The Eliza

William Sturgis, born in Barnstable, Massachusetts (Cape Cod), on February 25, 1782, was one of the most significant merchants who operated out of New England in the 19th century, transitioning to the role following an initially successful career as a sailor. Sturgis was primarily involved in the Maritime Fur Trade for sea otter pelts between New England, the Northwest Coast (Alaska and British Columbia), and China. After his father’s death a year prior, Sturgis, at the age of just sixteen, went to sea in 1798 as an assistant trader on the ship Eliza, the voyage of which is mapped here. Sturgis’s broader reflections illuminate a maritime world in which intense commercial competition, Indigenous bargaining power, and competing Russian, British, and American imperial interests produced both extraordinary profits and escalating violence in tandem.

Thanks to the record-keeping detailed in Sturgis’ autobiographical reflections, we know that Eliza was one of the most successful trading ships in the 1799 season along Alaska’s southeastern coast, trading goods like blue and red cloth, greatcoats, muskets, and axes with the Alaskan Indigenous traders such as the Tlingit and Haida for 2,800 sea otter pelts, which sold at an average price of twenty-five dollars per pelt in Chinese ports. That season, Eliza was joined by three other Boston-origin ships: the Ulysses, Hancock, and Dispatch, as well as three ships from Canton (Guangzhou), China: the Dove, Cheerful, and Dragon. As news spread about the “imminent profits made in the NW trade,” Sturgis describes how many “adventurers” were induced to “engage in [the trade] without either information or capital,” leading to consequences that “anyone acquainted with the business might foresee: that almost all of them made losing voyages.” His narrative reveals that the Indigenous traders were able to leverage the competition from increased supply and take advantage of the inexperience of Anglo-American traders to reap large profits. While sailing in 1801 with the Caroline, Sturgis notes that being the first vessel to arrive that season, they traded at a rate of three fathoms of blue cloth, two fathoms of red cloth, or two blankets for a prime pelt, a musket for three pelts, and a great coat for one pelt. As more inexperienced crews arrived, he notes that “a spectator would have thought their sole object was to get rid of their cargoes as soon as possible without minding what they got in return, so wantonly and unnecessarily did they squander it away that even the Natives, who were reaping the profits of their misconduct, openly censured their proceedings and laughed at their folly.” He details that these crews traded at rates of ten fathoms of blue cloth or three muskets per pelt, which forced more bargain-oriented ships to visit less frequented ports.

While most of the trading ships Sturgis describes came from the American Northeast – Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania – to trade at Kaigani near the southwest corner of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, he also discusses the growing Russian presence at nearby Sitka, which he refers to as Norfolk Sound, where the Russian American Company established a settlement in 1799. This fort site, known later as Old Sitka, was attacked and destroyed by the Tlingit in 1802 to forestall the Russians establishing a presence in Southeast Alaska that would expand their commercial activities into new hunting grounds for the sea otter from their existing base on Kodiak Island. American traders such as Sturgis, who were known to the Alaska Natives collectively as the “Boston Men” even if they were from other U.S. states because most of them sailed out of New England ports in and around Boston, were contemporaneously active in Southeast Alaska in the same market for sea otter pelts. As a result, this region witnessed layered rivalries and shifting alliances between Russian, Tlingit, Haida, and American merchants in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Sturgis concludes his memoirs by reporting that the Russians sent a war ship (the Neva, which became the first Russian ship to complete a circumnavigation) from St. Petersburg to Sitka in 1804 and drove the Indigenous populations away from this coast in entirety. His narrative here concerns the Battle of Sitka and its aftermath, when the Russians established a new Alaskan colonial outpost in Sitka, which they named anew as New Archangel (Novo-Arkhangel’sk). The Russians moved their colonial Alaskan capital from Kodiak to New Archangel in 1808, a move that reflected both increasing commercial and political interests as the Russians had staked a claim to the region from their first exploratory voyages to Alaska by Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov in 1741. In particular, the Russians wanted both to control trade relations with the Tlingit and Haida and limit further American and British encroachment from the south and east (including the Hudson’s Bay Company, a fur-trading rival) into their Alaskan colony.

Sturgis’s recollections thus place Eliza’s 1798-99 voyage within a rapidly changing maritime world, providing precise details of the commercial and political realities of the Northwest Coast Trade and the broader China Trade. The extraordinary profitability of the sea otter trade in general attracted increasing numbers of American vessels to the region, intensified competition for pelts, and brought traders into Indigenous landscapes already being transformed by Russian expansion. Sturgis would continue his sailing career until 1810, when he returned to Boston to form the trading partnership Bryant & Sturgis with associate John Bryant. The firm became the most significant operator in the trade routes between the Northwest Coast and China between 1810 and 1850, controlling over half the trade, while Sturgis simultaneously maintained a successful career as a philanthropist and politician. He served for some thirty years in both the State House and Senate of the Massachusetts Legislature and was president of the illustrious Boston Marine Society. Taken altogether, Sturgis’s experiences in the Maritime Fur Trade offer a firsthand perspective on commercial networks, intercultural encounters, and competing imperial ambitions that shaped the Northwest Coast at the turn of the 19th century.