As is to be expected in a new colony, the areas of settlement were either on the coast or along the major rivers and estuaries, especially those with salt-marshes. Though the reluctance of the Acadians to clear upland forest along the Bay of Fundy is well—documented (they preferred instead to dike the salt-marshes)“, given the limited area of salt-marsh on lle Saint—Jean, there was little choice for most of the settlers but to tackle the forest, especially from the 17505 when the population began to expand at a higher rate due to an influx of settlers from Acadia. We may thus wonder how much credence to give to the scathing comment of Roma (1750) (penned in Martinique) that the Acadians on the island had not cut down one tree (he had last seen the island in 1746 when the population still numbered in the hundreds). His comment does however receive some support from Pensens (1732) who says that the land of the island was haute [upland] and difficult to clear: he notes more specifically that at Tracardy the settlers were having difficulties in clearing their land due to the large oak trees that covered it. But there is also substantial evidence that the uplands were tackled: we have Franquet's (1751) description of the upland clearances at Pisquid and his note that the Acadians were handy with the axe. Roma’s comment is even more directly counteracted by the evidence provided by the comprehensive census of La Roque in 1752 which indicates that almost all of the settlers had cleared some area of forest for their crops.“ We also have La Roque’s mention of the ”extensive clearings” [Ies deffrichés conside’rab/es] at the harbours of Saint Pierre and Tracadie which he cited as evidence that the settlers could successfully pursue both fishing and farming at the same time.‘37

the reprint of Franquet’s report in the Rapport de l‘archivisfe de la Province de Quebec, 1924).

65 Clark 1968, pp. 158-59. This preference for marsh agriculture was also well-known to Pensens (1732) who was attempting to attract Acadians to the island.

66 As a record of the extent of forest clearance, La Roque's is the most useful of all the censuses since he gives for each of the island's farming households the amount of land that they had cleared, expressed either in arpents or more usually in terms of the bushels of wheat that could be sown, eg. “a clearing for the sowing of about fifty bushels of wheat”. As far as I know, the mass of information contained in La Roque's census has never been fully summarised or analysed statistically from either the population or landscape viewpoint.

“7 La Roque (1752) (p. 148 in the 1906 French typescript; p. 151 in the English, where Acadie has been erroneously written for Tracadie).

17

This entire colony, which by 1758 numbered about 4700 persons68 came to a sudden end in October of that year with the mass deportation of the entire population — or at least those who did not manage to flee to the forests or to the mainland. In the decade after the deportation we have a number of British-period maps showing the areas cleared by the French on the island: a map dating from 1762 makes a rough attempt to show the areas of cleared land evident at that time”. Far more accurate is Captain Samuel Holland’s map of 1765.70 This, the product of the first accurate survey of the whole island, shows the boundaries of all of the cleared areas that were evident six to seven years after the deportation, as well as the location of the surviving buildings. Holland also recorded in tabular form an estimate of the number of acres of cleared land in each of the sixty-seven townships into which he had divided the island. Such detailed estimates at a single point in time, of the amount of land cleared of forest, and maps showing its precise location, were not to be available again until the late nineteenth century.71

Forest clearance for roads — There were very few roads made during the French period, travel, at least in the summer, being mostly by water. We know of the trails that Roma (1734) cut from Trois Rivieres to Saint-Pierre and to Port La-Joie, neither of which were much more than blazed tracks. A

68 Lockerby 1998, pp. 78-79. We have only rough estimates of the size of the human population after 1752, and especially from 1755 when refugees from along the Bay of Fundy began to arrive in large numbers in an attempt to escape the deportation of that year.

69 This map with its accompanying ‘Notes‘ is found in the Hardwicke papers in the British Library [Add MSS 35914, 95-99ff.] — l have placed a copy in the PARO (4615). It seems to have been made by a British soldier (unnamed in the document) who “by order of the General" travelled with a party of thirty men all around the coast of the island in July and August of 1762 for the purpose of producing a map and description of the island. There also exist in the P.E.l. PARO two other maps (0,549 and 0,450, both copies of originals of unknown whereabouts) which are closely related to the above map: Map 0,549 is virtually an exact tracing of the British Library map on the same scale, but with most of the place names given in English rather than French, and with added pictorial detail representing sub—divided fields on the supposedly cleared areas, with the uncleared land being dotted with tree symbols. The other map (PARO 0,450) is also a close copy of the British Library map. It has the same pictorial detail as Map 0,549 but it differs both from it and from the British Library map in some of its details: more place-names are given and some errors in the other two maps are corrected. In the PARO index it is dated 0.1760, but this is obviously a guess — otherwise its origin and provenance are not known by the staff at the PARO.

7° Holland, Samuel (1765) Plan of the Island of St. John. PARO: map 0,6170.

7‘ Relevant extracts from Holland's report will be presented in the sequel to this source-book that will cover the British period.