Pair 13: Voyageurs and Furs

Contemporary books, pamphlets, and maps in the Clements Library provide rich source materials on French colonial Canada from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Early French exploration and settlement of trading posts were conducted with an eye to the profitable trade in furs, largely beaver pelts. Original fur trade manuscripts reveal the lives, activities, and material culture of individual French and indigenous traders, laborers, and sometimes panis (enslaved Native American persons).

Rarely does the Clements Library have an occasion to expand our handwritten documentation of the 17th and early 18th century fur trade. In 2020, Maggs Brothers in London supplied such an opportunity, and the library was able to purchase a very scarce contract for a fur trading voyage. Associate Map Curator Mary Pedley and University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jonathan Quint skillfully transcribed and translated this manuscript, which was penned by Montréal notaire Antoine Adhémar, who is recognized for “abbreviations of his own invention [and] impossible scribbles” (Theodore Calvin Pease and Raymond C. Werner, eds. The French Foundations 1680-1693, in Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. XXIII, French Series, Vol. I. Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1934: xii).

The manuscript is a record of the terms of a contract between Nicolas Perrot and voyageurs Raphael Beauvais and Nicolas Godé to undertake a trading journey from Montréal to Odawa lands to the west. In turn, the men would each receive 700 livres worth of good beaver skins and an apichimon (a tip) of six additional skins. Like the Beauharnois license in 101 Treasures, this contract gives us an understanding of the needs of a single trading voyage. What are they expected to have in their canoe(s)? In this case, Perrot provided them with a gun, six shirts, two hats, and pelts to trade for their own profit.