Page 28 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

14.

and all "the numerous islands bordering this whole extent of

14
coast, and the sounds, bays, and inlets within these limits.11
1
This territory, largely uncharted and unmapped in the 1780 s,
offered majestic scenery of "mountains, rising in magnificent

amphitheatres, covered with evergreen forests, with here and

there a verdant plane near the shore, and a snowcapt mountain
15
in the back ground. .Here nature reigns supreme."

Living along the Coast were various tribes of Indians who

trapped furs and sold them to whoever bid the highest price.

The trade was by barter with American vessels offering articles

such as beads, blankets, bars of iron and copper, great coats,

knives, fire-arms and muskets in return for pelts of fur.

Americans prized sea-otter fur most highly, but they also took

pelts of beaveL, fox and nutria.

Many vessels never completed their transactions. Since

much of the North Pacific and its shores were uncharted, the

threat of shipwreck was constant. Very few American vessels

though actually suffered this fate. A much greater peril was

attack by the Indians with whom Americans traded. From the

beginning of the American fur trade, its participants maintained

a very low opinion of the Northwest Indian tribes. The usual

14
From a lecture on the Northwest fur trade given by the
famous Boston seacaptain and merchant William Sturgis, as reported
in "The Northwest Fur Trade," The Merchants' Magazine and Com­
mercial Review, XIV (June 1846), 533.
15
william Shaler, "Journal of a Voyage between China
and the Northwest Coast, Made in 1804, 11 American Register, or
General Repository of History, Politics and Science, III (1808),
138-39.