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Overview
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title
More than any other nonhuman species, it was the sea otter that defined the world's largest oceanscape before the California gold rush. In addition to the more conventional aspects of the sea otter trade, including Russian expansion in Alaska, British and American trading in the Pacific Northwest, and Spanish colonial ventures along the California coast, the global importance of the species can be seen in its impact on the East Asian maritime fur trade. This trade linked imperial China, Japan, and indigenous Ainu peoples of the Kurile Islands as early as the fifteenth century.
In Sea Otters: A History Richard Ravalli synthesizes anew the sea otter's complex history of interaction with humans by drawing on new histories of the species that consider international and global factors beyond the fur trade, including sea mammal conservation, Cold War nuclear testing, and environmental tourism. Examining sea otters in a Pacific World context, Ravalli weaves together the story of imperial ambition, greed, and an iconic sea mammal that left a determinative imprint on the modern world.
Richard Ravalli is an associate professor of history at William Jessup University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496225009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2021 |
| Series: | Studies in Pacific Worlds |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Sales rank: | 447,545 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Richard Ravalli teaches history at William Jessup University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Rakkoshima, the Sea Otter Islands
In 1770 a boat carrying some eighty Russian fur trappers (promyshlenniki) arrived at Urup Island, roughly south of the halfway point in the Kuril archipelago between Japan and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Russians had been visiting the island chain since early in the century, hunting animals and trading for sea otter pelts with inhabitants of the Kurils known as Ainu — "humans," in their language. Urup eventually became known for a large sea otter colony located there; thus the volcanic, rectangular-shaped land mass was dubbed Sea Otter Island by fur traders and was a stopping point for a number of expeditions. Violent encounters between promyshlenniki and Ainu had occurred in the Kurils prior to 1770, yet the events of that year precipitated a major response by Native warriors. According to a Japanese report, the Russians shot and killed a number of Ainu hunters following a meeting between the two groups on Urup. Outnumbered and with their pelts confiscated, the Ainu fled south along the Kurils, where chiefs at Iturup and Kunashir Islands decided to cooperate and engage the interlopers with a large force. In 1771, on board some fifty itaomacip (small sailed vessels), warriors set sail for Urup. Around one hundred Russians arrived at the hunting grounds this time, and as they attempted to come to shore the Ainu attacked them. Approximately ten promyshlenniki died during the assault; others scrambled through the surf and were struck by the poison arrows of Ainu archers who had climbed the sides of the vessel and shot at fleeing survivors. An additional two or three Russians were killed, and many were wounded. The Ainu had retaken Sea Otter Island.
The violence at Urup was mirrored by events in the Aleutian Islands and elsewhere in the North Pacific as Siberian hunters pursued marine mammal quarry for profit and often attempted to procure tribute (yasak) from indigenous people by force or coercion. Examining similar actions in the Kuril Islands offers an opportunity to compare eighteenth-century Russian colonialism on localized scales. Looking carefully at sea otter hunting and trading in the western Pacific also allows us to reframe the history of the maritime fur trade more generally, since the focus of attention is most often on events in the Aleutians and to the east. The Pacific explorations of Vitus Bering, Russian expeditions to Alaska, and Spanish, British, and American efforts from Vancouver Island to California have been thoroughly documented. Oceanic histories surrounding Kamchatka, Hokkaido, and other Northeast Asian locations broaden the scope of the sea otter trade and make it possible to tell the story of Enhydra lutris more completely.
Inter-Asian fur markets that existed centuries before the eastward excursions of both Bering and promyshlenniki suggest the need to expand knowledge of the exchange of skins geographically and temporally. Among historians of the North American West, rethinking of the fur trade has been aided since the millennium by a growing attention to Pacific history and the development of a "Pacific World." According to David Igler, such a concept "would have made little sense" prior to eighteenth-century breakthroughs like James Cook's final expedition, which expanded and intensified European American contact with the region. Before 1700 Spain's Manila galleons set off on transoceanic ventures (inaugurated in the sixteenth century), and Europeans formed other post-Columbian economic ties with Asia and the South Pacific. Yet the Pacific remained a "Spanish lake" and was not an integrated geographic space in the same manner as was the early modern Atlantic World. The people and sea otters of the ocean's northwestern portions help us to understand some of the larger forces that made such integration possible by the mid- to late eighteenth century. The first modern markets for otter pelts and Russian expansion in the western Pacific set the stage for a degree of commercial and colonial involvement that effectively put the Pacific — particularly much of its North American littoral — on world maps. Historian Robert Hellyer has argued for the importance of the Pacific's West in the forging of links with its East and "insular middle" after 1750. Preceding 1750, maritime fur trading in the West unfolded in crucial and often overlooked ways.
Despite the deadly clash with Ainu in 1770–71, Russians continued to sail to Urup to exchange items such as textiles, silks, and sugar for furs even after an attempt to establish a permanent post on the island was ended by a destructive earthquake and tsunami in 1780. Metaphorically similar to the tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire, an intensification of Japanese involvement in the Kurils also disrupted the efforts of promyshlenniki to consolidate the islands commercially and geopolitically. Earlier claims by Japan to northern reaches and a need to expel the barbarians moving south toward Hokkaido encouraged the shogunate to resist Russian encroachment in the region. Among other things, this involved attempts by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to control and assimilate the Ainu traders who acted as middlemen between Japanese and Russian merchants. As Brett Walker argues, this "middle ground" of the western Pacific led to Ainu subjugation and dependency in a similar fashion to changes that affected indigenous people positioned between rival powers in North America. At the same time, the international tensions of the Kuril trade helped to limit the destruction of local sea otter populations. Russians returned to settle Urup in the 1790s, but they were frustrated in part by greater Japanese investment in the southern Kurils and an inability to access resources from the Ainu. Sea Otter Island, situated along both geological and imperial fault lines, provided a different environment from the one Siberian colonists encountered at Kodiak Island around the same time (discussed in the following chapter). The difficulties that promyshlenniki had in killing them, coupled with limited Japanese interest in fur trading for much of the eighteenth century, meant that local sea otters were less exploited than the species was elsewhere in the Pacific. Otter pelts from the Kurils may have been the first to reach non-Native markets, but for various reasons the number of animals remained relatively stable there before 1800.
Commercial Networks in the Western Pacific
For much of its imperial history, China lacked forests capable of supporting sizable populations of large furbearing animals. The clearing of northern woodlands for farms left relatively little space for such species to dwell. Reverence for fur as a rare luxury item was expressed in sources as early as the Tang dynasty (roughly AD 600–1000), a mixed-blood Chinese and Central Asian ruling house. Fur was associated with "exotic" Central Asian societies, although it may have faded in importance later during less heterogeneous dynasties. The Mongols and other barbarian groups were often identified with the frontier product. Sea otter fur reached China as early as the middle of the Ming dynasty (1450–1550), an imperial era marked by increased luxury consumption. Referencing Japanese scholarship, Chikashi Takahashi cites 1483 as the earliest year for the export of otter pelts to China from Japan. Generally, pelts were acquired on Hokkaido (formerly Ezo) and the Kuril Islands by Ainu hunters and traders who brought them to posts on Hokkaido, a northern island discovered by Japanese explorers as early as the first millennium. Merchants then transported them south to Nagasaki for export to China through Korea. Over time, expanding the trade of marine products allowed Japan's rulers to limit the flow of silver to China.
The Ainu are a people native to islands and coastal ranges in the Sea of Okhotsk. They exhibit more body hair than other East Asians, which often earned them exotic descriptions from their neighbors, and although Caucasian features once led to speculation about their origin, the Asian heritage of the Ainu has long been established. They are multiethnic descendants of ancient to medieval Jomon, Okhotsk, and Satsumon cultures and began to appear in early Japanese royal chronicles as distinct barbarians from the North. Ainu hunters killed sea otters with handheld bows (caniku) and harpoons (marep) managed from boats, as depicted in a 1799 Japanese woodblock from the collection Nihon Sankai Meisan Zue. On land they may have used crossbow traps rigged with aconite-laced poisoned arrows, which they used to kill bear and deer. Salmon fishing was central to Ainu sustenance, as was small-scale grain and vegetable crop production.
Anthropological and historical studies have emphasized the importance of long-distance Ainu trading that helped to link the Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin Island, and the Kurils with Hokkaido and Japan. Permanent settlers migrated to southern Hokkaido as early as the Kamakura era (twelfth to fourteenth centuries) and laid the groundwork for an active barter exchange between the Japanese and indigenous northerners. As Kaoru Tezuka explains, "Products were brought to and from Hokkaido in ships traveling across the Tsugaru Strait or along coastal waters. These included items not produced in Hokkaido, such as rice, salt, tobacco, cloth, koji ferment, and metal which the Ainu very much wanted. The Japanese were particularly eager to receive eagle feathers, which they used to fletch their arrows, and marine products."
Chinese goods obtained by Ainu and other groups from the Amur River on the East Asian mainland via Sakhalin were part of these networks — this was known as the "Santan" trade, distinct from the Kuril trade. Thus it is possible that sea otter fur reached China before Japan first realized its potential as a trade item. Whatever the case regarding the first use of an otter pelt in Asia beyond those who lived near and hunted the animals, records from the sixteenth century onward reveal that Ainu tribes thrived as marine mammal hunters and traders from southern Kamchatka to Japan's northern frontier. Fur was part of an ongoing maritime exchange system that carried Japanese and Ainu goods across the northwestern Pacific, linking the Ainu with both Japan and the Russian Empire.
Japanese elites were among the first to recognize the importance of otter skins as an exotic luxury item. An eighteenth-century report records that in the 1560s "pure white sea otter pelts" from the Kurils made their way to Hokkaido, and otter fur was gifted to officials in later decades. Prior to their martyrdom by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, the Jesuit missionaries Jerónimo de Ángeles and Diego Carvalho noted the existence of the pelt trade emanating from Urup. By the eighteenth century, sea otter furs from the Kurils were believed to have special healing properties, and using them as a cushion was thought to help with poor circulation and even the effects of smallpox. As historian John Stephan notes, the islands became known during the early modern era as Rakkoshima, or the "sea-otter isles," signifying the special place of the species in Japanese frontier imagination.
The Kurils, a chain of fifty-six volcanic islands stretching some eight hundred miles between Japan and Kamchatka, were, like Hokkaido, exotic barbarian lands shrouded in mystery. Both appeared in inaccurate and vague forms on Japanese maps into the early eighteenth century. It was at Hokkaido that Japanese lords managed trade with Kuril Ainu. Similar to other points of exchange in the maritime fur trade, sea otter fur was one of the most expensive items traded at the island and regulated by officials. In one analysis of prices for fish oil, cloths of tree fiber, and marine mammal skins, sea otter pelts rank at over five hundred times the cost of seal skins at Hokkaido for the year 1786. Perhaps the disparity had something to do with increasing competition from Russian merchants by the late eighteenth century or with an increase in the volume of fur exports to China. Whatever the case, the otter was long recognized as a valuable commodity from Japan's wild North. Animals hunted and exported by the Ainu were vital sources of symbolic power for early modern Japanese elites. Hawks, trapped on the island by both Japanese specialists and Ainu hunters, were perhaps most important to the economy of Hokkaido. Similar to the possession of furs, hawks and falconry conferred a sense of wealth and prestige to lords as fantastic things from faraway lands. Some estimates from the mid-seventeenth century calculated profits from the hawk industry at or above all taxes collected from trade ships at Hokkaido.
After 1700 Japanese investment in the Kuril trade expanded with the establishment of an outpost north of Hokkaido at Kunashir Island. The curious case of merchants who were shipwrecked far beyond the island may have been related to this expanding northern trade and resulted in the first Japanese individuals to bring back information on Kamchatka and Russia. The men were reportedly traveling along the coast of Honshu in 1782 and were on their way to Edo when a storm pulled them out to sea. Jean-Baptiste Barthélemy de Lesseps, who traveled to Kamchatka in 1787 with the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, noted encountering nine survivors from the crew who were shipwrecked at Amchitka Island in the Aleutians and were ultimately saved by a group of Russians engaged in sea otter trading. Barthélemy de Lesseps did not entirely believe their story, but his record is unclear about whether they were engaged in trade in the Kurils or elsewhere north of Japan. He asked one of the sailors "some questions respecting the nature of the merchandise they had saved from their wreck" and was told that it consisted mostly of "cups, plates, boxes, and other commodities," some of which were sold at Kamchatka. Whatever their intended destination, the merchants traveled to St. Petersburg and met Catherine the Great, and three of them returned home in 1792 as part of an expedition led by the Finnish navigator Adam Laxman, who was sent on a Russian mission to open Japan to trade. Laxman returned unsuccessful in his effort.
Whatever Japanese traders sought in return from northern territories — furs, hawks, or fish — the Ainu were dramatically affected by trade relations with Japan. Commercial contacts changed Ainu life as natural resources were increasingly viewed for their market value and less as sources of sustenance. Leaders adopted Japanese goods as indicators of social and economic standing. Sake was integrated into the Ainu metaphysical universe, offered in ritual to ancestors and deities. Such shifts resulted in increased dependence on trade and local environmental depletion. The overhunting of deer for skins was particularly destructive to Ainu communities on Hokkaido, a major cause of famines there in the late eighteenth century. Thus the Ainu who fought promyshlenniki at Urup in 1770 were already living in a world turned upside down by commercial and imperial contacts. Shakushain's Rebellion, a failed mid-seventeenth-century insurgency inspired by Japanese encroachment on Hokkaido, was by that point a distant memory.
Russians in the Western Pacific
Russian extension eastward to the Pacific by the early 1700s represented a distinct commercial and political challenge to the Japanese state. Due in part to the robust Kuril trade, some in Japan believed that the entire archipelago and even the Kamchatka Peninsula were within their rightful territorial claim. The appearance of foreign "red-haired devils" in these areas contested such notions and threatened to disturb lucrative fur exchanges. As the Japanese official Mogami Tokunai summarized in 1785, "The Kuril Islands belong to Japan. Sea-otter fur is the best product of Ezochi. It has been sent to Nagasaki to be sold to Chinese ships since the old days. However, in recent years, the Russians have come to collect sea-otter furs and sell them to Beijing as a Russian product. This is a shame and a serious problem for Japan."
Tokunai was a member of a mission dispatched by the shogunate to explore the Kurils for colonization and trade opportunities with the Russians. Apparent in his report is that the economic concerns of the northern frontier, epitomized by the sea otter trade, were beginning to give way to national security worries by the late eighteenth century. Japan's fears of Russian encroachment can be traced to developments on the Eurasian continent centuries prior. As Cossacks and entrepreneurs began to expand east across the Ural Mountains during the late 1500s, their efforts at trapping — sable, in particular — and collecting tribute contributed greatly to the tsar's royal coffers. Detrimental effects on the indigenous human and animal populations of Siberia were also part of this movement east. By the mid mid-seventeenth century, Russians had reached the Sea of Okhotsk and penetrated to the Amur River (imperial China's only natural northern border), raiding villages of Natives who petitioned China for assistance. It was at a frontier town in the Russian-Chinese borderlands that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed in 1689. Russia agreed to recognize the Amur as the official border with China and was granted trading rights in return. After 1728 commercial exchanges between the two powers were limited largely to the border town of Kiakhta.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Rakkoshima, the Sea Otter Islands 2. Promyshlenniki and Padres 3. Boston Men 4. Near Extinction and Reemergence 5. Nukes, Aquaria, and Cuteness Conclusion Appendix: List of Vessels Engaged in the California Sea Otter Trade, 1786–1847 Notes Bibliography Index