CHAPTER VI.
1671.
First Public Sale at Garraway's—Contemporary Prices of Fur—The Poet Dryden—Meetings of the Company—Curiosity of the Town—Aborigines on View.
On the seventeenth day of November, 1671, the wits, beaux and well-to-do merchants who were wont to assemble at Garraway's coffee-house, London, were surprised by a placard making the following announcement:—"On the fifth of December, ensuing, There Will Be Sold, in the Greate Hall of this Place, 3,000 weight of Beaver Skins,[16] comprised in thirty lotts, belonging to the Honourable, the Governour and Company of Merchants-Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay."
The Beaver.
Such was the notice of the first official sale of the Company. Up to this date, the peltries brought back in their ships had been disposed of by private treaty, an arrangement entrusted chiefly to Mr. John Portman and Mr. William Prettyman, both of whom appear to have had considerable familiarity with the European fur-trade. The immediate occasion of this sale is a trivial matter. The causes lying behind it are of interest.
Among the numerous houses which cured and dealt in furs at this period, both in London and Bristol, there were none whose business seems to have been comparable, either in quantity or quality, to that of the great establishments which flourished in Leipsic and Amsterdam, Paris and Vienna. Indeed, it was a reproach continually levelled at the English fur-dressers that such furs as passed through their hands were vastly inferior to the foreign product; and it is certain that it was the practice of the nobles and wealthier classes, as well as the municipal and judicial dignitaries, for whose costume fur was prescribed by use and tradition, to resort not to any English establishment, but to one of the cities above-mentioned, when desirous of replenishing this department of their wardrobe. Hitherto, then, the Company had had but little opportunity of extending its trade, and but little ground to show why an intending purchaser should patronize its wares. But the superiority both in the number and quality of the skins which now began to arrive seems to have encouraged the directors to make a new bid for public custom; and as the purchasing public showed no disposition to visit their warehouses they determined to take their wares to the public.
First sale well attended.
This sale of the Company, however, the first, as it subsequently proved, of a series of great transactions which during the past two centuries have made London the centre of the world's fur-trade, did not take place until the twenty-fourth of January. It excited the greatest interest. Garraway's was crowded by distinguished men, and both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, besides Dryden, the poet, were among the spectators. There are some lines attributed to him, under date of 1672, which may have been improvised on this occasion.