On one matter of divination, Champlain ended up compromising with local practices. His Native companions regularly asked him about his dreams, as they asked about each other’s, and he was just as persistent in denying having any. But then he did. His dream came when the party was only two or three days away from the moment of contact. By this point they were paddling south on Lake Champlain, hugging its western shore and far enough south that the Adirondack Mountains were coming into view. They knew that they were getting close to Mohawk territory and now had to travel by night, spending the daylight hours silently hiding in the densest parts of the forest. No fire could be lit, no sound made. Champlain finally succumbed to dreaming.
“I dreamed that I saw in the lake near a mountain our enemies the Iroquois drowning before our eyes,” he declared when he awoke and they asked, as they always did, whether he had had a dream. His allies were thrilled to receive this sign. When he tried to explain that he had desired to save the drowning men in his dream, he was laughed at. “We should let them all perish,” they insisted, “for they are worthless men.” Nonetheless, Champlain’s dream did the trick. It gave his allies such confidence that they no longer doubted the outcome of their raid. Champlain may have been annoyed at “their usual superstitious ceremonies,” as he puts it, but he was canny enough to cross the line of belief that separated him from them and give them what they wanted.
As 29 June dawned and they set up camp at the end of a night of paddling, the leaders met to revise tactics. They explained to Champlain that they would form up in good order to face the enemy, and that he should take a place in the front line. Champlain wanted to suggest an alternative that would make better use of the arquebuses the French were carrying. It annoyed him that he could not explain his battle tactic, which was intended not just to win this battle but to deliver a resounding defeat. Historian Georges Sioui, a Wendat descendant of the Hurons, suspects that Champlain’s goal was to annihilate the Mohawks, not just beat them in one battle. European warfare was not content with just humiliating the enemy and letting them run away, which Native warfare could accept. Their purpose, phrased in our language, was to adjust the ecological boundaries among the tribes in the region. Champlain’s goal, by contrast, was to establish an unassailable position for the French in the interior. He wanted to kill as many Mohawks as possible, not to gain glory as a warrior but to prevent the Mohawks from interfering with the French monopoly on trade. And he had the weapon to do this: an arquebus.
Champlain’s arquebus would be the hinge on which this raid turned, the stone that shattered the precarious balance among the many Native nations and gave the French the power to rearrange the economy of the region. In 1609, the arquebus was a relatively recent innovation. It was a European invention, although Europeans did not invent firearms; the Chinese were the first to manufacture gunpowder and use it to shoot flames and fire projectiles. But European smiths proved adept at improving the technology and scaling down Chinese cannon into portable and reliable firearms. The arquebus, or “hook gun,” got its name from a hook welded to the carriage. The weight and unwieldiness of the arquebus made it hard to hold steady and take aim with any accuracy. The hook allowed the gunner to suspend his weapon from a portable tripod, thereby steadying it before firing. The other way to stabilize the arquebus was to prop it on a crutch that stood as high as the marksman’s eyes. By early in the seventeenth century, gunsmiths were producing ever lighter arquebuses that could dispense with such accessories. Dutch gunsmiths got the gun down to a marvelously light four and a half kilograms. The weapon Champlain carried was a gun of this lighter sort, French rather than Dutch made but capable of being aimed without the impediment of a hook or crutch.
However streamlined an arquebus might get, firing was still cumbersome. The trigger was in the process of being invented in 1609. As of that date, an arquebusier still had to make do with a matchlock—a metal clip that held a burning fuse known as a match to the gunpowder in the flashpan. When the arquebusier flipped the match down onto the flashpan, the gunpowder ignited and burned its way through a hole in the barrel, causing the gunpowder charge inside the barrel to explode. (By the middle of the seventeenth century, gunsmiths figured out how to build a trigger that was not prone to go off whenever the gun was dropped, at which point the musket replaced the arquebus.) Despite its cumbersome firing mechanism, the arquebus redrew the map of Europe. No longer did the size of an army determine victory. What mattered was how its soldiers were armed. Dutch gunsmiths put themselves at the forefront of arms technology, providing the armies of the new Dutch state with weapons that were more portable, more accurate, and capable of being mass-produced. Dutch arquebusiers ended Spain’s continental hegemony in Europe and positioned the Netherlands to challenge Iberian dominance outside Europe as well. And French arquebusiers like Champlain gave France the power to penetrate the Great Lakes region, and later to trim Dutch power in Europe.
The development of the arquebus was impelled by the competition among European states, but it gave all Europeans an edge over peoples in other parts of the world. Without this weapon, the Spanish could not have conquered Mexico and Peru, at least not until epidemics kicked in and devastated local populations. This technological superiority allowed the Spanish to enslave the defeated and force them to work in the silver mines along the Andean backbone of the continent, mines that yielded huge quantities of precious metal to finance their purchases on the wholesale markets of India and China. South American bullion reorganized the world economy, connecting Europe and China in a way they had never been connected before, but it worked this magic at gunpoint.
The magic of firearms had a way of slipping from European control when they entered metalworking cultures. The Japanese were particularly quick to learn gunsmithing. The first arquebuses to enter Japan were brought by a pair of Portuguese adventurers who had taken passage there on a Chinese ship in 1543. The local feudal lord was so impressed that he paid them a king’s ransom for their guns and then promptly turned them over to a local swordsmith, who was manufacturing passable imitations inside a year. Within a few decades, Japan was fully armed. When Japan invaded Korea in 1592, the invading army carried tens of thousands of arquebuses into battle against the defenders. Had the Dutch not arrived with superior firearms that the Japanese were keen to acquire, they would not have been allowed to open their first trading post in in Japan 1609—the very same year in which Champlain demonstrated the power of his arquebus to the dumbfounded Mohawks. (Once Japan had come under a unified command, its rulers chose in the 1630s to opt out of the vicious cycle of escalating firearms development by banning all further imports, effectively imposing disarmament on the country, which lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century.)
Native American cultures did not yet know how to work metal, but quickly learned to use firearms and acquired them through trade. Champlain tried to block guns from leaking into Native culture, realizing that it would undercut his military advantage. He was able to win his battle on Lake Champlain in 1609 because guns had not yet fallen into the hands of the Mohawks. Other European traders were not so careful. The English traded guns for fur pelts, but only with their allies. The Dutch trading out of New Amsterdam (now New York) were less discriminating. They sold arquebuses to anyone. Native traders soon learned the value of guns and made access to them the price of trade. As a result, guns poured into the interior and were soon being traded well beyond the reach of the Europeans. The Dutch eventually realized that the arquebuses they were selling to their allies were ending up in the hands of their enemies, so they declared that any European trading guns to the Natives would be executed. Unfortunately for them, that order was too late by at least a decade.
Champlain’s arquebus played one more role in his campaign. It happened the day after the battle was over. One price of defeat was human sacrifice. The sacrifice could not be performed at the site of the battle. The Algonkians and Hurons were deep in Mohawk territory and feared the quick return
of their enemies, and in greater numbers. The surprise of the first victory could not be repeated; they had to leave. But they would not give up the Mohawk warriors they had captured. Young males were too valuable to waste. Some would be taken home and, if possible, integrated into the tribes of those who had captured them. But one, at least, would be sacrificed. They hobbled the captives by cutting the sinews in their legs, bound their arms, trundled them into their canoes, and headed north as fast as they could paddle. By sunset that day they put close to forty kilometers behind them, enough distance to perform the business of sacrifice. It was serious business, and would take all night.
The sacrifice of one Mohawk warrior was performed to thank the spirits who had aided them in battle, honoring them for the dream signs they had given and avenging the spirits of warriors whom other Iroquois had killed in earlier raids. It was also a rite of the deepest seriousness for the victim, the ultimate test of courage that either would mark him as a great warrior or humiliate him as a coward. The rite started with an invitation to sing his war chant. As he sang, his captors drew glowing sticks from the fire and burned his torso. They did this slowly. The ordeal had to last until the sun rose. Whenever the Mohawk warrior passed out, they poured cooling water on his back to revive him. A night of torment ended at dawn with disembowelment and ritual cannibalism.
Champlain wanted to end the torture before it had run its course. The captured Mohawk had committed no crime, nor did he possess useful information, and that in European terms was supposed to rule out the use of torture.
“We do not commit such cruelties,” Champlain declared. “We kill people outright. If you wish me to shoot him with the arquebus, I should be glad to do so.” Then he stalked away, making a show of his displeasure. His Native allies were distressed, and invited him to return and shoot their victim, if that would please him. Champlain got his way—not because the Natives accepted that his course was right and theirs wrong, but because etiquette required them to defer to a guest’s wishes. Perhaps they assumed that an arquebus shot was how Frenchmen conducted their victory sacrifices.
OCHASTEGUIN AND CHAMPLAIN LINKED UP again the following summer and inflicted a second crushing defeat on the Mohawks. At their third meeting, in the summer of 1611, Ochasteguin brought with him several other chiefs from the Huron Confederacy. Both sides wanted to negotiate an enlargement of direct trading. As a pledge of their good faith, the Huron chiefs gave four strings of shell beads to Champlain—what is known as wampum, a form of both currency and contract in Native culture. The four strings tied together signified that the chiefs of the four tribes of the Huron Confederacy committed themselves to an alliance with the French. The Huron Alliance Belt, as it is known, still survives.
Along with the wampum, the Huron chiefs presented Champlain with a gift of what he most wanted: fifty beaver pelts. The Hurons may not have understood why the French wanted an endless supply of beaver fur, other than knowing how valuable it was in their own culture. The French did not want the pelts for the lustrous outer fur, as Natives did, to line or trim garments. What they wanted was the underfur, which provided the raw material for manufacturing felt. Beaver fur is uniquely barbed and therefore prone to bind well when stewed in a toxic stew of copper acetate and mercury-laced Arabic glue. (Hatters had a reputation for being mad because of the toxic soup they inhaled during their work.) The result, once pounded and dried, is the very best felt for making the very best hats.
Before the fifteenth century, European hatters had made felt for hats from the indigenous European beaver, but overtrapping decimated the beaver population and the clearing of wilderness areas in northern Europe eradicated their natural habitats. The fur trade then moved north into Scandinavia until overtrapping drove Scandinavian beavers into extinction as well, and beaver hats along with them.
In the sixteenth century, hatters were forced to use sheep’s wool to make felt. Wool felt is not ideal for hats, being coarse by comparison and lacking the natural ability of beaver hairs to thatch. Felt makers could mix in a dose of rabbit hair to help the thatching, but the result was still not as sturdy. Wool felt tended to absorb the rain rather than repel it, and to lose its shape as soon as it got wet. Wool was also unattractive because of its indifferent pale color. It could be dyed, but the natural dyes felt makers used did not fix well, especially in the rain. Wool felt also lacked the strength and pliability of beaver fur. The standard headgear of the Dutch poor, the klapmuts, was made out of wool felt, which is why it slouched.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, two new sources of beaver pelts opened up. The first was Siberia, into which Russian trappers were moving in search of better hunting. The overland shipping distances were great, however, and the Russian supply was unreliable, despite Dutch attempts to control the Baltic trade to guarantee the shipping of furs into Europe. The other source opening at about the same time was Canada. Europeans fishing along the eastern coast of North America where the St. Lawrence River opened into the Atlantic discovered that the eastern woodlands were full of beavers, and Native trappers were prepared to sell them for a good price.
When beaver pelts from Canada began to come onto the European market in small quantities in the 1580s, demand skyrocketed. Beaver hats made a huge comeback. The fashion first caught on among merchants, but within a few decades the style spread to courtly and military elites. Soon, anyone with any social pretension had to have a “beaver,” as these hats were known. In the 1610s, the price of a beaver had risen to ten times the price of a wool felt hat, splitting the hat market into those who could afford beavers and those who couldn’t. (One effect of the price split was the emergence of an active resale market for those who could not afford a new beaver but did not want to resort to wearing a klapmuts. European governments regulated the secondhand hat market closely, out of a reasonable fear of lice-borne diseases.)
Status competition among those who could afford beavers, and the struggle for market share among those who made them, drove hatters to concoct ever more outlandish creations in order to stay ahead of their competitors. Fine distinctions of color and nap fed into the fashion whirligig and kept the style conscious on their toes. Crowns went up and down, narrowed and widened, arched and sagged. Brims started widening in the 1610s, turning up or flopping down as fashion dictated, but always getting bigger. Colorful hatbands were added to distinguish the truly fashionable from the less so, and showy decorations were stuck into them. We can’t tell what the soldier in Officer and Laughing Girl has stuck in his hatband, but his headwear was the very latest in Dutch male fashion—it was also coming to the end of its fashion life, and would be gone within a decade or so.
The opening of the Canadian supply of beaver pelts stimulated the demand for hats, which in turn pushed up prices for consumers and profits for pelt dealers. This surge was a huge boon for the French then trying to establish their first tiny colonies in the St. Lawrence Valley, for it furnished them with an unexpectedly profitable source of income to cover the costs of exploration and colonization. Trade goods valued at one livre when they left Paris bought beaver skins that were worth 200 livres when they arrived back there. The trade also bound Native people closer to the Europeans. In the early years, Native trappers thought they were getting the better of their trading partners.
“The Beaver does everything perfectly well,” chuckled a Montagnais trapper to a French missionary. “It makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.” Europeans he thought gullible for the prices they paid for pelts, particularly the English in New England, to whom he sold his pelts. “The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.” The French paid at rates slightly below the English. What the Europeans gave was of far greater value than what the beaver skins were worth in the Native economy. Each side thought the other was overpaying, and both in a sense were right, which is why the trade was such a success.
The year 1609 was for Champlain a crucial moment in t
he fur trade. The ten-year monopoly that his business consortium enjoyed had been set to run out the previous year, and the Parisian hatters’ corporation fought hard to end the monopoly so that prices might come down. Champlain fought back, fearing that, without the monopoly, his project would become financially unviable. Before the monopoly expired, he appealed to King Henri for an extension. His application succeeded, but only to the extent of gaining him one year. So as of 1609, the beaver market was open to all comers. Competitors moved in immediately, driving the price of beaver fur down by 60 percent. Champlain’s sole hope was to use his personal alliances to position his operations farther upriver than his competitors. To keep the Huron market to himself, he exchanged a symbolic son (having married late, he had none of his own) with Ochasteguin as a pledge of mutual support. The loss of the royal monopoly thus had the effect of spurring Champlain to probe farther into the continent.
Champlain pushed west in search of furs, but he went in search of something else as well: China. When he explained to Henri why he needed the monopoly continued, he pointed out that he was not seeking simply to benefit his business partners. The furs he was buying were needed to pay for something more important: “the means of discovering the passage to China without the inconvenience of the northern icebergs, or the heat of the torrid zone through which our seamen, with incredible labours and perils, pass twice in going and twice in returning.” Champlain needed to keep fur prices high in Paris so that they could pay for the costs of getting to China.
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