INTRODUCTION

This publication is the second part of a study in which I have been examining and analysing early historical documents that contain descriptions and comments on the forests of Prince Edward Island. In Part 1 of the study I presented and analysed the documents of the French period in the history of the island (1534-1758); in this second part I examine the evidence surviving from the British colonial and post-confederation periods (from 1758 to just after 1900). As was so for the first report, the core of this second publication consists of extracts from all of the historical documents of this later period that contain comments relevant to the forests of Prince Edward Island — or the Island of St. John, as it was known up to 1799. These extracts have been gathered together in the process of arriving at a description of the natural forests of Prince Edward Island before the period of European settlement.

This historical research is a follow-up to earlier work that I carried out on the current forests of the island based on data collected in the 1990- 1992 Prince Edward Island Forest Inventory.1 In analysing that data I inevitably found myself trying to account for the composition of the present forest in terms of the past forest, especially that existing prior to European settlement. However, it soon became apparent that the few previous attempts to describe this early forest (e.g. Clark 1959, Erskine 1960) were based more on the examination of forest remnants interpreted in the light of general ecological principles, than on an extensive search of historical documents for contemporary descriptions of the forest.2 I thus considered it essential to carry out such a search.

To enable me to arrive at a valid description of the pre—settlement forest I have searched for all early descriptions of the forests of Prince Edward Island, from 1758, the year when authority on the island was transferred from France to Great Britain, up until about 1900. As was so for the earlier French period, when the study began I intended to

1 See Sobey 1993, 19953, 1995b; Sobey & Glen 1999, 2003, 2004. Some of these reports are available from the PEI. Forestry Division.

2 Erskine's historical sources comprised one primary source (Stewart 1806) and two secondary sources (Harvey 1926; Gaudet 1956), both of whom extracted material verbatim from some of the earlier records. Clark‘s sources were in general more wide-ranging than Erskine's.

concentrate on records that contained descriptions of the natural forest, in particular any mentions of specific tree species. However, as I was gathering the material together it became evident that there was other information in the surviving records of relevance to the history of the forests. Thus, at an early stage I decided to also include records relating to any aspect of the forest, including the processes leading to its destruction (e.g. references to forest clearing, timber harvesting, and forest fires), as well as any mention of attitudes or opinions about the forest, ranging from its value as a source of timber to its acting as an obstacle to settlement.

As explained in the earlier report, it was during the process of gathering the material together that I began to realise that it would be useful for others to have access to the original descriptions so that anyone interested in the topic would be able to go directly to the words of the original recorders without any intervening interpretive screening or sieving. This has led to the idea of publishing the extracts in the form of a ‘source-book’, i.e. as verbatim extractions of the relevant material. At the same time, since it is only by means of the analysis of the information contained in these early descriptions that we will be able to attain a better understanding of the nature of the original forest, as well as of the factors leading to its destruction, I have also included in this report a number of different analyses of the material. Because of the large amount of surviving material it has been necessary to print this British period report as two separately bound parts, Part A containing the analyses of the material, with the extracts bound separately as Part B.3

METHODS THE DOCUMENT TRAIL FOR THE BRITISH PERIOD

Beginning in the year 1758 there is a relatively large amount of contemporary published literature and private documents concerning Prince Edward Island, a surprising number of which contain

3 I should say that I intend to follow this report up with a third

report that will contain the more important scientific literature of the early twentieth century that describes the forests of the island.