I don’t agree that “there’s not much trade opportunities for a northern merchant fleet.” If there’s enough trade opportunities for the hardscrabble Iron Islands to have an active port town doing business from southern Westeros and Essos both:
“The Myraham was a fat-bellied southron merchanter up from Oldtown, carrying wine and cloth and seed to trade for iron ore…A handful of Lordsport merchants had gathered to meet the ship. They shouted questions as the Myraham was tying up. “We’re out of Oldtown,” the captain called down, “bearing apples and oranges, wines from the Arbor, feathers from the Summer Isles. I have pepper, woven leathers, a bolt of Myrish lace, mirrors for milady, a pair of Oldtown woodharps sweet as any you ever heard…”
“…Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts of countless fishing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley off-loading beside a lumbering Ibbenese cog with her black-tarred hull.”
“…She had surrendered her virtue at six-and-ten, to a beautiful blond-haired sailor on a trading galley up from Lys.”
then there’s no reason that the vast agricultural markets of the North just on the other side of the Flint Cliffs from Ironman’s Bay, wouldn’t find buyers from among the ships that sail the northern stretches of the Sunset Sea.
By contrast, trying to sail west across the Sunset Sea has historically been a fool’s venture:
“Strange tales like this are common at the edges of the world, however, and the Lonely Light stands farthest west of all the lands known to us. Many a bold mariner has sailed beyond the light of its beacon over the centuries, seeking the fabled paradise said to lie over the horizon, but the sailors who return (many do not) speak only of boundless grey oceans stretching on and on forever.”
To be entirely fair, it’s less than clear WHY the northern reaches of the Sunset Sea have so much traffic. That’s literally the end of the world, and north of Seagard there’s almost nothing there. And yet you have things like Mance Rayder’s cloak being repaired with silk from Asshai found in a wreck on the Frozen Shore, literally as far from Asshai as it is possible to get. Who the hell ships silk up NORTH of Bear Island?
My own headcanon is that the fur trade and the ice trade must be INCREDIBLY lucrative. Historically speaking both of those things caused traders to sail to incredibly undeveloped lands with dubious harbors and infrastructure in order to acquire them.
As for that chunk of the planet between the Sunset Sea and the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, my own thought is that it’s nothing but thin place, something like the Scar from Bas-Lag or the unfinished lands not yet hewn from Chaos in the Elric books or Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World. When you sail east far enough the waters turn strange and odd and inhospitable, the same thing happens when you sail west, and Essos east of the Five Forts or Stygai is deeply fucked up. (Not that K’dath or Stygai are exactly normal to begin with.)
That side of the planet just… isn’t finished yet.
Keep in mind, storms can blow ships a long, long way, so it’s not a given that the ship with Asshai silk in it was heading to Bear Island or beyond.
Fur and ice are good picks for commodities, but I’d also throw two of the other key Early Modern to Modern era commodities that were imported by the Muscovy Company: timber and flax (to quote Robert Hughes “in eighteenth century strategy, pine trees and flax had the naval importance that oil and uranium hold today) for masts, spars, and sails.
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