INTRODUCTION

The core of this publication consists of extracts from sixty-nine historical documents of the French period (1534-1758) containing comments relevant to the forests of Prince Edward Island — or lle Saint-Jean, as it was called by the French. These have been gathered together as part of the process of arriving at a description of the natural forests of Prince Edward Island before the period of European settlement.

This historical research is a follow-up to earlier work that I carried out on the current forests of the island based on data collected in the 1990- 1992 Prince Edward Island Forest Inventory.‘ In analysing that data I inevitably found myself trying to explain the composition of the present forest in terms of the past forest, especially that existing prior to European settlement. However, it soon became apparent that the few previous attempts to describe this early forest (e.g. Clark 1959, Erskine 1960) were based more on the examination of forest remnants interpreted in the light of general ecological principles, than on an extensive search of historical documents for contemporary descriptions of the forest.2 I thus considered it essential to carry out such an historical search.

To enable me to arrive at a valid description of the pre-settlement forest I have searched for all early descriptions of the forests of Prince Edward Island, from the days of the first European visitors.3 I intended initially to concentrate on records that contained descriptions of the natural forest, in particular any mentions of specific tree species. However, as I began to gather the material together it became evident that there was other information in the surviving records of relevance to the history of the forests. Thus, at an early stage I decided to also include records relating to any aspect of the forest, including the processes leading to its destruction (e.g. references to forest

' Sobey 1993, 1995a, 1995b; Sobey & Glen 1999. Some of these reports are available from the P.E.I. Forestry Division.

2 Erskine's sources comprised one primary source (Stewart 1806) and two secondary sources (Harvey 1926; Gaudet 1956), both of whom extracted material verbatim from some of the earlier records. Clark's sources were in general more wide-ranging than Erskine's,

though for the French period he was heavily reliant on those sources identified by Harvey (1926).

3 In fact I have attempted to go even further back than the first European visitors by considering whether any forest descriptives survive in Mi'kmaq place-names (see Endnote 1). I also in Endnote 2 comment on whether Prince Edward Island may be the Vinland described in the Viking sagas.

clearing, timber harvesting, and forest fires), as well as any mention of attitudes or opinions about the forest, ranging from its value as a source of timber to its acting as an obstacle to settlement.

It was during the process of gathering the material together that I began to realise that it would be useful for others to have access to the original descriptions so that anyone interested in the topic would be able to go directly to the words of the original recorders without any intervening interpretive screening or sieving. This has led to the idea of publishing the extracts in the form of a ’source-book’, i.e. as verbatim extractions of the relevant material.

At the same time, since it is only by means of the analysis of the information contained in these early descriptions that we will be able to attain a better understanding of the nature of the original forest, as well as of the factors leading to its destruction, I have also included in this report a number of different analyses of the material.

At first I thought it possible to present all of the historical extracts in a single report. However, it has become evident that there is far too much material to include in one ring-bound publication, and it has thus been necessary to subdivide the study, with this first report presenting the material for the period up to 1758, when Prince Edward Island was under French rule.

METHODS THE DOCUMENT TRAIL FOR THE FRENCH PERIOD

In attempting to trace every historical document of the French period containing any reference to the forests of the island, my method has been to follow in the footsteps of others who have consulted the early records. I began by chasing up all of the early documents containing information on the island’s forests or trees that were cited by D. C. Harvey (1926) in his French Regime in Prince Edward Island. Three Centuries and the Island by A. H. Clark (1959) contained useful comments on some of these references although he did not identify any new sources for the French period that were unknown to Harvey. Then a friend and fellow researcher Georges Arsenault told me about the Margry file, a transcript from documents in the French Archives in Paris concerning the French