shrubs“, or ”ferns, laurels and stunted bushes"59.

Both Johnstone and Gesner explicitly use the term for a piece of vegetation in the area of St. Peters Bayso. Gesner and MacGregor considered that fire had played a role in the formation of this type of barren — though it is also evident that the soils were inferior to begin with, being described by Johnstone (1822) as ”dry and sandy”, and by MacGregor (1828) as ”a light brown or whitish sand”.61 However, contrary to the generally accepted opinion, both Gesner (1846) and MacGregor (1828) considered that such areas were capable of improvement for agricultural use.62 Given their evident narrow application of the term, it is not surprising that these authors

species that also occurs on Prince Edward Island), while ‘moss' is a Scottish term for ‘bog' — see Tansley (1939) (p. 673), for the use of the word ‘moss' as a synonym for bog. Johnstone‘s ‘myrtle‘ is thus likely to be either Myn'ca ga/e or Myn'ca pensylvanica - Erskine (1960) (p. 128) came across a record of the latter species being called myrtle on the island in 1853.

5“ MacGregor 1828.

59 Gesner 1846. His ‘laurels‘, as also Stewart’s (1806) (see the next footnote), would seem to be Ka/mia angustifo/ia, the dwarf or sheep laurel, which Erskine (1960) notes as “common throughout [on] bogs [and in] open or cleared swampy and acid woodland".

6° Johnstone (1822) in fact said that “excepting in the area of St. Peters, there was little of this kind of [‘barrens’] upon the island". Elsewhere (p. 124, not extracted) he said that you "entered the barrens of St. Peter" where the main road from Charlottetown "bending a little to the left" lost sight of the Hillsborough River — which is a point just at the Kings County line beyond St. Andrews. Somewhat similarly Gesner (1846) said that the “barrens” covered “large tracts of land upon Lots 39, 40 and 41". It is likely that MacGregor (1828) also had in mind this same piece of vegetation, since he refers to the “barrens” as occurring on “lands formerly laid waste by fire" — a description that would fit the area at St. Peters burned over by the forest fires of the French period; and though Stewart (1806) doesn't explicitly use the term "barrens" in connection with the area of the French fire (rather he calls it “the burnt lands"), he says that “a great deal [of the] large tracts of forest destroyed by fire near a century back are without useful timber of any kind, and a great deal overrun with strong ferns, dwarf laurel and other shrubs" — which would seem to be the same type of vegetation. I note also that Holland (1765: October), in the table attached to his map, used the word ‘barren' to describe much of the land of Lot 41. (The only other township for which he used the word is the East Point township, Lot 47, where he described the soils as "sandy barren lands“)

6‘ As well, Stewart (1806), self evidently, considered fire to be a determining factor for the creation of “the burnt lands", though he also considered that the soils must have been "inferior" to begin with. Dawson (1868) (pp. 49, 53, not extracted), writing from the point of view of the Maritime region in general, and citing the observations of Titus Smith, as well as his own, considered that repeated fires on an area of low natural fertility led to the predominance of “Ka/mia angustifolia or sheep laurel" on what became in effect a “permanent barren“.

62 So also did Stewart (1806) consider that the “burnt lands“ would “pay very well for their cultivation”.

13

considered the 'barrens’ in this sense as making up only a small proportion of the island’s total surface area 53

Turning to its wider sense, the word 'barrens' seems to have been applied to a land-type of much greater extent that was particularly associated with the western part of Prince County“. The first mention of ’barrens’ in this sense that l have come across occurs in a letter from the land agent of Lot 13 to the proprietor in England: in 1816 James Bardin Palmer wrote to Sir George Seymour that there was ”a vein of barren land" that ran from ”the West Cape in two directions, northerly and easterly”, the eastern vein terminating in Lot 13.65 Then in 1840 we have James Yeo’s statement, as recorded by Seymour while on a visit to the island, that ”between Lots 1 and 14 inclusive" there were 100,000 acres of barrens.66 We also have Sutherland’s (1861) statement that "wide sections of two or more townships between Richmond Bay and Holland [i.e. CaSCUmpec] Bay are barren

wastes incapable of cultivation".67

From its widespread geographical extent, it is evident that the word ‘barren’ in this broader sense is likely to have been an epithet for poor coniferous forest, and as so, it also corresponds with Francis Bain’s use of the word: he uses it for a forest—type, which along with the ’swamps’, contained what he called the ”Sub-Arctic Flora" of the island: he lists the trees of both the swamps and barrens collectively as ”spruces, larches, poplars, birches, aspens and firs”, and their ground flora as ”Andromeda, Ledum, Whortleberries and

‘33 Johnstone (1322), MacGregor (1828).

6‘ “The barrens“ of west Prince County are referred to by Palmer (1816), Seymour (1840), the Land Commission (1860) (in the testimonies of a Mr. Perry, and of James Yeo), Sutherland (1861), the Land Commission (1875) (in the evidence of many persons), Bain (1890) and Mollison (1905).

65 Palmer 1816. Palmer‘s two ‘veins' are clearly visible on a modern soil map as two large stretches of poorly-drained soils in west Prince County: see the Prince Edward Island Soil Survey (MacDougall et al. 1988), and Fig. 5-5 (p. 53) of Sobey and Glen (1999), for a whole-island view of the distribution of such soils.

66 Seymour 1840 (quoting James Yeo); the comments Seymour made in his travel journal also allow us to pinpoint fairly precisely the location of some of the barrens occurring in Lot 13.

67 More geographically specific, a Mr. Perry in evidence to the Land Commission (1860) stated that “a portion of Lot 14 through which the main Western Road runs is a barren. There is another barren on the line between townships 13 and 14, which extends to Egmont Bay; and in these places the land cannot be highly valued".