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Geopolitics and Environment in the Sea Otter Trade UC Merced UC Merced Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Soft gold and the Pacific frontier: geopolitics and environment in the sea otter trade Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03g4f31t Author Ravalli, Richard John Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California 1 Introduction Covering over one-third of the earth‘s surface, the Pacific Basin is one of the richest natural settings known to man. As the globe‘s largest and deepest body of water, it stretches roughly ten thousand miles north to south from the Bering Straight to the Antarctic Circle. Much of its continental rim from Asia to the Americas is marked by coastal mountains and active volcanoes. The Pacific Basin is home to over twenty-five thousand islands, various oceanic temperatures, and a rich assortment of plants and animals. Its human environment over time has produced an influential civilizations stretching from Southeast Asia to the Pre-Columbian Americas.1 An international agreement currently divides the Pacific at the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait between Russia to the west and the United States to the east. This territorial demarcation symbolizes a broad array of contests and resolutions that have marked the region‘s modern history. Scholars of Pacific history often emphasize the lure of natural bounty for many of the first non-natives who ventured to Pacific waters. In particular, hunting and trading for fur bearing mammals receives a significant amount of attention, perhaps no species receiving more than the sea otter—originally distributed along the coast from northern Japan, the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka peninsula, east toward the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan coastline, and south to Baja California. The story of EuroAmerican fur trading dates back centuries to the Age of Discovery and the first explorers, settlers, and traders who ventured to the North American Atlantic seaboard. By the late seventeenth century, England‘s Hudson Bay 1 Arrell Morgan Gibson and John S. Whitehead, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), chs. 2-3. 2 Company was chartered and beaver pelts had become a major continental commodity.2 Partly because of this rich, deep history with ties to eastern and trans-Atlantic markets, little fur trade scholarship has centered on the Pacific conceptually or firmly placed Pacific trading in larger global contexts.3 Hence, although the editors of one volume observed that ―[p]re-gold-rush trade in animal skins along the California coast was in fact firmly linked to intercontinental markets connected via the Pacific Ocean,‖4 few have developed such historiographic ground. Evidence of the need for a Pacific-grounded fur trade history is that studies of the sea otter trade typically focus on particular localities in the Eastern Pacific Basin and/or on specific national players in the eighteenth and nineteenth century trade. The approach I offer integrates these works into a broader picture of Pacific history. In doing so, I both amplify and refine previous arguments about the importance of the sea otter trade. I argue that EuroAmerican desire for the luxurious and costly fur of Enhydra lutris was central to the Pacific‘s economic and political development. The high exchange rates that merchants received for sea otter in the China market helped spur the first extensive non- native activity in many coastal areas. As entrepreneurs and hunters of various backgrounds competed and cooperated for the region‘s fur bearing resources, territorial claims were shaped and contested. Principally, I reaffirm the geopolitical significance of American success at sea otter trading in the Pacific. I also argue that wider geographic and temporal perspectives clarify the various environmental consequences of the trade. 2 For a general overview of this era of the North American fur trade, see James A. Hanson, When Skins Were Money: A History of the Fur Trade (Chadron, Nebraska: Museum of the Fur Trade, 2005), chs. 3-5. 3 Recent examples of Pacific/global fur trade studies are Jim Hardee, ―Soft Gold: Animal Skins and the Early Economy of California,‖ in Dennis O. Flynn, Arturo Giraldez, and James Sobredo, Eds., Studies in Pacific History: Economics, Politics, and Migration (England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002), 23-39; Nancy J. Taniguchi, ―Jed Smith, U.S. Trade, and Global Connections,‖ Southern California Quarterly 88:4 (Winter 2006-2007): 389-407. 4 Flynn, Giraldez, Sobredo, 6. 3 Recent scholarship in the history of the United States West supports the application of expanded transnational and global scopes.5 Most prominently, David Igler has written that much of the Eastern Pacific Basin did not function as a historical and geographic reality until European and American traders journeyed to ports and assisted in its integration with the emerging Pacific World. These individuals brought with them foreign cultural traditions, germs which decimated native populations, and often destructive systems of forced labor in addition to exchange goods, yet their various activities were essential in bringing locations such as Sitka, Hawaii, and Alta California into a wider international imagination. This study of the sea otter trade fits well within such a framework. One of my contentions is that historians have largely bypassed the Western Pacific origins of the trade. While like Igler I focus primarily on the Eastern Pacific, I argue that an examination of inter-Asian fur exchanges from roughly 1500- 1800 sheds new light on the subject. Not only does the commodification of the sea otter originate within this context—a phenomenon involving Japanese enterprises and native Ainu peoples from Hokkaido and the Kurils—but many of the commercial, political, and environmental aspects of the sea otter trade have important parallels and contrasts in the Western Pacific Basin. Therefore this study provides global comparisons that reshape our understanding of the fur trade specifically and the US West generally. 5 For examples, see David Igler, ―Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770- 1850,‖ American Historical Review 109:3 (June 2004): 693-719; Lissa Wadewitz, ―Pirates of the Salish Sea: Labor, Mobility, and Environment in the Transnational West,‖ Pacific Historical Review 75:4 (November 2006): 587-627; Taniguchi. 4 Encompassing the entire natural range of the sea otter, a range that crosses a number of historic and geographic boundaries, this study has distinct implications for scholars evaluating the emergence of the Pacific World.6 For one, it suggests that the historical dynamics of the Far East, including the above-mentioned Western Pacific, were more important to intensive trans-oceanic connections and permanent settlements in the Eastern Pacific Basin than the explorations of individuals like British Captain James Cook. Had it not been for the value first attached to sea otter pelts in Asia, than the late- eighteenth and early-nineteenth century merchant enterprises at places such as Nootka Sound and Hawaii—established following news of Cook‘s fateful third expedition— would have proceeded more slowly than they did. Additionally, I am not the first to view the Spanish mission system in Alta California as first and foremost a reaction against Russian fur traders pushing eastward from the Western Pacific. Ultimately I support a ―West Meets East‖ interpretation of Pacific development for much of the eighteenth century. The Eastern Pacific emerges at this time in large measure because of events occurring elsewhere in the Basin. The centrality of China is a concept at play here, one which many world historians would recognize. I chose to center on the sea otter, a creature that to varying degrees and at different locations and times was vital to the Pacific frontier. Its historical importance invites multidisciplinary perspectives. Political scientist and world systems researcher John D. Carlson has recently stressed the significance of the sea otter trade in the incorporation of the Pacific Northwest, 6 An edition of the American Antiquarian Society‘s online journal Common-place offers a scholarly yet readable collection of essays from those engaging in early Pacific World dialogues. See Common-place 5:2 (2005), Available online at http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/. 5 particularly Nootka Sound, into the global capitalist economy.7 I do not entirely share his methodological approach, but I do agree that a number of scholarly endeavors illuminate this subject while arguing that regional perspectives which include the Northwest as one comparative component are needed. My attention to Enhydra as a species leads me to an environmental history of the trade. While historians in the last few years have begun to focus more sharply on issues related to the natural consequences of the sea otter trade, an evaluation of the complex occurrences that affected otter populations throughout the Eastern Pacific Basin during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is needed.8 Clearly the animals were vigorously pursued along North American coasts for nearly a century, and overall their numbers were dramatically reduced. Yet this decline took place at different rates at different locations and periods. Moreover, a collection of factors, including conservation and the distinctive geographies where sea otters live, influenced localized rebounding of their numbers during the first major period of sea otter hunting and trading (defined as roughly prior to 1850). I also utilize the above concerns for a period after 1850 in order to fill a ―Dark Age‖ gap for the Pacific sea otter. Scholars have said relatively little about the species for the decades spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the period being historiographically ―dark,‖ surviving populations were hunted for their pelts and were increasingly threatened with extinction prior to more recent national and international conservation policies. Therefore this dissertation 7 John D.
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