Asleep Beside a Frozen Sea

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Notes

1. Even between these covers, I regret to say. See for example, Mount, Kevin (2004) ‘Woman in white meets man in black, Performance Research 9(2): 7–11.

2. For the scale of the shoddy industry, see, for example, Glover 2013: In 1855 16 million kg of rags were dealt with in Batley, by 1935 the annual volume had risen to nearly 27 million kg, valued at over half a million pounds (£32m now).

3. For example, at Gottingen at 5 p.m. on the 11 January 1774 John Frederick Blumenbach put three drachms of mercury into a small sugar glass, covered it with a mixture of snow and sal ammoniac, and found that by 1 a.m. the following morning it was frozen solid and white like zinc. Two years later in the year of the American Declaration of Independence, Blumenbach published his Treatise on the Natural Variety of Mankind, in which he became the first to classify himself shivering in Gottingen and Thomas Hutchins blasted by ice on the roof of Fort Albany as creatures of a ‘Caucasian’ white race, and the indigenous peoples of the Little North as members of a red race.

4. Thomas Hutchins was equipped with seven thermometers by the Royal Society. They included a mercurial thermometer with an air-bulb at the top, graduated 628 degrees below the cypher and marked at every second degree; another graduated to 526 degrees below the cypher, each line representing 2 degrees; another with an air-bulb at the top graduated 2,300 degrees below the cypher; yet another on an ivory scale, divided at every 5 degrees between 2,200° degrees above and 2,500 degrees below. To these he added a Nairne and Blunt spirit thermometer of his own with which he had been making meteorological observations at Fort Albany since 1774.

5. For an attempt to compare and convert the weather data collected by Thomas Hutchins and his colleagues, see Ball 1983.

6. David Corner quotes contemporary estimates of the annual domestic consumption of hats at around three million, almost one per capita. Between 1660 and 1700 a bewildering procession of new fashions in felt hats testified to the growing demand for the product – from 1660 to 1670 the sugar loaf hat was popular, with a high crown with a rounded top and a wide brim, from 1665 to 1675, a boater style hat with a smaller crown, from 1675 to 1690 the Monmouth cock hat with a low round crown and a very broad brim cocked in variety of positions, and between 1690 and 1700 the tricorn hat symmetrically cocked into an equilateral triangle. (Corner 1991: 154).

7. See O'Leary et al.: Out of his frustration with the Committee's ‘local ignorance,’ one factor told London that ‘your rivers never freeze, ours are only for a short while open … I intreat you to dismiss from your minds the sprucely- dressed wherryman with his plush breeches and his silver badge, nor conceive the descent of the solitary bargeman at London Bridge with that thro’ the shallow horrors of rocky chasms [here] as at all synonymous’. Even the Committee acknowledged at one point that it had ‘no sort of Clue’ about many aspects of trade in Rupert's Land. (2002: 43)

8. For a detailed discussion of the condition of native American women as willing brokers and of the reliability of the traders’ view of the relationship, see van Kirk, 1997: 33ff

9. For a discussion of the internal dynamic of the Canadian fur trade during the first half the eighteenth century and of the variable control exerted from London and Paris, see Wien, 1990: 296ff

10. The preferred material was actually ‘worn beaver’, to indicate pelts that had been carried by First Nation trappers for some months before being traded, because during this pre-ownership the long guard hairs were likely to have been broken, exposing the softer hooked downy hairs beneath that fused together during the felting process like the barbules and barbicles of bird feathers.

11. For the lasting importance to the Witney industry of this first shipment, see Plummer and Early, 1969: 40ff.

12. For a discussion of the pitfalls of writing about a subject as laden with gender politics, sexual innuendo and low humour as the relationship between beaver, felt and felt hats (also for the diagnostic 1927 limerick that begins ‘There was a young lady named Eva … ’) see Francis 2004 and 2011.