RESULTS THE DOCUMENTS AND THEIR RECORDERS

I have collected together in this source-book, extracts from 172 different documents written by 120 different authors. Eighty-five of the 172 were made available to a wider public through publication during the lifetime of their authors, either as books or pamphlets, or in magazines or newspapers (usually as letters), and some of these early publications have since had modern reprintss. Also an additional twelve of the documents that were private during the lifetime of their authors, notably journals or diaries, have since been publishede. However, for the remaining extracts collected here, this is the first time that their content will have been published.

Each of the extracts has had to be evaluated in terms of the criteria of historical source criticism (i.e. who wrote it? for whom was it written? and why was it written?). Bias, deception, falsehood, exaggeration and many other factors can affect the interpretation and usefulness of what is recorded, even concerning a topic such as the forest, that one might at first sight view as uncontroversial. In addition, the value of each record depends on how well the recorder knew the island. Of relevance is the length of time they spent on the island, as well as how much of the island they were familiar with, and Appendix 3 contains a tabulated summary of such information for each recorder, as well as a list of the types of comments they made on the forest.7

It is evident from Appendix 3, as well as from a ’thumbing-through’ of the source-book extracts in Part B, that from the Surrender of Port La—Joie to the British military force in the summer of 1758, when lle Saint—Jean became the Island of St. John,

5 Namely, Stewart 1806; MacGregor 1828; Johnstone 1822;

Land Commission 1860; Rowan 1876; Macphail 1939. 6 Namely, Curtis 1775; Chappell 1775-1818; Rit‘ter 1780; Gray 1793; Shuttleworth 1793; Walsh 1803; Selkirk 1803; Plessis 1812; Carrington 1837; Mann 1840; Seymour 1840; Craswell & Anderson (c, 1856).

7 A number of the accounts were initially written, or published, without an author's name being attached. Where the author has continued to be unknown, l have labelled them as anonymous, e.g. Anon. 1808. However, the names of some of these authors have since been identified by historians, and lhave also proposed some new identifications myself. In either case, in the reference list and in the footnotes I enclose the name of the proposed author in square brackets, e.g. [Hill] 1819, and l justify briefly the identification of the author in the introduction to the extract.

there begins an almost continuous flow of documents of many different types containing information on the forests of the island. For the first decade, until about 1770, all of the recorders were short-term visitors to the island, most either military officers or government officials who had been assigned specific duties. In this respect they are very similar to the recorders of the French period, almost all of whom were also government officials.8 Thereafter, four key related events bring about a significant change in the nature of the recorders and the documents: in July 1767 direct ownership of the land on the island — along with the forests on it — was transferred from the Crown (in large blocks of about 20,000 acres) to more than one hundred private individuals.9 Then, two years later, in 1769, in response to the lobbying of the British government by these new landowners, or ’proprietors’ as they became known, the island was separated from the jurisdiction of Nova Scotia and designated as a separate colony. As a consequence, in 1770 there followed the third event, the arrival of a colonial administration, consisting initially of a governor and a few officials, who based themselves at the new capital, Charlottetown. The fourth event also resulted from the change in ownership of the land: from 1770 new settlements began to be established on some of the townships, as a consequence of a few of the proprietors sending out colonists from the British Isles, in order to begin to fulfill one of the conditions of their grants‘o. This marked the beginning of a renewed, and this time permanent and ever-expanding, European settlement of the island.

These events not only had a great impact on the forests and landscape of the island, they also had an effect on the types of records that were made concerning the forests. From Appendix 3 and from Table 1, which groups the recorders according to their background and the type of document that they wrote, it can be seen that prior to 1770, as noted, all of the recorders were non-resident visitors, mostly military officers or government officials assigned specific duties, and

8 See Sobey 2002 , pp. 4-11. 9 All but one of the 67 townships, or ‘lots’ as they were generally known, were granted in the lottery, but quite a number of these were split between two persons, and some between even more. See Clark (1959) (pp. 263-69) for a list of the original grantees.

10 Between 1770 and 1773 new settlements were begun at Malpeque (1770), Stanhope (1770), Tracadie (1772) and New London (1773).