ANALYSIS

An analysis of the extracts will be carried out from three points of view: (1) what they can tell us about the nature and state of the original forest, including the forest as a natural habitat; (2) the changes to this forest that occurred as a result of colonization and forest exploitation during the British colonial period, including forest clearance, timber extraction and fire; and (3) the attitudes of the British, and later the resident islanders, to various aspects of the forest, such as the benefits it bestowed, the disadvantages of its presence, and its conservation. It should be noted that I am not attempting here to give a synthesized description of the forest or of the factors that caused its alteration — that will come when all of the historical material, including that contained in the maps and surveys housed in the provincial archives, has been analyzed. Rather, what follows is an attempt to extract and catalogue the material on the various forest-related topics found in the records.

THE NATURE AND STATE OF THE FOREST

In comparison with the written records of the French period we have some very good descriptions of the pre—settlement forest of Prince Edward Island, which when gathered together enable us to re—construct reasonably well the composition and appearance of the forest.

The extent of the forested area — What especially impressed most of the recorders newly arrived from Europe was that the island was entirely covered by forest. From Thomas Curtis in 1775 to David Stewart in 1831 this is a common refrain in the writings. One of the most vivid descriptions is that of Walter Johnstone (1822):

the country is one entire forest of wood; all the exceptions to the truth of this, literally are not much more, even including the present clearances, than the dark spots upon the moon’s face, as they appear to the

naked eye, compared to the brighter parts thereof. 17

17 Other similar descriptions are: Curtis (1775): “the Island

appeared an entire wood as far as we could see"; Cambridge (1793): “prepare your Mind to see Groves upon Groves of Wilderness Woods"; [Cambridge] (1796): “the far greater part of the Island is in its original wild and uncultivated state covered with groves of various kinds of trees"; Walsh (1803): “by far the greater

part of the surface of the Country (perhaps seven eighths) is still covered with wood”; Selkirk (1805): “ the country, in its natural

state, is entirely covered by timber; with the exception only of the salt-marshes, which form but a small proportion"; and at Belfast he recorded: “[with the exCeption of] an old French village all the

Some of the writers make exception for the salt- marshes; others for the French clearances and the areas affected by fire — though on both of these they noted that the forest was returning.18 However, after 1831 there are no further comments of this type; such descriptions are now in the past tense, with the emphasis being on the clearing of the land”, until by the end of the nineteenth century the comments are the complete opposne:

there are no forests of any extent in the province they have disappeared under the axes of the settler and lumberman. 20

From the beginning and end of our period we are very fortunate to have two detailed maps showing the distribution of the forested areas over much of the island. The map of the whole island made in 1765 by Captain Samuel Holland shows precisely the areas that had been cleared during the French period.21 And from the end of the nineteenth

rest of the coast was covered with thick wood, to the very edge of the water'; Anon. (1818): “This island is entirely covered with wood, On approaching the island, it looks like an immense forest rising from the sea"; [Hill] (1819): “The uncleared parts of the country is uniformly covered with trees"; MacGregor (1828): "[the Island] is covered to the water‘s edge with trees"; Stewart (1831): “the Island appears nearly entirely clothed with wood”. There is also the retrospective description of Anon. (1867): “(Any island man] who has attained old age, in his boyhood has seen the greater part of the country covered with primeval forest. From every hill top Iandwards nothing met his eye but a vast unbroken sea of foliage, so dense as almost to appear solid".

“3 See the section on 'succession' on pp. 22-23.

‘9 An example is Gesner (1846): “The whole of the surface of Prince Edward Island has been covered with forests Great inroads have been made in these forests by the progress of cultivation and the Iumbermen Fires have also been very destructive

2° Johnson (1895), quoting a report written ten years before. In similar vein is Crosskill’s (1904) comment: "The woodsman's axe, forest fires and the fore-time prosperous ship-building industry have swept away the “forest primeval”, leaving but insignificant growth".

21 Holland 1765 (PARO map 0,617C). It should be noted however that even though it was only seven years since the deportation of the Acadians, Holland said that "a great part of the Lands formerly cleared is so much overgrown with Brush and small Wood, that it will be extremely difficult to form a true estimate of the quantity of cleared land". There is another map, made perhaps in 1762, which exists in three known copies (see Anon. (1762), and especially the attached footnote 2), which shows the same areas of cleared land as in Holland's map, but drawn crudely, and clearly not based on an accurate survey. In addition, in the University of PEI Map Collection there are two maps from the Atlantic Neptune of J. F. W. Desbarres: one titled 'Hillsborough Bay', the other 'Cardigan Bay', both dated in the collection as ‘c. 1780'. They are clearly based on Samuel Holland‘s survey, but they show in greater detail the French clearances around the two bays.