Once, it was the ultimate status symbol. For the Haida people of the northwest coast of America, a 鈥渃opper鈥�, like the one on display in the British Museum鈥檚 North America Gallery, was as good as a Picasso in the drawing room or a Porsche on the driveway-a sign of conspicuous wealth. But the solid, torso-sized pieces of beaten copper were more than that. Each had a name and was adorned with the family crest-a stylised hawk, a bear or a killer whale. When visitors came, they were regaled with stories of the heroic ancestors who had once owned this family heirloom.
In the 18th century, when explorers and traders from Europe began to reach the remote villages of what is now British Columbia, they too heard these tales of the times before the Europeans came. A few of the coppers were carried back to Europe, eventually ending up in the British Museum. More than a century later, analysis of the metal revealed that these heirlooms, supposedly hammered into shape long before Europeans set foot in the region, were made from metal mined in southwest England.
WHEN the first Europeans landed on the northwest coast of America in the 18th century, they found a land of plenty. Unlike most hunter-gatherer peoples, the Haida and their neighbours didn鈥檛 have to go far to feed their families. Half a dozen species of salmon practically leapt into their hands and the shoals of herring were so dense they could be gathered in with rakes. If people wanted a change from eating fish, the forests provided deer, elk, bears and berries. The villages were large, with fine cedarwood houses, and there was plenty of spare time for art and culture, feasts and parties.
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Europeans came late to this part of the world-at least officially. The Spanish arrived in 1774, followed four years later by James Cook on his search for the Northwest Passage. Then, in 1794, British navigator George Vancouver charted America鈥檚 tortuous Pacific coastline in minute detail. But despite Cook鈥檚 glowing reports of a fine, rich land with a wealth of furs to be had, few Europeans made the long and hazardous journey, either by sea or overland until the second quarter of the 19th century. Most of those who did come were trappers, fur traders and whalers, rather than settlers.
Within twenty years of the first official landings, reports of the precious 鈥渃oppers鈥� began to crop up. What exactly these things were wasn鈥檛 clear, but they were obviously very valuable. A single copper was worth thousands of blankets-the currency of the time. In the Pacific Northwest, the social calendar was dominated by potlatches, parties thrown to remind people how rich and powerful their host was. Chiefs competed to give their guests the most expensive gifts-and the family copper was the most prestigious present of all.
The coppers in the British Museum were acquired in the 19th century and were thought to be hundreds of years old. If the heroic ancestors created the coppers, where had they acquired the metal?
North America is well supplied with native copper, a pure form of the metal that appears on the surface of rocks as nuggets and fine threads or 鈥渟tringers鈥�. Around 80 per cent of the world鈥檚 native copper is in North America, with rich deposits in the far north of Canada and Alaska and around Lake Superior. In the northernmost regions there were also scattered patches of 鈥渇loat copper鈥�-lumps of metal moved around the continent by the great ice sheets of the last ice age. With so much pure metal available, these people never needed to learn how to smelt ore to extract copper. All they had to do was heat and hammer the pieces of pure metal picked up off the ground.
One of the museum鈥檚 coppers, bought from the Indian Commissioner for British Columbia in 1894, had belonged to 鈥楴egh-icum-gee, a chief of the Kitwillgiouls. 鈥淭he copper is some hundreds of years old and is beaten out of a solid lump of copper found on an island in Alaska,鈥� said the chief. So when researchers from the British Museum analysed tiny cores drilled out of the coppers in their collection they expected to find native copper. Instead, the metal had clearly been smelted from ore. Unlike the extremely pure native copper, it contained a pattern of trace elements characteristic of metal smelted and refined in a furnace.
Some samples produced an even bigger surprise: traces of bismuth, something so unusual it immediately identified the source of the copper. The researchers had seen this 鈥渟ignature鈥� before-in Cornish copper ingots salvaged from the wreck of the Carnbrae Castle, an East Indiaman that sank in 1829 shortly after setting off from London. Copper ingots are usually short-lived and anonymous things. But ingots recovered from a sunken ship with a name and a documented cargo are as good as labelled with date, origin and destination.
The museum has been building up a collection of ingots from wrecks, and a set of signatures for metals mined in different places at different times. Only copper from Cornwall contains such a large amount of bismuth.
The match did more than identify the source of the Haida copper, it also put a date to it, because the Cornish copper industry flourished only briefly. British copper dominated the market from the early 1700s. But by the 1850s, cheap ore from Chile and Australia destroyed demand and the industry fizzled out.
Fair exchange
This suggests that the ancient coppers were not so ancient after all, but were made some time between the 1770s, when the first Europeans arrived on the coast, and 1850 when trade in Cornish copper died away. The coppers may not tell us much about the ancestors of the Haida and other peoples of the northwest coast, but they tell another story-about the power of trade.
The smelted copper could only have come from trappers, whalers and sailors from British naval ships. They exchanged copper kettles, tools and spare pieces of copper plate-for repairing the cladding on their ships鈥� hulls-for sea otter pelts and other valuable furs. Within a few short years, the smelted English copper was turning up in remote villages where no European had ever been. This new and precious material travelled fast, shifting the balance of economic power from the people of the north, who controlled supplies of native copper, to the coastal people who had contact with the Europeans.
And, of course, the trickle of copper could have begun even before Cook first put in an appearance. He was exploring the world for king and country and to earn a place in the history books. But for the whalers and trappers who might have got there before him, official recognition was the last thing they wanted. Their fortunes depended on keeping the best hunting places secret for as long as possible.