Its amphibious body is covered with a soft felt-like under fur that is 1 inch thick. This under layer of barbed hairs is called fur-wool and it is covered by a protective over layer of coarse guard hairs measuring about 2 inches in length. The farther north the beaver lives, the thicker the fur coat is. Fur can be exploited to produce fancy fur or staple fur. Fancy fur is the fur of the furrier, who makes coats well known for their luster and warmth. Staple fur is the under layer of fur-wool which has been removed from the pelt and separated from its protective guard hairs.
This is the fur of the felt maker and the hatter. While most furs can be used as fancy, only a limited number of animals skins have the special quality needed for the making of hats. Beaver is most perfectly made for felting purposes because of the barbed or spiccated nature of its under-fur. Examined through a microscope, it can be seen that over the entire surface of beaver under-fur lies a series of scales that appear to overlap each other.
The edges of these lie all one way and thus give the fibre the impulse to travel in the opposite direction for these "staples" or "edges" catch when pressed against each other. As a result, beaver felt keeps it's shape under rough handling and successive wettings, and it does so better that any felt made from wool or other pelts. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the process for making a beaver hat was lengthy 7 hours and required over 30 procedures conducted by various specialists.
Beaver skins were stripped of their outer guard-hair and turned into felt through a complex process of combing, beating and drying.
Depending on the price and quality of the hat, the size of the beaver pelts, and the richness of the felt, a single hat needed between 1 to 5 full-grown male pelts for its production. Cheaper hats, such as those worn by soldiers, combined beaver, horse, and rabbit fur in order to make them less expensive to manufacture. The pelt just arrived in the hatter's workshop was rough, greasy and covered with coarse hair, under which was the fine felt.
The guard-hairs were first removed with a knife or tweezers. The pelt was then spread with a chemical solution of nitrate of mercury, which caused small scales to raise on each felt fiber.
This increased the felt's matting capacity and gave it a reddish color. However, constant exposure to mercury fumes attacked the nervous system of hatters, thus causing muscle twitching as well as difficulties in speech and thought, which is how the expression "mad as a hatter" appeared. In turn, the pelt was dried and the under-fur was shaved off. To separate the remaining guard hairs from the under-fur, hatters used a tool similar to a bow.
The mix of felt and hair was vibrated and the long coarse hairs gradually fell into traps on the hatter's table. Once the felt was separated from the skin, it was manipulated to form 3 or 4 flat and triangular pieces called "capades", each looking like a piece of pie.
Each capade was wrapped in a leather skin and placed on a wooden bench with a heated iron plate placed in the center. This strengthened and condensed the capades and allowed the hatter to bring them together to form a single cone-shaped piece of felt.
Because the hat body was still very large at this point, it required further shrinkage and toughening. It was thus placed in a large kettle filled with a hot mix of water, sulfuric acid, beer-grounds and wine lees. After the hat body was immersed in this solution over and over again, it was worked by hand or with a rolling pin.
This combined use of pressure, heat and moisture helped reduce the felt to about half its original size. This was done until the texture became firm and was ready to draw over a wooden mould, on which the material was worked to give it a desired shape and style. The shrunken hat body was stripped of its cone-shaped top and placed in a copper container filled with a dye. The hat was kept in this boiling mixture for about 45 minutes before being removed to cool. This was done several times until the hat obtained the desired color.
Other entities, including the North West Company , also issued tokens in exchange for pelts. For example, one beaver pelt could buy either one brass kettle, one and a half pounds of gunpowder, a pair of shoes, two shirts, a blanket, eight knives, two pounds of sugar or a gallon of brandy. Ten to twelve pelts could buy a long gun, while four pelts would purchase a pistol. The HBC produced brass Made Beaver tokens in the s, and continued to exchange pelts for tokens until Though the fur trade declined in economic importance beginning in the early 19th century, the beaver pelt was an essential part of the development of relations between Aboriginal peoples and European settlers.
The Standard of Trade See how much one beaver pelt was worth in commodities in From hbcheritage. Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. Remember me. I forgot my password. Why sign up? Create Account. For everyday use or costume and decoration , furs have been used for the production of outterware such as coats and cape, garment and shoe lining, a variety of head coverings, and ornamental trim and trappings.
European and Asian trade in felts and fur stretched back centuries, if not millennium. Depending on the supply of animals, Russian, Northern Scandinavia, and Central Asia were the major supplies of this trade through the 15 th century. Furs were supplied to the Mediterranean and Middle East through Constantinople. This trade can be traced back to the Classical Greek and Roman periods, and through to the modern era.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Scandinavian and Viking Rus traders traded to Northern and central Europe a variety of furs including: marten, reindeer, bear, otter, sable, ermine, black and white fox, and beaver. Due to the strength and malleable quality of felts, they were used extensively in hat making. The physical structure of beaver fur predisposes it to the felting process, making it a highly desirable fur for felt production.
Crean suggests that wool felting likely spread to western Europe after the sack of Kiev by the Tarters in , when artisans fled west.
However, beave r felting techniques did not diffuse westward, and the beaver felting industry remained centralized in Russia until the late 17 th century. With a monopoly on both supply and industry, the Russians developed and refined techniques for processing beaver fur.
Essential to the felting process was a step known as combing, which separated the beaver's guard hairs from the downy under wool that was desired f or felts.
The careful guarding of this trade secret helped to maintain the Russian monopoly. Nonethel ess, George Stubbes reported in his Anatomie of Abuses that beaver hats were sold at 40 shillings a piece and were "fetched from beyond the sea," [5] indicating that the British industry was not, or was not able, to completely control the domestic market.
Unfortunately, due to population depletion of the European beaver, by nearly all exports of beaver fur and felts from Russia stopped. England, France, and the Netherlands had all established North American colonies by the early-to-mid 17 th century.
Although beaver populations could be found all over North America, beaver in the northern parts of the continent contained the fuller coats that were more desirable in the fur trade. Because there were no physical differences between the north American beaver Castor canadensis and the European beaver Castor fiber , the American beaver was an easy substitute for the near-extinct European beaver.
Both the superior ecological familiarity, and well-developed hunting and trapping skill sets of native hunters were essential to providing a steady supply of beaver from North America. Within the colony itself, trade functioned as both an economic exchange and a means of establishing alliances between Europeans and their Native American neighbors.
The exchange of goods inhabited a realm that tied two cultures together economically, symbolically and politically. An open market for European goods in the colonies, and the supply of raw material from the colonies to Europe, helped drive the colonial economy.
The introduction of steel tools and gun powder weaponry transformed indigenous American society. The Europeans, on the other hand, heavily relied upon their Native American neighbors for access to American resources, such as the beaver.
0コメント