responsibilities, was only ever held by two persons24 — one of whom, Robert Dubuisson, held it for twenty-two years (1722-1744)“, though he seems never to have recorded any comments on the forest.

These various officials on lle Saint-Jean frequently addressed reports and letters directly to the minister of the Marine in France. In doing so it is unlikely that they were aiming to bypass their immediate superiors on lle Royale, since their reports seem usually to have passed through the governor’s office at Louisbourg. This procedure of direct access was apparently not discouraged by the minister, since it allowed the central authority to keep a close eye on a colony even as small as lle Saint-Jean.

Persons assigned special tasks — In addition to the above officials who were posted to lle Saint-Jean for extended periods, there were others who were sent to the island by the governor at Louisbourg (or by the authorities in France) to carry out specific assignments over a short period. Four such persons contribute to the records collected here. Three were military officers: the first was Etienne Verrier, the chief military engineer at Louisbourg, who visited the island in the summer of 1733 to design government buildings and fortifications for Port La-Joie (Verrier 1733-1734); the second was Louis Franquet, a military engineer — his visit to the island was only a small part of what turned out to be a much larger assignment in which he had to inspect and make recommendations on the defences for the whole of New France (Franquet 1751).26 The third, Joseph de La Roque, was a military surveyor assigned by the governor at Louisbourg to carry out a complete census and description of the island, including not only the human population but also all of the livestock and the landscape (La Roque 1752).

The fourth of these short-stay visitors was Thomas Pichon, the odd man out in a number of ways: he was a man of the pen rather than the sword — he was secretary to the governor, the Count de Raymond, and he accompanied Raymond on his visit to the island in August 1752.27 His visit overlapped somewhat with that of La Roque,

24

Harvey 1926, p. 239.

’5 Maude 1974.

26

Thorpe 1974, p. 229.

’7 Crowley 1979a, p. 630.

11

though surely not so completely as Pichon would later try to pretend. For, eight years later, he was to pass off La Roque’s report, or a good part of it, as his own work in his Lettres et Mémoires which he published in England (Pichon 1760F & 1760E). But by that time he had been an active traitor to the French cause in Acadia, in particular having betrayed the French forces at Fort Beausté-J'our.za

There is a fifth person who fits in with these special assignees: another military surveyor, Jean— Baptiste de Couagne, who asked to be sent to inspect lle Saint-Jean in 1713 but was not given the task because of his responsibilities on lle Royale (Couagne 1713).

A semi-independent agent — The granting of land by the king in the form of seigneurial or proprietorial grants bestowed a limited measure of independence from the royal authority. After the failure of the Company of lle Saint-Jean mentioned above, another (though much smaller) proprietary concession was granted in the east of the island: from 1731 to 1753 the land fronting the three rivers flowing into Cardigan Bay was in the grant of the Company of the East of lle Saint-Jean, though in fact the whole venture had collapsed with the burning of the Three Rivers settlement by New Englanders in 1745.29 One of its directors, Jean-Pierre Roma, who spent fourteen years in his settlement at Brudenell Point, penned two of the more detailed documents included here (Roma 1734, 1750).

ANALYSIS

An analysis of the extracts will be carried out from three points of view: (1) what they can tell us about the nature and state of the original forest, including the forest as a natural habitat; (2) the changes to this forest that occurred as a result of colonisation and forest exploitation during the French period, including forest clearance, timber extraction and fire; and (3) the attitudes of the French to various aspects of the forest, such as the benefits it bestowed, the disadvantages of its presence, and its conservation. It should be noted that I am not attempting here to give a synthesised description of the forest or of the factors that caused its alteration — that will come when all of the historical material, including that of the British period, has been assembled and analysed. Rather

28 Crowley 1979a.

2" MacLean 1977.