set aside a trust fund for his second wife in Kodiak; he had given away his own shares to dedicated managers he wanted to keep in the colony, when the company was paying them only a meagre wage. He deeply cared about the colony and the people he had worked and lived with for years. Caught in a conflict of interest between his duty to his company and what he imagined to be his duty to his country and his fellow colonists, he had dutifully sent all the colony’s profits back to St. Petersburg and supplied the colony from his own earnings. As a result, he had little money left— barely enough to live on without a pension.
Upon his arrival in the colony Hagemeister was rude and belligerent, demanding that Baranov hand over the company’s books within twelve hours. It was hard on Baranov; he was humiliated and saddened. As he descended into a bout of drinking, pondering his future and fearing that he had failed to provide for his Alaskan children, hope emerged during what threatened to be an abrupt and ignominious end to his career. On board one of the Russian naval frigates that had put into port in Sitka four months ahead of Hagemeister was a senior lieutenant named Semion Yanovskii. A handsome young man, well read and thoughtful, Yanovskii was impressed with Irina Baranov’s beauty and vitality. She was a wonderful piano player with a lively sense of humour and a zest for life. He courted her for months while a bemused Baranov looked on approvingly. Eventually, Yanovskii asked for her hand in marriage and Baranov agreed—it was a good match.
The young man’s senior officer, Hagemeister, agreed despite his dislike of Baranov because the marriage would solve one of Hagemeister’s greatest problems. A lifetime’s habit fades slowly, and most of the citizens of Sitka still deferred to Baranov, as if he were still in charge, as if the navy had no authority to replace him. Owing to many years of bad relations with naval officers, perhaps a third of the employees, both native and Russian, threatened to leave the company’s service if the navy took command. So Hagemeister hatched a scheme that would allow for a smooth transition from company rule to navy rule: he named Yanovskii, now Baranov’s son-in-law, to the position of governor, replacing the old man. In this way, the colonists’ hatred of the navy would be tempered with their respect for Baranov’s daughter, providing some continuity during the transition to naval control. After the marriage the happy couple set off on a tour of the colony, while Baranov remained in Sitka moping. He was confused about what he should do: visit his brother in Irkutsk, go to Hawaii, stay near Sitka, return to Kodiak Island? His judgement had been slipping in the past few years, and now the decline became more pronounced. His memory was failing along with his eyesight.
Hagemeister’s accountant, in scouring the company’s accounts, found no evidence of corruption or plundering. Indeed, he discovered that Baranov was a master of profit-making: net profits on goods shipped from Russia were 90 per cent, with everything accounted for. But Hagemeister still wanted Baranov to leave Russian America, so that he could never again influence events in the colony. With his personal fortune depleted, Baranov could not afford to live in Russia. He planned to go to Hawaii, but the navy was concerned that the presence of one so well known and respected, but living on limited means, would raise eyebrows. Another of the visiting naval officers, the outspoken Captain Vasilii Golovnin, offered Baranov a small company job in St. Petersburg and agreed to sponsor his son in the naval academy. Indeed, he would take Antipatr aboard his warship immediately. With both his children suddenly and unexpectedly looked after, and his wife, whom he had not seen in years, living on Kodiak Island and financially secure, Baranov agreed. He was, however, apprehensive about returning to a homeland he had not seen in over three decades and requested one final voyage north to Kodiak Island, where he had spent so much time in his early years in Russian America. Hagemeister claimed there was no time; he must prepare to leave without delay.
A month later, after many tearful farewells, Baranov boarded a ship for the long voyage round the world to St. Petersburg. Kiril Khlebnikov, the government accountant who had inspected Baranov’s books and found them perfectly in order, and who became Baranov’s first biographer after hearing the old man’s stories while they worked on the accounts, described the scene: “Old, grey-haired men, his comrades in glorious voyages and deeds, sobbed like children at parting with their beloved leader. Many in his entourage grew up during his tenure, others were born while he was boss. He was godfather to one and almost all of the young ones were trained under him. Even the Tlingit who trembled before him, but who respected his brave and decisive spirit, took leave of him with ambivalent feelings in which fear and joy were mingled.” He was now an old and tired man of seventy-two, and his years of hard living had caught up with him. On the ship, he grew weary. He caught a fever in Batavia, and died soon after his ship put to sea again on April 12, 1819. His body was dropped into the Indian Ocean.
Corporate rule in Alaska ended with Aleksandr Baranov, just as it had begun with him, although the Russian American Company remained the monopoly commercial entity there and Alaska’s Russian settlements continued to fly the company flag alongside the state flag of the Russian Empire. Lydia Black writes in her book Russians in Alaska: 1732–1867, “Forthwith, until the end of Russian America in 1867, the colony would be governed by a high-ranking officer of the navy, accountable first of all to the government and concerned primarily with matters of state.”
The Russian American Company’s fortunes waned as the nineteenth century progressed. The inevitable decline in the quality of sea otter pelts, due to overhunting, a failure to diversify and the lack of interest from distant St. Petersburg were certainly key reasons. The company, however, was also no longer a merchant enterprise, but rather a branch of government; and Russian America had atrophied, overshadowed by Russia’s greater interest in events closer at hand in Europe. Under naval rule, the colony lacked the freedom and initiative to adapt to changing times. Another man like Baranov might have staved off the decline, seeing opportunity where others saw only the end; but none was forthcoming, particularly not from the ranks of the navy. On October 18, 1867, all of Russian America was purchased by the United States for $7.2 million, and the company ceased to exist.
Chapter 5
“I consider it quite unnecessary to indent for Sauces & Pickles on public account . . . I never use fish sauce in the country, and never saw anyone use it or pickles either. From the quantity of Mustard indented for, one would suppose it is now issued as an article of trade with the Indians!”
SIR GEORGE SIMPSON, C. 1843
Empire of the Beaver
SIR GEORGE SIMPSON AND
THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY
1
HE WAS CHAUFFEURED ABOUT THE WILDS OF NORTHern North America in a giant canoe, perched in its centre under a faintly ludicrous black beaver top hat, exhorting his longsuffering voyageurs to paddle harder so that he could set speed records. Seeking to make an impressive arrival, he had a bagpiper in Highland regalia begin braying whenever he neared a Hudson’s Bay Company fort. A respected member of the elite in Montreal and London, “the Little Emperor” earned a legendary reputation for stinginess that bordered on cruelty to his employees and customers. Over the decades he fathered at least ten, and perhaps seventy, children with a number of women in his vast fur domain, a domain that covered a good chunk of northern and western North America, and that at its height spanned nearly a twelfth of the world’s total land mass. Haughty, impatient and self-important, he was the managerial genius who steered the Hudson’s Bay Company to its greatest financial success and greatest expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. A balding, chubby and short man with an iron will and an unfashionable admirati
on for Napoleon Bonaparte, he was as hated by his employees and customers as he was loved by his shareholders and investors.
The story of Sir George Simpson and his empire of the beaver is inextricably intertwined with the founding of the nation of Canada. If not acknowledged as a national hero—he was far too complex, too selfish and, by modern standards, too unsavoury for that—then he is at least known as one of the founding historical figures whose actions laid some of the framework upon which the modern nation was built. The story begins centuries before Simpson was born and is rooted as much in North America as in Europe; as much with the denizens of Restoration London’s fashionable drawing rooms as with the North American wilderness and the theatrical antics of two French Canadian fur traders from Quebec. in the fall of 1665 two buckskinclad coureurs de bois sailed up the Thames River through plague-ravaged London. The scene was a strange contrast to the wild forests, rivers and lakes to which they were accustomed. As they scanned the banks they spied burned-out buildings, deserted streets, looted houses and clusters of ragged refugees. The plague would slay nearly eighty thousand of the city’s approximately half a million inhabitants. The stench of death permeated the air, and carts laden with corpses trundled down detritus-strewn roads to dump their loads into putrid plague pits. Clutching perfume-doused handkerchiefs to their faces, the shocked woodsmen continued upriver, past London to the city of Oxford, where the English court had fled to escape the pestilence. They were ushered into an audience with the king, Charles ii, the same flamboyant king who had recently declared war on the Netherlands to start the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and who had a year previously authorized his brother James, the Duke of York, to seize the colony of New Netherland from the Dutch West India Company. But it was business, not war, that these French Canadian fur traders wanted to discuss with the king, and Charles ii had a keen interest in mercantile concerns.
The two men, Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers (later known in England as “Mr. Gooseberry”) and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, were long-time citizens of New France and long-time traders with the native peoples. They had ranged far and wide in North America, meeting a number of tribes—Huron, Sioux and Cree—in the headwaters region of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and in the forests of the north. The historian Douglas MacKay writes in The Honourable Company that “a more daring pair of intentional promoters cannot be found in the history of commerce . . . Glib, plausible, ambitious, supported by unquestionable physical courage, they were the completely equipped fortune hunters.” In the spring of 1659 the two brothers-in-law— Groseilliers, the solid veteran, twenty-two years older than the insouciant twenty-year-old Radisson—had ventured farther than usual and had traded for the glossiest and largest beaver pelts they had ever seen. During their two-year expedition into the interior they had heard tales of the Cree who lived in the distant northwest, and of great rivers that flowed north to a frozen inland sea.
When they paddled their canoes back to the St. Lawrence River and Quebec with a great mountain of furs, they were celebrated as heroes. They soon set off on a second expedition, but when they returned the governor of the colony of New France seized a good portion of their furs on the grounds that they had been trading without a licence. He then forbade them to venture west again, fearful that their exploits might shift the focus of the fur trade away from the St. Lawrence and weaken the struggling colony. The governor wanted to promote farming and settlement and to discourage the colony’s men from fleeing to the hinterland in search of furs. Refusing to be cowed, the spirited and adventurous duo cast about for suitable allies and settled on New England as it was the nearest. But after a few years of vigorous persuasion that resulted in a failed expedition, they decided to cross the Atlantic and present their case to the English king.
Their plan was sure to interest the king: use English ships to enter Hudson Bay and exploit the vast beaver reserves surrounding the bay, thus bypassing New France altogether. Groseilliers and Radisson’s intrigues inspired the English courtiers. Smooth-talking Radisson—famous for his boast about his mastery of the wilderness of Canada: “We were Caesars, being nobody to contradict us”—regaled the gentleman of the English court with the tale of his journey down a great river that flowed “North West into the South Seas” and with his plan for a series of forts along the bay. The English East India Company was finally showing good profits with its monopoly. Was not Hudson Bay first explored by an English mariner? And was not Hudson Bay well known to be on the route to Cathay? Radisson’s appeals to his listeners eventually had their intended effect. He and Mr. Gooseberry recruited their investors.
The first royal voyage departed a few years later in 1668. With Groseilliers sailing aboard the Nonsuch and Radisson aboard the Eaglet, the two ships crossed to Hudson Strait, where storms sent the Nonsuch packing back to England. The small fifty-ton Eaglet, however, cruised south into James Bay and spent the winter establishing relations with a few hundred local Cree. They traded sundry manufactured metal goods, which were rare and useful implements to the residents along the shores of Hudson Bay, for beaver pelts, the natives’ most common and abundant trade item, before returning to London the following
October. Radisson had found no passage to the South Seas, but he had vindicated his and Groseilliers’ claims that the fur trade from Hudson Bay would be profitable. Indeed, the prospects seemed so bright that on May 2, 1670, the king agreed to grant to his cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and seventeen courtier-adventurers a charter giving them the “sole trade and commerce of Hudson’s Bay” as “true lords and proprietors” with rights to all the surrounding territory as well, including fisheries and minerals.
Although no one knew it at the time, the region that comprises Hudson Bay’s drainage basin constitutes nearly four million square kilometres, over 40 per cent of the later territory of Canada, including all of northern Ontario and Quebec, all of Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta and a good portion of the U.S. states of North Dakota and Minnesota. Rupert became the first governor of “the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” The new company possessed powers similar to those granted the other great monopolies of the era—a monopoly being necessary, Rupert believed, to succeed in such a risky venture, with a long payback time on investment. Rupert and his cronies put up the capital to finance the venture, but they had obligations that went beyond the requirement to make a profit: they were to continue to search for the route to Cathay and to establish settlements “by meanes whereof there may probably arise very great advantage to us and our kingdome.” Certainly the king had in mind the promotion of strategic English trade to counter the expansion of New France.
Soon, flotillas of ships were crossing the Atlantic from England every year, loaded with knives, saws, kettles, utensils, mirrors, muskets, pots, axes, sewing needles, gunshot, powder, wool cloth, beads, tobacco and brandy. When Hudson Bay froze over, they wintered at pre-selected spots along the shore of the bay to trade for mink, fox, ermine, otter, wolverine, lynx and, of course, beaver pelts, the primary object of their trade. The furs were pulled from the hinterlands by native trappers and transported to the bay, where the English traders waited for them to arrive. The company built primitive palisade forts at the mouths of the key rivers flowing into the bay so that they could maintain constant contact with the local people. In that way, it was hoped, each year ever more trappers could be persuaded to make the arduous journey to trade at the forts.
True to Groseilliers and Radisson’s predictions, beavers were available in great abundance. Their lustrous pelts were of superior quality, and beaver fur was in particular demand throughout Europe. Numerous seventeenth. and eighteenth-century engravings depict fanciful scenes in which these curious and myopic rodents display their prominent and enormous orange teeth. Sometimes they are shown regal and sphinx-like, posed with their mouths open and their great flat tails splayed out behind, or even walking erect, carrying logs over their shoulders in mighty communal build
ing efforts, like furry anthropomorphized ants going cheerfully about their labours. In these engravings, men with guns line the banks of ponds shooting at the beavers that are gnawing at trees to bring them down and build their dams and houses. These dwellings occasionally appear as multi-storey, apartment-style mounds housing dozens in the centre of a pond. Written accounts of the time had beavers dwelling in giant communal house-villages, speaking to each other and working together to hunt and build. The fur trader and explorer Samuel Hearne, who was very familiar with the more prosaic lives of these furry, flat-tailed rodents, expressed amusement at this attribution of noble traits. In his classic A Journey to the Northern Ocean, he wrote: “I cannot refrain from smiling when I read the accounts of different authors who have written on the economy of those animals . . . Little remains to be added beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion.” That such gentle and innocuous creatures should inspire such praise seems unusual. But they were given all the attention not because of their sophisticated and urbane culture, but because of their value: their pelts were then worth, if not their weight in gold, certainly a great deal of money.
Furs have always had value for their warmth, but it was their use in the manufacture of felt that drove the demand in Europe.
Felt was primarily used to make hats, an ever-changing fashion accoutrement that was indispensable to gentlemen as well as ladies. Each profession or calling boasted its own hat style, from the distinctive cocked hat of the navy to the tall, imperious Regent or top hat, to the faintly ridiculous-looking “Paris Beau.” People wore hats to mark their social position, and the hats carried price tags to reflect that. Some gentlemen’s hats were so valuable that even well-off people protected them and dutifully handed them down as inheritances, assuming the fashion had not changed. Although the beaver was virtually extinct in commercial quantities throughout most of Europe, in the seventeenth century the region covered by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s charter was home to at least ten million beavers.
Merchant Kings Page 19