Abstract
On 25 June 1786 21-year-old Alexander Walker, ensign on a fur-trading expedition from Bombay led by the merchant James Strange, sighted the north-west coast of America. Early the next morning eight canoes, soon followed by forty more, came out to the ships. With great curiosity, Walker witnessed this first encounter between the Mowachaht people and a British merchant.
Highlights
It was the site of an international incident in 1790 — the Nootka Crisis between Spain and Britain, which witnessed the British issuing an ultimatum of war after Spanish acts of possession at Nootka, and provocation of British and American merchant vessels arriving there
This article investigates accounts of incidents of trade in sea-otter furs in exchange for iron and copper as recorded by European merchants and explorers between 1774 and 1792, and especially the account provided by Alexander Walker in 1786
My study is a global history of a very specific type of long-distance commodity trade — furs for iron — as it developed within the particular locality of Nootka Sound and the specific moments of encounter and trade between indigenous peoples and Europeans travelling from the Indian Ocean
Summary
SEA OTTERS AND IRON copper for Pacific sea-otter furs to be traded to China. I focus especially on the neglected Alexander Walker, who arrived on the Pacific coast from India in 1786 and returned to India the year after, and was only some years later to write up the notes of a journal into three draft accounts of his reflections on the people and trade of Nootka. What is global in this study is my research into a long-distance trade of an individual commodity in the very specific local context of Nootka Sound, a trading hub which differed from most other trade ports on the East India Company and private European merchant routes. This particular trading space was one part of a long trading chain which connected European metals and other goods with furs gathered here for expected sales in China. Micro-analysis of a specific locality, such as this remote place, little known to European and even global historians, connects us to the highly specific studies of villages and communities developed by the German, French and Italian microhistorians of the
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