working out what the writer meant by the word or phrase that he has used (especially with colloquial phrasing). And in this respect there can be a particular problem with the vari0us French names used for the different species of trees. Fortunately here I have been able to take advantage of the meticulous research of a French linguist, Genevieve Massignon (1962) into the Acadian vocabulary (including that present in historical documents), and as a result have been able to correct some significant errors of previous translators. (The French names used for the various tree species and an analysis of their occurrence in the records is fully presented in Appendix 1.)

In both the transcribing and the translating l have had access to the expertise of two people whose help has been invaluable. It is a fortunate coincidence that a colleague with whom I work at the University of Ulster, Arlette Bataillé, is a native-born French speaker from south-western France, not all that far from La Rochelle, the point of departure of French ships for the New World in the eighteenth century. Arlette has checked and re-checked all of my own translations and we have had long discussions over many of the extracts — sometimes over the meaning of a single word. My other helper has been Georges Arsenault, the doyen of Acadian studies on Prince Edward Island, who has read many of my transcriptions and translations and has corrected several errors.

It is however still possible that some errors or misinterpretations may have slipped through. In this case any errors in my translation can be circumvented by direct recourse to the original French version — though errors in my transcription of that French cannot be so easily got round. For those who may wish to examine the original French publications and manuscripts (for the latter, at least a photographic copy on microfilm) the archival references may be followed up.

The presentation of the extracts — For each author I have written a brief introduction containing a short biographical sketch in which I emphasise their previous North American experience (which may have relevance to the value of their descriptions), and I also comment on the importance of the extract to the wider topic. Very useful here has been the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) which has an entry for almost every one of the authors.

In the reference for each extract, l have identified the immediate source from which my transcription

is taken. Where this was not the original, I have also listed the ultimate source as given by the version that I used. I have not attempted to check the accuracy of these latter references but I include them anyway, lest anyone should wish to try to track down the originals.

Where any of the sixty-nine extracts is referred to in any part of this report (including the footnotes and the appendices), I have written the author’s name and the year of composition or publication in bold (e.g. Cartier 1534) — in which case each extract can be found in this source—book in chronological order by author.

RESULTS THE DOCUMENTS

l have collected here transcriptions taken from sixty-nine different documents from the pens of twenty-seven different authors. Only five of the sixty-nine were made available to a wider public through publication in the lifetime of their authors (Champlain 1632; Denys 1672; Charlevoix 1744; Pichon 1760F & 1760E) — a sixth, Cartier's 1534 account, was published shortly after his death. All six of these appear to have been privately published at the time. The remaining sixty-three documents all come from the government records of the French regime: they consist of letters, memoranda and reports, most of them originating on lle Saint-Jean or at Louisbourg and sent back to the department of the Marine at Versailles. In addition there are a few memoranda written within the department in France, which were presumably not intended for circulation outside the Marine’s offices at Versailles. In fact all of the correspondence was presumably in its day confidential within the department of the Marine, and — given the state of hostility between the French and British in the region during much of the time — some of the reports (such as Franquet’s (1751) report on the defences of Ile Saint-Jean and La Roque's (1752) census of the island) are likely to have been classified as the equivalent of the ’top-secret' of today.

The originals of all of these documents are still in the French Archives in Paris (Archives des Colonies and Archives de la Marine), though photographic copies of the originals or hand-written extractions have long been available in the Public Archives of Canada.4 In addition, in the early twentieth

‘ From evidence in the primary documents (handwriting styles,

marginal notes etc.) it is evident that many of the records in the