Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Popular historians and non-fiction writers are partial to the concept of sudden social collapse, which they have used to explain the “disappearance” of such past civilizations as Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Classical-era Mayans, the Ancestral Puebloans, and even the Roman Empire. Many of us like the drama of rapid change, the pathos of social decline, and the ease of finding a moral lesson - beware of war, don’t mistreat the environment, obey your leaders - in a tale of decline and fall. Archaeologist Guy Middleton has recently reminded us that life and death, especially the life and death of an entire human society, are rarely so simple. Elements of a civilization can and do decline over time, but cultures can endure for centuries. Confusing the fall of a single powerful city or the overthrow of a small elite with the death of a whole civilization distorts the lived experience of most of that society’s people, and encourages us to adopt an elitist view of history.

Middleton’s particular specialty is the Mycenaean civilization, which ostensibly fell apart at the end of the Bronze Age. Middleton argues that much of Mycenaean culture (e.g. pottery, religious beliefs) survived the abandonment of its palace complexes in 1200 BCE, and finds little evidence of the kind of violence or resource exhaustion that might have caused a sudden collapse. The Mycenaeans instead abandoned a particular kind of political system, replacing the centralized palaces with smaller and more diffuse settlements, and their old semi-divine kings with the basileis of the early Hellenic era. What ended in 1200 was a polity, not a society. His description reminded me of the fate of the Ancestral Puebloans, whose Pueblo Indian descendants overthrew their priestly elite (ca. 1300 CE), stopped building large stone towns on the elite’s behalf, and moved into smaller but more numerous agricultural towns in the more fertile Rio Grande valley. In each case there was a period of political disruption and social change, but only the old elite and their latter-day sympathizers would see this as devolution.           

Calakmul, Classic-period Mayan city

The Mayans and Easter Islanders provide additional examples of the evolution-not-devolution model of cultural change. Fiction writers and television programs have generated much popular interest in the question “What happened to Mayan civilization?” Middleton's answer is both simple and surprising: it survived in one form or another until the Spanish destroyed the last city-state in 1697. States rose and fell in the Classical period (750-1050 CE), and drought or intra-elite violence led to the abandonment of some urban centers, but the post-Classical Mayans continued to build cities, write books, and engage in maritime trade well into the early modern period. Middleton has little patience for those who charge the Mayans with destroying themselves, and even less for writers like Jared Diamond who castigate the people of Rapa Nui for wrecking their environment and becoming a pack of starving, deracinated wretches. Historical evidence shows that indigenous Easter Islanders instead lived fairly rich and decent lives, maintaining a stable population and a sizable agricultural surplus well into the nineteenth century. The toppling of the island’s distinctive statues, or moai, occurred not in one spasmodic bout of desperate violence, but in a smaller series of conflicts over the course of 200 years. As with the Mayans, the destruction of Rapa Nui’s people came from outside forces, in particular the arrival of Euro-American slavers in the 1860s.   

Middleton’s insight can even be applied to the largest and most dramatic episode of civilizational collapse in historical literature, namely the fall of Rome. There is a good reason that the most famous historian of this process, Edward Gibbon, took 2,700 pages and fourteen years to chronicle “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:” Rome’s so-called collapse took nearly 1300 years from start to finish, a period spanning twenty human lifetimes and exceeding by a millennium the institutional lifespan of the United States. The Eastern Empire, home to the imperial capital and most of the old empire’s wealthy urban centers, did not end until midway through the Renaissance, while in the West a soi-disant Roman Empire held on until Napoleon’s time. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Roman civilization did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downward. Indeed, the Roman language and ecclesiastical bureaucracy (in the form of the Catholic Church) remain with us today. Slow change and cultural persistence make for a less exciting story than the sturm und drang of socio-political collapse, but they more accurately characterize the lives of far more people, rich and poor, famous and obscure, than war and ruination.  

(My thanks to John Barnes for linking to Middleton's fascinating article.)             

Sometimes Imperialism Wears an Expensive Fur Hat

The Manchus, whose soldiers conquered China in the 1640s and whose Qing dynasty ruled it for 270 years, shared with other northern Eurasian peoples a love of fur. In the cold northern provinces of the Qing Empire, ermine, sable, and otter adorned the hats and outer garments of Manchu elites and their wealthier Han subjects. Of all these adornments the thick and lustrous pelts of Pacific sea otters were probably most prized. European observers claimed that Han merchants would buy otter fur for its weight in silver. This made sea otter pelts very valuable to Europeans, for China had much that Europe wanted - tea and fine silks, in particular - and Europe had nothing China wanted, except for silver itself. Hard cash being ever in short supply in the backward and barbarous West, China-bound merchants saw the luxury fur market as their salvation. Here at last was a commodity the sophisticated Han would willingly buy.*

Russia pioneered the Chinese luxury-fur trade, selling high-value pelts at the Qing entrepot of Kyakta on the Amur River. Once Russian traders (promyshlenniki) discovered the value of sea otter pelts, they began buying or seizing them from northern Pacific indigenes. From the Kamchatka Peninsula the adventurers expanded their range into the Aleutian Islands, thence to southern and southeastern Alaska. The 100 or so Russian trading expeditions to Alaska between 1740 and 1800 brought home up to 4,000 otter pelts each, and collectively sold eight million rubles’ worth** of otter in northern China. Many paid little or nothing to their Native American suppliers, forcing Aleut hunters (for instance) into their service by taking Aleut families hostage. Some indigenes proved harder to coerce: the Tlingits destroyed several Russian outposts rather than submit to serfdom, and the Russian-American Company decided that peaceful commerce would cost less than the conquest of so large a nation. Russians bought the Tlingits’ furs with European and Chinese trade goods. Tlingit chiefs displayed the wealth they derived from the tripartite Pacific trade by wearing vests adorned with one of their new imports: Chinese coins. Three continents’ peoples were now joined not only by commerce but by the exotic clothing, the bright silks and sleek furs and formidable vests, that their elites showed off in public.

Russia could not long enjoy a monopoly of northern Pacific commerce. Other European powers with strong mercantile fleets soon inserted themselves into the Sino-American otter trade. Britain got in early, after James Cook learned (1778) that the Nootka people would sell the furs of “sea beavers” (as he called otters) for a relative pittance. The fractious but intrepid Americans soon followed. After American independence New Englanders began sailing round the Horn to the north Pacific, stopping near the Columbia River to swap beads and nails for Chinook hunters’ furs, then continuing on to Canton with their “soft gold.” By 1820, 400 British and American trading ships had called at the Columbia, Puget Sound, and Vancouver Island. Sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest drew lower prices than their Alaskan equivalents, but Alaska lay under a Russian claim, and otter remained easier for Americans (or Brits) to obtain in quantity than their other China-market export, ginseng.

Fairly early on, wealthy British and American merchants, and the government officials with whom they enjoyed a more-than-cordial relationship, realized that a land-based otter trade could probably operate more cheaply and effectively than a maritime one. Coastal trading posts could attract trading partners from greater distances, as Native American hunters would presumably more readily undertake long journeys to a permanently staffed storehouse than to an ephemeral landing site. Also, such posts might prove easier to supply by land than by sea. Using an oceanic route, the Pacific Northwest lay half a planet away from London and Boston, but a continental riverine route might make it more accessible from the eastern United States and Canada.

Britain’s Northwest Company, one of the two largest trading firms in eighteenth-century Canada, made an early attempt to develop an overland route to the western sea. In 1792-93 NWC employee Alexander McKenzie, with substantial assistance from Native American guides, crossed the northern Rockies to the Pacific. The path he followed proved too rough and difficult for sustained long-distance commerce. Nonetheless, it stoked the anxieties of American officials when Mackenzie published an account of his travels in London a decade later. President Thomas Jefferson worried that the British would soon discover a cheap and easy overland route to the Pacific, use it to establish trading posts in the Northwest, and thereby dominate the region’s sea-otter trade. Hoping that the United States could beat Britain to the punch, Jefferson directed the Corps of Discovery (which departed one year after the release of Mackenzie’s book) to chart a route for water traffic from the center of North America to the western shore, and to plant the American flag on the north Pacific coast. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark weren’t engaged in an early act of Manifest Destiny, blazing a trail for brave pioneer settlers*** - they were securing American access to the complex and valuable China trade. Gumption and bravery these explorers doubtless had, but what set them on their course were silk and silver, Manchu fur hats and Native American coin vests, and plain old-fashioned imperialism.

Sources:

James Gibson, Otter Skins, British Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast (McGill-Queens UP, 1992), 12-15

Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W.W. Norton, 2014), Chapter 1

Jonathan Schlesinger, “China’s Tangled Environmental History,” The Diplomat, 5 November 2016

Alan Taylor, “Continental Crossings,” Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Summer 2004): 182-188

Jason Wordie, “Pelt and Road: How Trade with China was Smoothed with Furs from British Columbia,” South China Morning Post, 7 March 2018

* Before the British introduced opium, the only other European imports saleable in China were French clocks and printed cotton cloth, the latter of which Chinese traders bought only reluctantly.

** About 240-480 million modern U.S. dollars, based on the equivalent exchange values between each currency and gold.

*** The Oregon Trail followed a different route than Lewis and Clark’s path, in any case, a route pioneered by the first American fur-trading company to set up shop in the Pacific Northwest.

Pacific America and the Wider World before 1700

Scholars tend to take for granted the profound isolation of the pre-Columbian New World from the Old. After the last migrations across the Bering Strait, circa 1000 BCE, and apart from sporadic contact between the Norse and the Inuit after 1000 CE, the peoples of the Americas lived lives wholly separate from those of the rest of humanity. Or so we usually think. Actually, the corridor that ancestral Native Americans used to colonize the Western Hemisphere never completely closed. Rising sea levels inundated the Bering land bridge, but several groups of migrants (Athabascan, Inuit, Aleut) crossed the strait by boat, and no practical barrier subsequently prohibited other northeastern Asians from traveling to Alaska and points south, or prevented Native Americans from communicating with Siberia.

Archaeologists from Purdue University have now confirmed that cross-Bering communication did occur in the relatively recent past. H. Cory Cooper reports that Inuit of the Thule Culture buried artifacts of bronze, an alloy no New World culture ever produced, on Cape Espenberg, Alaska. The bronze artifacts were interred between 1200 and 1500 CE, but their creators made them much earlier, perhaps a thousand years earlier, in northern China. They passed hand to hand from their place of manufacture to Siberia and America. The Thule Inuit incorporated the Chinese bronze wares into a toolkit that already included beaten-copper points, like fish hooks and needles. They surely regarded the bronze beads and buckles they had received in trade as exotic, but did not consider metal itself foreign and weird. It is instead modern scholars who should consider these tools usefully strange: they prove that medieval-era Inuit were either trading with Native Siberian travelers or crossing into the Chukchi Peninsula to do so themselves.

An additional conduit that brought both metal wares and people to Pacific America has been known for some time, though I myself discovered it only recently in the notes to Paul Mapp's Elusive West (North Carolina, 2010). During the Tokugawa regime in Japan, when the shogunate prohibited nearly all foreign contact, a large (60-plus) number of coastal cargo ships lost their rudders or masts in storms and blew out to sea. The Kuroshio and North Pacific currents carried them north or east to regions inhabited by Native Americans, but within the ambit of record-keeping Europeans. These ships had small crews and usually carried cargoes of rice and other foodstuffs, which allowed at least some of their crew members to survive long periods at sea if they could acquire (through rainfall) enough drinking water.

Charles Brooks studied over thirty of these "sea drifters" from the period 1600-1870. Half were rescued at sea by European mariners, but the others washed up on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, and northwestern North America. Mike Dash, in a 2010 blog post on the storm-tossed Japanese mariners, provides some remarkable stories of Japanese sailors who peregrinated about the Atlantic and Pacific for years before finally returning home. It seems likely, however, that some of the sea drifters crossed the Pacific unrecorded by Europeans, leaving their bodies (live or dead) and the cargo and fittings of their ships in the hands of Aleutians, Tlingits, and other coastal Native American groups. Dash suspects that some of these crossings predate the start of Brooks's study in 1600.

Add to these discoveries the likelihood of contact between South America and Polynesia, evidenced by the spread of sweet potatoes, and we can see that there was a nascent "Pacific World" of sorts before the nineteenth century. While we generally consider Indian-European contact to have begun on the eastern coast of North America, it appears that, thanks to Inuit and Japanese and Polynesian mariners, pre-Columbian western North America was less isolated from the wider world than the Atlantic seaboard.

(Above image of Japanese junk via https://thelosttreasurechest.wordpress.com/ship-gallery/japanese-junk/)

Aztecs and Samurai

In a post from my Voyagers to the East series, I noted that Hernan Cortes brought a dozen Aztec Indians to Spain in 1528 for presentation to Carlos I, and that several members of this cortege, whom Bernal Diaz described as jugglers and acrobats, wound up moving to Rome to adorn the court of Pope Clement VII. Courtesy of Charles Mann's fascinating book 1493, I have since learned that this was not the first party of Nahua to visit Spain: in 1526 Spanish priests had brought over another group of Mexican "jugglers," who turned out to be skilled players of the game of ullamaliztli. The Venetian ambassador to Spain reported on the ball players' padded garments and on the immense speed and dexterity with which they propelled the ball to the goal. The purpose of the game puzzled the ambassador, but more puzzling still was the ball itself, made of some sort of "pith" that caused it to jump about. The pith was actually rubber, which Europeans had never seen before, and the ball's behavior was such that the ambassador couldn't describe it because there was no precise word in contemporary Italian for "bounce."* (Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created [Knopf, 2011], 240-42.)

Jarring juxtapositions like this one are among the more compelling features of Mann's narrative. Another, more jarring (and fascinating) example of this trope occurs in Mann's discussion of Asian migration to colonial Mexico, which apparently was quite substantial in the seventeenth century. Spanish treasure ships had begun regular voyages across the Pacific in 1565, stopping in Manila to exchange Mexican and Bolivian silver for Chinese silk and porcelain. Apparently, many of these vessels brought Asian immigrants back with them to Latin America. The 100,000 or so trans-Pacific travelers included Japanese emigrants who had been stranded in China or the Philippines when the Tokugawa regime sealed the home islands' borders. A few of these were samurai whom the viceroy allowed to retain their katanas and employed in Mexico's colonial militia. I am fairly certain I made the previous sentence up. (Hastily checks book.) Nope, there it is on page 324. Mann cites a recent article by Edward Slack, who identifies the countries of origin of colonial Mexico's chino population (China, the Philippines, Japan, India), describes their professions, and observes that Asians were the only non-whites in Mexico licensed to carry weapons and serve in the colony's militia. (See Edward R. Slack, Jr., "The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image," Journal of World History 20 [Winter 2009], 35-67.) Professor Slack does not offer suggestions for how one might turn this fascinating story into a film plot, but such a movie script (perhaps a mashup of Yojimbo and Treasure of the Sierra Madre) almost writes itself.

* The English word "bounce," per the Oxford English Dictionary, existed but was not used to describe the bouncing of a ball until the seventeenth century.

The Best-Kept Secret in Chadron, Nebraska

During the past ten years I've visited three first-rate museums: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, and the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska. The latter is a compact but richly-endowed and ably-interpreted archive of materials from the North American Indian trade: animal pelts, Indian handicrafts, European trade goods, models of pirogues and trade canoes, and a restored nineteenth-century trading post. I had thought myself an expert, of sorts, on this subject, but I quickly learned that the museum's designers curators had much to teach me. Here are some of my more intriguing findings:

1) Deerskins, which I thought Europeans used primarily for breeches and gloves, could also be used as water-resistant coverings for bags and trunks.

2) When Indians bought tobacco from traders, they purchased it in highly-processed units: large spun ropes of "twist" tobacco and pressed bricks of "plug" tobacco, both commonly flavored with spices and molasses.

3) Point blankets, the large, water-resistant woolen blankets sold by the Hudson's Bay Company, whose vertical stripes (or "points") indicated their cost in beaver skins, were commonly sold in pairs. I had no idea why this was so until I actually saw a display of point blankets: each "pair" was actually a single double-sized blanket that storekeepers subsequently cut in half. British weavers supposedly made the blankets this way to minimize export duties on individual items.

4) Indians sometimes wore padlocks as pieces of jewelry, rather than using them as actual locks - a point one might remember when trying to view padlocks as evidence that Indians had abandoned the concept of communal property.

5) By the nineteenth century, the American fur trade had become not only an extension of the Atlantic economy, but the global economy. Plains Indians bought cowrie shells from the Indian and South Pacific Oceans, to decorate their clothing, and Northwest Indians sometimes bought Chinese camphor-wood boxes or coins ("cash") from European traders. This is a subject that I suspect (or at least hope) will generate a growing amount of research over the next couple of decades.

Pacific Interlude

Two quick historical notes from the Pacific coast of North America:

First, an article in Science (summarized in the March 8, 2011 issue of the New York Times) reports on archaeological findings at three 12,000-year-old sites on the Channel Islands of California. The sites contained numerous "delicate" projectile points, used for a variety of marine-oriented subsistence activities: catching fish and shellfish and hunting seals and waterfowl. The most startling feature of the sites was their age: they were contemporaneous with the Clovis culture, and provide further evidence that some of the earliest human settlers of the Americas were mariners who migrated into the hemisphere via the Pacific Coast.

Second, via Newshoggers.com, an interesting observation about historical earthquakes in the Pacific. I found it neat that one can so precisely date a major earthquake off the Oregon coast in the era before European contact, based on the simple combination of radiocarbon dating of destroyed trees and plant life, and the known impact date of a tsunami that crossed the Pacific and hit Japan the following day (27 January 1700). I must confess I also didn't know how recently Mount Hood had erupted: there was apparently a major eruption in 1805, right before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Columbia Valley.

OAH Convention Summary, Part the Second

In addition to attending a reception or two and browsing at the book exhibit, my main activity at this year's Organization of American Historians conference was attending two professional panels, one titled "Teaching American History as if the Pacific Mattered" (March 27), the other a "State of the Profession" panel on Native American History (March 28). The Pacific History panel featured presentations by Iris Engstrand, who presented some of her work on 18th-century explorers in the North Pacific; Thomas Osborne, who called for the creation of a Pacific History institute similar to Harvard's Atlantic World symposium; and Elliott Barkan, who observed ruefully that most American historians' consciousness stops at the Mississippi River. While the presentations were interesting, the session as a whole was an extended bout of question-begging, the question being "Is there really such a thing as 'Pacific History'? and if so, does anyone care?" I have my doubts. The panelists themselves seemed unsure, inasmuch as they frequently conflated Pacific History with the history of the American West, a related but not synonymous subfield.

The second panel was graced with some professional heavy-hitters - R. David Edmunds, Peter Iverson, Brenda Child, and Laurence Hauptman - but the panelists talked little about the actual "state of the field" (e.g. how many Native Americanist historians there now are, how many monographs we're producing, what questions we're now asking and interpretive devices are we using). Most instead spent their time telling a few good stories and anecdotes, and admonishing their peers to engage in more fieldwork - more direct contact with actual Native Americans - and to acknowledge the emotional depth of their field of study. I concur with the first admonition but not the second; the emotions most commonly associated with American Indian history are pity and rage, neither of which usefully contributes to historians' efforts to emphasize Native American agency and move them to the center of the historical narrative.

Dave Edmunds also informed the audience of a forthcoming American Experience miniseries on Native American history titled We Shall Remain, which premieres on April 13th. The five episodes cover 17th-century New England, Tecumseh, the Trail of Tears, Geronimo, and the Wounded Knee confrontation of 1973. A bit selective and dramatic, to be sure, but the producers wanted to make sure they could hold their audience's attention, which is a bit hard to do when you're discussing the High Plains smallpox epidemic or the Indian Reorganization Act.

Finally, here is a more thorough account of the OAH convention from the standpoint of another early Americanist (Ann Little of Colorado State University), who seems to have had a few problems with the local cuisine...