Instability of the fur trade and decline of beaver resources

The instability of the fur trade and decline of beaver resources shape a decisive economic and ecological transition in the novel: beaver pelts first promise wealth, but overtrapping, uncertain supply, changing trade arrangements, and volatile markets make that promise precarious. Charles Duquet responds by looking beyond animal commodities to timber, treating the forest as a seemingly inexhaustible foundation for lasting wealth. Later scenes expose the cost of that confidence, connecting resource extraction to disrupted landscapes and the displacement of wildlife and Indigenous livelihoods.

A Trade Built on Uncertainty

Forgeron explains to Charles Duquet that the life of a coureur de bois is no reliable road to wealth. The people doing the dangerous work—the woods runners and Indigenous trappers—do not capture most of the profit; companies and merchants control the money. The trade itself has also become unsettled. Middlemen increasingly arrange exchanges with Indigenous trappers, while those trappers are being pushed out by rival groups and beaver numbers are declining. Duquet comes to recognize the limits of moving through the fur-trade network: labor and risk do not necessarily lead to riches.

The resource and market are both unstable. Beaver can disappear from heavily trapped districts, and the areas where they remain move farther north and west. Later, after a poor year marked by fear of the Iroquois and delayed supplies from France, large quantities of pelts nevertheless descend the river. French hatters and furriers eventually have more than they can use, and warehouses fill with fur. To Duquet, this alternation between scarcity and surplus shows why stories of easy, immense profits are unreliable. Overtrapping, disease, or causes nobody can identify may diminish supply; abundant catches can also overwhelm demand. Neither the animal nor the market offers the predictable foundation he wants.

From Pelts to Timber

Duquet’s response is to distinguish short-term trading gains from wealth that might endure across generations. He wants a fortune that can pass to his sons and a family name that can become an honor. Considering what could provide lasting value in the new world, he rejects beaver and other animals, along with fish, seals, game, and birds, because their numbers and markets can change suddenly. The forest appears to solve both problems: it is vast, Europe needs timber, and, in Duquet’s understanding, it grows back. He envisions a business supplying wood for ships, houses, and fuel, with profits that can continue indefinitely.

He does not immediately abandon furs. His plan is to earn as much as possible from the trade, prepare himself, and shift into timber when ready. He sketches this future to the Trépagny brothers and invites them to remain partners, but their restrained response gives him no assurance that they share his confidence. Duquet also recognizes a practical obstacle to building a durable enterprise: he cannot read or write, and fears being cheated by merchants. His proposed change of business therefore depends not only on identifying another resource, but on acquiring the means to negotiate and manage it.

New Routes, New Markets

The timber idea develops alongside Duquet’s exposure to overseas trade. Captain Outger Verdwijnen describes how the Dutch East India Company restricts private trade with India, China, and Japan, and recounts a secret partnership whose members pool resources for voyages. Duquet continues to return to the forests of New France, while Verdwijnen questions whether the country is truly his and points out that a ship suited to China trade may not carry the large timber loads a lumber merchant would need. Even so, the exchange places timber within a wider problem of transport, shipping, and access to markets.

On the voyage, trade in India offers a concrete example of goods moving through a three-cornered route. Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks for produce and spices, and takes on a chest of opium for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet immediately considers whether a similar route could work for lumber. Verdwijnen’s answer turns to the profits of the growing Chinese opium market, underscoring how commercial opportunity can redirect a voyage toward whichever commodity promises the greatest return. Timber is not simply a matter of finding trees: its commercial future depends on shipping, intermediaries, demand, and competition among goods.

In Amsterdam, Duquet learns from Benton Dred-Peacock about colonial resistance to British trade restrictions. The Royal Board of Trade regulates the cutting and supply of naval stores, including masts, bowsprits, yards, pitch, and tar; the Acts of Trade and Navigation also constrain colonial commerce. Jonathan Bridger, the royal mast contractor, may complicate access to townships and mast trees. These restrictions make timber a political as well as a commercial resource: its value attracts official oversight, while colonial merchants resent limits on their ability to sell and trade. Duquet’s vision of forest wealth thus enters a world already shaped by competing authorities and regulated supply.

The Forest’s Cost

The novel places Duquet’s faith in replenishing forests against visible changes to the land. In the years after his rise, Crown corvée gangs widen a trail into a road and more settlers enter the woods. Chopping sounds carry through the forest; trees fall and maize is planted among the stumps. Woodpeckers flee, followed by deer and moose, and then wolves. René Sel experiences the forest as an ever-present expanse that his axe cannot master, yet the work continues as new shoots grow from stumps and living roots. The scene makes the gap between the scale of the forest and the cumulative pressure of clearing part of the story’s environmental history.

The Mi’kmaw country shows that agricultural settlement and the fur economy alter the same landscape. Sosep points out French families along the shore and describes woodland edges that once supplied berries and edible roots, much of which has been plowed for maize and turnips. Acadians drain salt marshes for livestock hay; moose, caribou, and bears retreat; beaver become scarce because their skins can be exchanged for guns and metal pots. The pelt has become a form of white economic value, while the practice of placing beaver skins on graves has fallen away. The consequences are not only a smaller supply for trade: the commodity’s new role changes both the landscape and the meanings attached to the animal.

Later logging episodes extend the contrast between a resource imagined as inexhaustible and forests treated as disposable. In New Zealand, logging and trading stations pursue flax, spars, and lumber, then move on after taking the best of the shore forest. Downed timber is burned to clear land, with birds, insects, plants, and other parts of the forest world caught up in the destruction. In Michigan, Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes that Duke & Sons’ appetite for newly found pine may make rapacious extraction the company’s driving force; he deplores waste, soil loss, erosion, and the assumption that another forest will always be available. The commercial logic first exposed by the unreliable fur trade does not disappear when the commodity changes. It moves from pelts to timber, while the ecological cost accumulates in the places from which wealth is taken.

A Changed Measure of Wealth

The fur trade’s instability is therefore both a plot motive and a recurring measure of economic judgment. Duquet understands correctly that no single stream of animal wealth can guarantee a hundred years of fortune. His alternative, however, rests on a mistaken confidence that forests replace themselves fast enough to sustain limitless extraction. The later contrast between wild forests and managed timber makes that assumption explicit: one view treats a forest as an interconnected world living for itself; the other treats trees as a crop that can be cut, replanted, and made to yield revenue.

The novel follows a change in what can be sold, but not an escape from the uncertainties of extraction. Beaver numbers, demand, trade rules, and shipping routes all constrain the fur economy; timber appears to offer a larger, steadier resource and a means of building a family enterprise. Yet the forest is not simply a more dependable commodity. As animals retreat, marshes are drained, and woodlands are cut and burned, the apparent permanence of timber wealth is revealed as an economic assumption with lasting consequences for ecosystems and the people whose lives depend on them.