When Ibn Battuta visited the Golden Horde in 1332 (ish) he wanted to travel further North to "the land of darkness" where a strange people with strange customs lived.
They would not trade for goods in person, instead going to an open place in the snow where southern merchants had left goods to trade. They would take these in the night and leave furs and other valuables for the southerners to pick up in the morning.
I have read about trade between Europeans and Native Americans being conducted in a similar way. My question is what kind of assumptions can we make about this behaviour, considering that both native Siberian and American populations were almost eradicated by disease.
Do we know if they had an understanding of disease transmission and that this was done for the same reason in both instances? Are there any other examples of this?
Thanks for your time and apologies for the awful description.
This is almost certainly a legend.
A similar story has been told by 15th century Soninke about Malians trading salt for gold with a secretive people who controlled the mines; by 16th century Gambian Muslims about the Sofala in Mozambique; by 10th century Arabs about the Ghana Empire. In fact, the oldest attested variation is found in none other than Herodotus himself!
Another story is told by the Carthaginians. There is a place in Libya, they say, where men live beyond the Pillars of Heracles; they come here and unload their cargo; then, having laid it in order along the beach, they go aboard their ships and light a smoking fire. The people of the country see the smoke, and, coming to the sea, they lay down gold to pay for the cargo, and withdraw from the wares. Then the Carthaginians disembark and examine the gold; if it seems to them a fair price for their cargo, they take it and go away; but if not, they go back aboard and wait, and the people come back and add more gold until the sailors are satisfied. In this transaction, it is said, neither party defrauds the other: the Carthaginians do not touch the gold until it equals the value of their cargo, nor do the people touch the cargo until the sailors have taken the gold. (Histories 4.196)
So how can we be sure we are dealing with a story, told and retold and adjusted and retold? I'll raise three main points. First, frankly, Occam's Razor. Take a moment to think logically about this form of trade. (Set aside details like the whole "land completely covered in darkness a forty days' journey over ice that costs 1000 dinars to take" bit). How on earth would something like this have been set up in the first place, if the people trying to protect the location of their mines/hunting grounds/etc were determined not to be seen at all? (In some West Africa-set versions of the tale, not even knowing whether the mysterious group is white or black--Arab or sub-Saharan African--is a major detail. Ibn Battuta's source doesn't even know whether they're human.) How would they trust each other not to shortchange the amount traded? Why wouldn't someone, at some point in time, have left behind a spy in disguise among the goods? (Notice that there's no "and every time this has been tried, the spy has been murdered"). And so forth.
Second, the various stories have numerous internal inconsistencies and quirks. Take Herodotus' up there. "A story is told by the Carthaginians," he writes. "They say." "It is said." Herodotus is capable of repeating some pretty clear-to-us whoppers straightforwardly, but here he is extra careful to qualify his information. There's the ambiguity of place--a common feature in these tales--along with a seeming contradiction (they're in interior Africa, but on a beach? Ships figure in some versions of the story besides Herodotus, but not all of them.) Another variant, by 13th century Arab writer Yaqut, starts by talking about middlemen/translators who connect the miners with merchants...but then skips over them and repeats the "silent trade" legend, middlemen forgotten.
But the most important reason not to trust this story is actually Ibn Battuta himself.
There's a very clear and long tradition of telling the silent trade story about the gold mines and mysterious miners of the West African gold empires--Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. Medieval Arab scholars writing about Ghana and Mali in particular return to the story again and again. With one major, major exception: Ibn Battuta, the one of them who had actually been to Mali.
Ibn Battuta talks quite a bit about Timbuktu and the Mali Empire, including economics. At no point in time does he even come close to a version of the silent trade story. Instead, he reserves it for a mythical "land of darkness" in mysterious, unreachable inner Asia.
There's no question that Ibn Battuta's version of the story is my favorite. First of all, a "land of darkness" cursing an ancient Persian king and his army is the coolest setting; second, his is the only one I know of that includes sled dogs. But ultimately, that's what it is: a version of a story.
And when you consider how many ways that story is told by so many people about so many peoples--that becomes the real story here.