Hunting Beaver. James Isham. 1743. Coloured drawing reprinted in James Isham’s  Observations on Hudsons Bay, 1743, edited by E. E. Rich, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1949. 

How do we envision animals and our relationships with them? What historical developments have shaped our ideas and representations of animals?  

This illustration is from James Isham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay, 1743. Based on a drawing Isham created while serving the Hudson’s Bay Company as Chief of the fur trading fort at Churchill, Manitoba, it presents a scientific illustration of the beaver within the scene of an ‘Indian’ beaver hunt. To consider the uniqueness of this extended human-animal social scene, think of other illustrations of beavers you have seen. How often do they involve both humans and animals going about their daily business – separately as well as in engagement with each other?   

In the late eighteenth century the separation between the world of humans and animals was still in the making. In European culture, the beaver occupied a middle position. As natural historians assembled explorers’ reports from across the globe, they noted the beaver’s uniqueness in 1) forming societies of up to several hundred individuals; 2) transforming the environment in ways that offered protection from climatic and predatory threats and secured year-long access to food; and 3) dispersing across the entire northern hemisphere. (Distinctions had yet to be made between the North American beaver, Castor canadensis, and the Eurasian beaver, Castor fiber). Consequently, natural historians engaged in the disturbing practice of ascribing to beavers and beaver societies the very qualities other historians proposed as identifying characteristics of humans and human societies.  

Ideas of beaver sociality originated with North American Indigenous peoples, who reportedly believed that beavers were ‘endued with reason’ and ‘had a government, laws, and language of their own’ (Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix, 1761). In the work of European natural historians, similar ideas surfaced in images of amphibious commonwealths, elaborate beaver bungalows and semi-aquatic cities – animal parallels to classical Venice.  

Thomas Pennant’s Artic Zoology (Vol I, 1784) followed convention in presenting beavers as emotional social creatures forming ‘animal civilizations’. Where Pennant diverged from other natural historians was in not regarding the repression and degradation of animals and animal societies as the prerequisite for human development. Because his work expressed concern about the fur-trade’s ‘ravages among the animal creation’ on the North American continent, it met with opposition among his collaborators in the Hudson’s Bay Company. Samuel Hearne, who (like Isham) had provided important written accounts and animal specimens, realized the danger of Pennant’s critique to his employer. Attacking Pennant’s use of anthropomorphisms and social metaphors in descriptions of natural phenomena, Hearne (1795) used his own beaver descriptions to establish clear demarcations between the language of natural and human history. In this manner, he ensured that the effects of modern human (European) civilization on (North American) animal civilizations were downplayed, and the fur trade could continue unabated.   

Because the fur-trade and the advancement of the science of zoology went hand in hand on the North American continent, images (like Isham’s) of animal sociality crossing the nature-culture divide – whether literally or in the utilization of metaphors – gradually disappeared from view. 

References   

Charlevoix, Pierre-Francois-Xavier de. 1761. Journal of a Voyage to North-America (Vol. I and II) London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley. 

Hearne, Samuel. [1795] 2011. A Journey to the Northern Ocean. Victoria: TouchWood Editions.  

Isham, James. [1743] 1949. James Isham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay, Ed. by E.E. Rich. Toronto: Champlain Society. 

Pennant, Thomas. 1784. Arctic Zoology Vol I. London: Henry Hughes. 

Essay by Sigfrid Kjeldaas