Duquet’s China trading expedition

Duquet’s China trading expedition is the venture in which Charles Duquet converts the fur trade into a route toward wider, more durable commercial power. He reaches Guangzhou with rare pelts, negotiates a substantial payment in silver, and learns that a root found in New France may be as valuable to his Chinese contact as the furs. The journey expands his ambitions beyond a single commodity: forests, luxury goods, shipping routes, and new markets become parts of one imagined business.

From furs to a larger fortune

In New France, Duquet had come to distrust the fur trade’s dependence on unstable supplies and fickle markets. Beaver pelts could arrive in such quantity that warehouses filled, then become scarce through overtrapping, disease, or unexplained decline. He wanted wealth that would last for generations and a family name that could be handed down, rather than a fortune exposed to the next reversal in animal populations or demand. He therefore began looking for a resource he believed to be both abundant and enduring.

His answer was the forest. Duquet imagined timber as an inexhaustible commodity that Europe lacked and New France possessed in vast quantities. He thought it could supply ships, houses, and fuel, and that the business might grow rather than collapse with a changing animal trade. He did not abandon furs at once: he planned to build capital through the existing trade before moving into timber. The China expedition belongs to that preparatory strategy. He gathered luxury furs, including mink, ermine, otter, muskrat, fox, spotted lynx, and marten, and set out to find a distant market willing to pay for them.

Passage through a guarded trade network

On the voyage to France, Duquet asked Captain Honoré Deyon how a merchant could reach China. Deyon explained that trade there required official connections and costly gifts, and that Chinese buyers chiefly wanted silver rather than Western goods. He pointed instead to the Dutch East India Company, which controlled much of the regular trade, and suggested that Duquet seek an independent captain willing to take him east. The advice made clear that access to the market was itself a commercial obstacle: reaching China meant navigating powerful institutions and suspicious shipmasters, not simply loading cargo aboard a vessel.

In Amsterdam, Duquet approached captains and was repeatedly suspected of being a French spy. He tried to establish his bona fides by describing the forests of New France and the rigors of the fur trade, and by showing a marten skin as evidence of his occupation. At the waterfront tavern called the Rock and Shoal, he noticed Captain Outger Verdwijnen among a group of multilingual mariners. When Verdwijnen left, Duquet followed him; the captain turned and confronted him, mistaking him for a robber. Duquet identified himself as a fur merchant, opened his pack, and persuaded the captain by offering both payment for passage and cases of Dutch gin.

Verdwijnen eventually agreed to take him. The ship was due to sail in two weeks, late enough in the season that it would need to catch the southwest monsoon winds carrying ships toward India and China between June and September. Duquet’s preparations were practical and revealing: he arranged for three dozen cases of gin to be delivered aboard, then bought a hammock, sturdy clothing, an oiled cape, a ledger, quills and ink, a spyglass, and brown sugar. The passage was an investment as much as a journey, requiring him to pay for access, equip himself for trade, and arrive with goods he could sell.

Bargaining in Guangzhou

In Guangzhou, Verdwijnen explained the restrictions governing foreign commerce. Ships had to use licensed provisioners; traders dealt through licensed merchants and translators; more than sixty separate fees and cargo inspections stood between arrival and sale. Foreigners were required to stay in the designated Factory quarter rather than enter the city. From the deck, Duquet saw the long row of warehouses and storerooms, whose different national flags made the foreign-trading district resemble a city in its own right. He had reached the market, but only within the boundaries imposed on outsiders.

Weeks passed before Wuqua considered Duquet’s offerings. Wuqua appeared to expect the familiar goods of the trade—ceramics, tea, lacquerware, silks, or silver—rather than a pack of furs. Duquet displayed the pelts individually: arctic fox, mink and marten, ermine, sea otter, and a particularly desirable velvet-black fur tipped with silver. Wuqua acknowledged their quality, while noting that Russian traders also brought furs and that Guangzhou’s warm climate limited their local use; they might be sought at court or in the north.

Duquet named a high price in silver. Wuqua countered with a much smaller offer supplemented by silk and tea. Duquet responded with exaggerated disbelief, then recognized that his reaction might have damaged his position. Wuqua nevertheless gave a slight nod that Duquet understood as a sign of calculated respect for the tactic. They returned to bargaining over the course of the month, meeting again after tea and continuing their negotiations until Duquet accepted a princely sum in silver. The sale brought him a staggering profit and demonstrated that a commodity’s value depended not only on its abundance at home but on finding the market where its rarity and quality could command a premium.

The root and the next circuit

The negotiation opened a second possibility. Wuqua told Duquet that furs of comparable variety and quality might stir even greater demand in a future year, then asked whether a particular root grew in New France. He produced a gnarled root vaguely shaped like a three-legged figure. Duquet recognized it as the same kind he had seen in the hands of the Indigenous woman who had saved his life. He confirmed that it could be found in New France. Wuqua offered to pay as much for a quantity of the roots as for the furs, perhaps more depending on quality and supply. The offer gave the expedition a direct connection between the Chinese market and a resource Duquet knew from his earlier life in the colonies.

Duquet continued to think in terms of routes as well as goods. In India, he watched Verdwijnen exchange some ceramics and silks for provisions, spices, and a chest of Patna opium intended for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. He saw in the movement among China, India, and Europe a possible commercial circuit for a lumber merchant. Verdwijnen observed that opium demand in China was growing and that other traders were already pursuing the opportunity. Duquet answered that he had been thinking of opium too. At thirty-two, he was not simply returning with the proceeds of a fur sale; he was forming ambitions around the intersecting markets and cargoes of a wider trading world.

Significance and limits of the venture

The expedition’s immediate outcome is clear: Duquet secures passage, sells his furs in Guangzhou at a major profit, and learns that the root found in New France may also attract a high price. Its longer significance lies in how it gives him a model for connecting distant supply, specialized goods, and markets governed by complex rules. His attention moves readily from forests to furs, roots, lumber, and opium—not as unrelated interests but as possible instruments of durable wealth.

That way of thinking also establishes a tension central to the book’s treatment of commerce. Duquet regards the forest as a vast, renewable store of wealth and imagines timber profits continuing indefinitely. Later generations encounter the ecological damage concealed by that assumption: logging camps move on after stripping forests, leaving waste and burned ground, while the belief that another forest will always be available sustains further extraction. The China expedition does not itself depict those later consequences, but it shows the commercial imagination that helps prepare for them: resources become cargo, distant demand becomes opportunity, and the land’s apparent abundance is treated as a guarantee of future profit.