of the hardwood species occurring on the Isle a Monsieur Courtin [Courtin Island], as well as in the area around the havre de Macpec [Malpeque Bay], where bou/eau also occurred. La Roque (1752), as well as Pichon (1760F), also mentions la pointe au bou/leau, evidently a place-name for a point of land between la grande ascension (now the Vernon River) and la pointe Prime [Point Prim] presumably the name indicating the presence (past or current) of a birch tree’s.

Conclusion — The higher frequency of merisier than bou/eau in the written records suggests that yellow birch was more frequently observed than the white birches, which, given its role as a late successional climax forest tree, is likely to have been so: presumably habitats supporting the early successional white and grey birches would have been relatively scarce on lle Saint-Jean in the first half of the eighteenth century (or earlier), as there w0uld have then been relatively few sites undergoing secondary succession.

THE MAPLES (Acer species) [French names : érable, plain] Identification — Since the genus Acer occurs widely in France (three species are found — all with the distinctive maple-shaped leaves and fruitsl76, the New World species should have been immediately recognisable as maples to early European visitors. However, the identification of the maples on lle Saint-Jean was complicated by the fact that there are two maples of tree size (Acer saccharum, sugar maple, and A. rubrum, red maple).77 Though the two may be readily distinguished from each other by their leaves, this appears not to have always been done.

Nomenclature — From at least the Middle Ages two different common names appear to have been used for species of Acer in France (Table 1-1). The

75 Rayburn (1973) (p. 24) considers this to be the present Birch Point that extends into OnNell Bay. ‘Pointe au boulaux‘ also occurs on maps of 1730 (NAC, No. 49768) and 1734 (NAC, No. Ph/240) as a name for the present Rosebank Point across the harbour from Charlottetown (see Rayburn 1973, p. 106).

76 Acer pseudoplatanus, sycamore; Acer platanoides, Norway

maple; and Acer campestre, field maple (Fitter 1978).

77 There are in fact four species of maple on Prince Edward Island, though the other two (Acer pensylvanicum, striped maple and Acer spicatum, mountain maple) are usually present only as understorey trees or shrubs. It is thus not surprising that they appear to have been totally overlooked in the written records.

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usual name for the genus was érab/e, a word derived from the Latin acer. However, in eastern and northern France the name plaine (also spelt plain or plane) was also used for species of Acer.78 From the earliest days of exploration both names appear to have been applied to maples in North America.” While the name érab/e appears to have been used in two different senses: (1) as the standard generic name for all maple species, and (2) for the sugar maple alone, plaine appears to have been applied specifically to the red maple — as it still is in both Acadian and Canadian French (Table 1-1). Thus early New World recorders wanting to distinguish red and sugar maples had at hand the nomenclature to do so.

The tree lists — Erable (in some cases presumably implying the maple genus) is listed in only four of the eight tree lists (Table 1-2), while the total tally (Table 1-3) contains two additional records. All four of these lists have been made by the more meticulous recorders (Duchambon 1738, Roma 1750, Franquet 1751, and La Roque 1752). Erab/e is thus missing from the lists of Cartier (1734), Denys (1672), Gotteville (1720) and Anon (17605?) — the first two perhaps explicable on account of their limited acquaintance with lle Saint-Jean (though they also acknowledge their lists to be incomplete).

Two of the four who recorded érab/e (Roma 1750 and La Roque 1752) also included plaine in the same list clearly indicating that they were distinguishing between sugar maple and red maple: Roma included both among the trees that he

73 Le Grand Robert (2001) records the earliest written use of

érab/e in French in c. 1240, while the first use of plane (which it defines as a regional form of p/atane) was about 1174. The name plane had been transferred from Platanus, a genus unrelated taxonomically to the maples, but with leaves of exactly similar shape. This genus does not occur naturally in western Europe — it is of eastern European and Middle-Eastern origin (Jalas et al. 1999) — though even before the eighteenth century it is likely to have been present as a planted shade tree in towns and country estates, and it may also have become naturalised in France.

Accounting for the ready transfer of plaine to maples in North America is the fact that in local dialects in France (and also in England) the name plaine (or plane) was already being used for European species of Acer, such as Acer pseudoplatanus (sycamore) and Acer platanoides (Norway maple) (Oxford 1971, Le Robert 1971) — the scientific names of which indicate their similarity to the genus Platanus. However, the current standard common name in France for the genus Platanus is not plane (or plaine) but platane (in use since the sixteenth century) — though ‘plane’ has continued to be the standard common name in England.

79 The earliest New World use of both plaine and érable found by Massignon (1962) (p. 188) is that of Champlain in 1630.