épinette (the two French names for spruce), then spruce is found in five lists — just one less than pine. Also, given the failure (or inability) on the part of a number of the recorders to discriminate between spruce and fir, if we then add sapin (fir) to the spruce listings (and excluding overlaps — i.e. where both sapin and prusse or épinette occur in the same list), spruce and fir combined now equal pine in the ranking. However, as was so for oak, the comments of the early recorders suggest that pine, because of its commercial and military status, is also likely to be over—represented in the records. Thus it is likely that the chief conifers on the island would have been the spruces and fir. Of the remaining conifers, cedar and hemlock are clearly less frequently recorded than the spruce-fir combination, and tamarack, peculiarly, was not recorded at all — which might lead us, if we had only this data, to infer that tamarack did not occur (or at the least was very rare) in the forests of Prince Edward Island in the eighteenth century!

When we turn to the tally of all records (Table 1- 4B), which adds in all other mentions of each tree, we find that the order of the species does not greatly differ from that in the tree list results of Table 1-4A. However, the differences that do occur are noteworthy: the margin of beech’s lead over all the other hardwoods has increased considerably. And oak and pine have also substantially increased — which is what we might expect of species attracting the special attention of the recorders. We also find that if we combine all of the mentions of the spruces and fir, they now exceed pine in number (16 compared with 15 for pine). Many of the other trees remain unchanged, or have only a single record added, indicating that these species only tended to be recorded when the recorders set out to make a list of all of the trees occurring on the island.

If we now bring in what we know about the shade tolerance and successional status of the trees, can we make further sense of the picture that has emerged? Considering the broad-leaved trees separately (and ignoring oak for the reasons given above), we observe a marked predominance of shade-tolerant climax forest trees in the lists (i.e. beech, yellow birch and maple). But what is especially interesting is the relative ranking of these three hardwoods: the marked predominance of beech over yellow birch and maple in the records is not something that we would have expected, given the low level of beech in the island’s forests today. All of the other broad- leaves, including the early successional light-

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demanding trees that are now so abundant (especially white birch and trembling aspen), appear from their frequency in the records to have been minor components of the forest in the eighteenth century.

For the conifers there is less that we can say in this respect, due both to the greater difficulty in identifying specific trees from their French names, and also in differentiating between the conifer species in terms of their light-tolerance and successional status — i.e. under the right habitat conditions any of the conifer species (even white spruce in coastal areas) might be an element of climax forest. However, a point worthy of comment is that hemlock, a conifer associated with the climax hardwood forest, is mentioned almost as frequently as maple, which might suggest that it was more common in the eighteenth century than it is today. Otherwise, all that we may conclude is that the frequent mention of spruces and firs, as well as of pine, suggests that they were fairly common.

It is not possible to use such limited data to try to work out the relative amounts of hardwood and softwood forest on the island before European settlement, so we can add nothing in support of the maps and comments in Sobey and Glen (1999).

It is clear that the ranking of the trees in the eighteenth century is very different from what we find in the forests of the island at the end of the twentieth century. In an analysis of data from the 1990-1992 Prince Edward Island Forest Inventory (Sobey 1993) the five trees most frequently recorded in the 1200 randomly selected forest plots were: balsam fir (in 74% of plots), red maple (68%), white spruce (53%), white birch (45%), and trembling aspen (25%). The climax hardwood species were all much lower: yellow birch (20%), sugar maple (19%), and beech (10%). Pine and oak, so prominent in the records of the eighteenth century (even if over-represented in them), were barely detectable in 1991 (2% and 0.33% respectively). Thus, the picture of the eighteenth century forest that we have teased out of the limited records of the French period, is very different from its descendant of the late twentieth century: it was a forest of climax tree species in contrast to a forest in which early successional species and/or those tolerating and responding to disturbance, now predominate.