century there is a map showing the area of forested land (distinguished as ”old forest growth” and "recent forest growth") in the geological report of Robert Chalmers (1895), the surveys for which, seemingly accurate, were carried out sometime between 1890 and 1893.22

The quality of the forests — In some guise or other, a refrain running through many of the documents, especially in the first fifty years of British rule, is the comment that the forests of the island were generally of a good quality: the ’timber’ is thus described as ”serviceable”? ”useful”, ”in most parts good’“, ”well-grown”26, "fine”, and valuable”28, with the criterion on which all of these descriptions were made clearly being utilitarian, Le. a view of the forest as a source of commodities, especially of wood for building materials and export. Such generalized descriptions are mostly an eighteenth century feature, since later recorders, when commenting on the quality of the timber, tended to distinguish between the value of the various tree species for timber, rather than generalizing for the forests as a whole.

Not all of the comments are positive however: three recorders state that the quality of the island’s forests was poor. We can dismiss William Cobbett's (1829) deliberately insulting description that "the whole is wretchedly poor: heaps of rocks covered chiefly with fir trees”, as of no relevance to the real forests, since he had never visited the island, and was anyway lumping it in with his description of the rest of British North America — he also had a political axe to grind. However, the other two recorders did visit the island: Edward Walsh (1803) said "the trees in general are slender, few exceeding a foot in diameter", while Bishop Plessis (1812) recorded that ”the trees on this island, are not notable for either their height or

22 Unfortunately Chalmers’ map, a reduced copy of which is

shown in the extract, only shows the western half of the island (i.e. the area west of a straight line running from Orby Head near Rustico to Canoe Cove, also excluding Lots 1, 2 and part of Lot 3 in the far north-west).

23 Anon. 1762.

2" Rogers 1765; Anon. 1772; Anon. 1789.

25 DesBrisay 1770-1772.

25 Anon. 1772.

2’ Curtis 1775; Stewart 1806 (referring to particular localities).

2“ [Clark] 1779; House of Assembly 1773-1849 (in 1780).

their size. They are generally inferior to those of Canada He the colonies of Upper and Lower Canadal.” Perhaps the forests that these two men saw in the particular parts they visited were of poor quality or comprised small trees. In this respect we may note that the first British governor, Walter Patterson (1770) in his first dispatch, had also described the forests in the vicinity of Charlottetown as ”of very little use except for firing [i.e. firewood]; and a great part of them not even good for that”.

Greater localized detail on the quality of the island's forests is contained in Captain Samuel Holland’s description of the ”woods” on sixty-five of the island’s sixty-seven townships, which he appended in tabular form to his detailed map of the island.29 Unfortunately, the qualitative descriptive labels that he used are not defined anywhere in his report: the categories range from ’bad’ to ’very good’, with 'good’, ’pretty good' and 'indifferent’ being also used.30 Even so, an analysis of his descriptions is of interest (see Table 2, and Figure 3): it is evident that the 'woods’ on 75% of the townships (49 of the 65) were classed as ”very good”, ”good” or "pretty good”.31 The sixteen townships that did not fall within these categories tended to occur in three areas: the only area where the woods were described as “bad” was in the far west from about Cape Kildare all the way round almost to West Point, Holland at the same time noting that the woods of Lots 1 to 3 comprised "small spruce". The forests along the

29 Holland 1765 (Plan of the Island of St. John). His assessment

of the forest of each township was based almost entirely on what was visible from the coast, and for this reason he was unable to assess the quality of the forests on the two land-locked townships which he did not visit (Lots 66 and 67).

3° Whether or not Holland realised it at the time of his field survey, his forest descriptions were one of the factors that were to be used two years later by the Board of Trade in setting the level of the annual quitrents due from the proprietors for each of the townships (see Clark 1959, p. 47).

3‘ For almost all of the townships, Holland‘s description of the woods, and of the ‘soils’ or ‘lands' (either word is used) correspond to each other (i.e. if the woods are described as "very good", so also are the lands or soils). However, for three townships there is a discrepancy: for Lot 59, the woods are described as “very good", while the ‘lands‘ are "indifferent"; for Lot 61, the woods are "very good", while the land is “something better than Lot 60" (which is not described); and for Lot 62, the woods are “very good", but the “soil" is labelled as “in most places bad". There is no reason why the two descriptions should always have corresponded, since a site could have large timber on it, yet be underlain, for example, by poor wet soils unsuited for agriculture. However, from the close correlation between the descriptions of the woods and the soils, I suspect that in most cases the quality of the soil was simply ‘read‘ from the size of the trees that it supponed.