to have been cut for the purpose in the woods and carried to the settlement. However, for other fences he used wood left over from land clearance, including some that appear to have been more crude fences made directly from branches.

Firewood — Though undoubtedly wood was the only fuel used for heating and cooking, there are only four references to its use in the documents. Interestingly, two of these were penned by officials in France: when the minister of the Marine, the Count of Maurepas (1732), gave an order to officials at Louisbourg to implement measures to conserve the forests of the island (see below) one of his concerns was that future settlers would continue to have fuel for heating, while a second recorder in France (Anon. 17605?) notes explicitly that wood was the heating fuel used on the island. On the island itself, Roma (1734) made the point of including the wood cut for firewood in his list of the ’travaux' carried out at Trois Riviéres but his estimate of the amount is not very helpful: they cut, he says, as many cords as were needed to keep ”a very big fire going in thirteen chimneys night and day for about seven months of the year”. The only other reference to firewood on the island is Franquet's (1751) comment that on account of the large area burned by a fire at Saint- Pierre the inhabitants had to go a long distance in search of their wood.88

Local ship-building — Although the right to build ”vaisseaux et autres batiments de mer” [vessels and other boats] using the wood found on the island was written into the grant of the Company of lle Saint-Jean”, there appears to have been only a modest amount of ship-building on the island during the whole French period. As far as we know the first vessels built were the three (of 25, 65 and 100 tons) that La Ronde (1721) had built for the Count of Saint-Pierre’s Company in the first year of the settlement. We also know that Jean-Pierre Roma had a 70-ton vessel built at Saint-Pierre in 1733 for use in local shipping, and he may also have had a 25-ton schooner built in

88 There is also the curious comment of La Roque (1752) that boats loaded with ten cords of wood could be got up the n'viére du nord«est [the Hillsborough]. Presumably he was told this by a local inhabitant. It suggests that wood, whether for fuel or building materials, must have been transported on the river. The original French implies the journey was up the river, which is possible, given the destructive effects of forest fires at the upper end of the Hillsborough River (see below). La Roque also makes a similar reference to “charrois du port [i.e. barges] of 3 to 4 cords" when describing the capacity of the havre a la souris. [i.e. Colville Bay].

“9 Louis xv 1719.

20

1740 (at least the records indicate that he proposed to do so)”, and that Louis Duchambon, the commandant at Port La-Joie, purchased a boat on the island in 174191. There is also substantial evidence, especially for the 17503, that the resident population owned a small fleet of schooners [goe/ettes] and other boats, many of which must have been built on the islandf’2

Timber exports to Louisbourg — l have not found any evidence that the French exported timber from lle Saint-Jean to Louisbourg for use either in the fortifications or in house-building, which is odd given that there is a record (admittedly, from a somewhat distant, though contemporary, British source — and therefore possibly not reliable) that the French were cutting timber on the Nova Scotia mainland in 1743 in the area of Pictou and/or on Pictou Island, an area that they had ceded to the British thirty years before, and where if caught, there would have been serious diplomatic consequences.93

However, there is some evidence of the small scale export to Louisbourg of the island’s pine mast resource for use in ship-building: Saint- Ovideg‘1 states that masts from the island, of 50 to 60 feet in length, had been used on local schooners and boats by, it would seem, both the local Acadians and master carpenters of merchant ships — though some of this could have been on lle Saint-Jean and not at Louisbourg. And we know that Commissaire Mézy at Louisbourg gave some of the masts harvested on the island by the Marine in 1728 to five captains of merchant vessels (presumably then at Louisbourg) so that they could test their qualities his motive was to get favourable reports on the quality of the masts, which could then be cited to the minister (see below and Appendix 3)95.

Timber exports to France — The records indicate that two separate attempts were made to export masts for naval ships from the island to France (see Appendix 3 for a full description and analysis). The first was made by the Company of lle Saint-

MacLean 1977, pp. 13 and 28.

91 Crowley & Pothier 1979.

92 Schmeisser 2000, pp. 20, 45, 48,61, and Appendix B.

93

Clark 1968, pp. 249, 318.

9“ Saint-Ovide 1726: 28 November, Letters 1 and 2.

95 Mézy 1723.