told that the fire began in the woods‘”

rapidly being driven by the wind.115

and spread

It is only from later records that we can begin to get an idea of the area of forest destroyed by one or other of these fires (Figure 2). The first indication is in Franquet's 1751 report: in his comments on the island as a whole, added at the end of his report, he notes that ”apart from cleared land, there are other areas of a large size that fire has laid bare”. In his journal entries, he records more specific information about the location of the burned area: the road from the riviére du nerd-est [Hillsborough River] to havre St-Pierre [St. Peters Bay], he says, passed through burned woods in which there were lots of blueberries, and he later made the general notation that ”all the woods between the source of the riviere du nord—est and havre St. Pierre are burned” adding (as noted earlier) that as a result the inhabitants of the area had to go a long distance for their wood. Also as noted earlier, for what it is worth, somewhere along the t0p of the riviere du nerd-est he stopped and spoke to two recently established settlers who told him that the part of their lands that had been burned (though this is not necessarily from either of the large fires), gave less trouble in clearing. Although Franquet does not say so, this might be indicative of a more widespread attitude to the use of fire as an aid to forest clearance in the colony.

One year later Joseph de La Roque (1752) provides additional information on the extent of the burned areas (Figure 2): he recorded that the area around pointe de /’est [East Point] had been reduced to a ’désert’ [i.e. wasteland] by a fire that had passed through the area, and that the settlers had had to re-establish themselves at ”a distance of two leagues from the point on the north side”.116 He then notes that for six leagues117 from East Point to l’étang du noffrage [Naufrage Pond] the land was a ’désert’ owing to the occurrence of the fire, but ”a short distance inland [a peu de distance de la caste] the country is covered with hardwood and the soil is good for the production of all kinds of grains and roots”. There is also incidental information on past fires in his census:

“‘ Bigot 1742.

“5 Duchambon 1743. “6 Two leagues is 11.1 km (or 6.9 miles) — such a distance takes us to North Lake, to which the settlers had presumably moved,

though in the census La Roque continues to call the settlement ‘pointe de I‘esf.

”7 Six leagues is 33.3 km (or 20.7 miles) which is exactly the distance between East Point and Naufrage.

24

the heads of two households in Saint-Pierre told him that their property deeds had been burned, one ”in the fire of 1724”, the other ”at the time of the fire fourteen years ago” Le. 1738. The latter, despite the discrepancy in the date, could refer to either of the two major fires, though more likely the 1736 fire, while the 1724 fire may be an earlier and otherwise unrecorded forest fire. Oddly, however, La Roque makes no mention of the burned area that had been recorded the year before by Franquet between Saint-Pierre and the top of the riv/ere o’u nord-est, though at the same time it may be significant that he makes no reference to any timber resources in the area, in contrast to his comments on many other areas that he visited.

If we combine the observations of Franquet and La Roque we get a picture of a burned area that stretched from the Hillsborough River to East Point (Figure 2). This is in broad agreement with the information contained in the more detailed records of the British period (the most useful of which is the survey of Samuel Holland in 1765) — as we shall see when we come to look at those records in the sequel to this sourcebook.

ATTITUDES TO THE FOREST

The French background — In order to understand the attitudes of the French, both the officials employed by the Marine and the resident population, to the forests of lle Saint-Jean we have to know something about the attitudes prevailing in the eighteenth century to the forests back in France.118 Most of the habitants and officials had come (either directly or indirectly) from a land where forests, on account of their relative scarcity, were a highly valued resource. In contrast, they were now on a continent and an island covered with forest where there was a superabundance of the timber and other resources that woodland could supply.

In France the control and use of the forest had for many centuries been the subject of a three-way contention between the crown, the landowners (among them the nobility and the church), and the rural population — who, though usually not outright owners of any forest land, used the forest as a source of building materials, firewood and other

113 The attitudes in France towards the forests are described by Schama (1995) (pp. 174-79). Further detail may be found in Bamford (1955, 1956), and there is a comprehensive study by Corvol (1984).