Empire of Skin

From the moment survivors of Captain Cook's third voyage of discovery found that sea otter skins procured from the Northwest Coast Indians would bring $100 apiece on the Chinese market, the future of the coast, the Indians, and the sea otters was irrevocably altered. Tom Clark's serial poetic history of the maritime fur trade (1785-1810) documents and elaborates that change, linking white world fur traders with indigenes in extended metaphors of contact and confrontation.