themeo. Fire had been through part of the barrens in both Lots 7 and 9, leaving in each area the local descriptive epithet of ”the burnt barrens” for an area of land‘“, while the barrens of Lot 13 were also in recovery from a past fire“. Finally, one witness said that the barrens of Lot 11 were underlain by a ”white barren sand”83 — which recalls Sir George Seymour’s recording of thirty— five years earlier, of a "hopeless white sand” on some of the barrens of Lot 1384.

It is evident from the above that, in this second wider application of the word, the two factors associated with the ’barrens’ in the narrower sense (as in the St. Peters Bay area) recur in the comments on the barrens of Prince County: these are the perceived influence of soil factors and of fire. As for fire, just as had the commentators on the barrens at St. Peters in the previous century, John Mollison (1905), attributed the creation of the barrens of Prince County to the effects of fire on "Spruce woodland” in an area with poor ’thin’ soils.85

In conclusion, though the term ’barren’ may have been used by different recorders for different vegetation types, they share the property of being unproductive and useless land unsuitable for agricultural clearance. Though some recorders seem to reserve the term for a vegetation that has more the appearance of scrub than forest, the records of many others indicate explicitly, or implicitly, the presence of a forest cover. It was perceived to be underlain, at least in part, by a white sandy soil, and subject to varying degrees of drainage, with the vegetation-type it carried being

5° Land Commission 1875: John Cocheran of Lot 7.

51 Land Commission 1875: Robert Holton of Lot 9 and Amos McWilliams of Lot 7. McWilliams added “that which has shrubbery on it and has been burnt I call barren".

32 Land Commission 1875: Samuel Ramsay called it “burnt land“, while Alexander McArthur said that, unlike the barrens of Lot 11 which were on “white barren sand“, “the 500 acres of barrens" of Lot 13 were “merely burnt and grown up with second growth”. Another witness alluding to barren land having been burned over is John Simpson of Lot 22

53 Land Commission 1875: Alexander McArthur of Lot 13.

84

Seymour 1840. 85 Mollison‘s comments were based on the perceived events that had occurred near the northern border of Lot 12, where a fire in “spruce woodland” (he thought about 1840) had left a barren area dominated for many years by blueberries, though by 1906 the land was again covered with “spruce and fir trees from ten to twenty feet in height".

15

susceptible to forest-fire, and once burned there was only a long and slow re-colonisation by trees. Such barren lands were viewed as making up only a small part of the island’s land surface as a whole, though making a significant contribution in west Prince County.86

The ’swamps’ — In the early attempts at land classification“, the barrens are usually discussed in tandem with another unproductive forest-type that was also viewed unfavourably for clearance:

the 'swamps’.88 Self-evidently, the 'swamps’

were a wet land-type“, and the word seems to have been mostly used as a synonym for wet woodland.90 That most swamps were indeed tree-

56 The ‘barrens‘ would appear to fall within the ‘black spruce

forest' of Sobey & Glen (2002), especially the ‘heath' forest-type (see Sobey 1995, pp. 92-95).

87

Stewart 1806; Johnstone 1822; MacGregor 1828; Hill 1839; Bain 1890.

83 Though sometimes the word ‘barren' was applied also to swamps (e.g. Land Commission (1875): evidence of Donald McPhee, Lot 9), the comments of most of the ‘men-on-the-ground' support the book-writers in distinguishing the swamps from the barrens: e.g. Seymour (1840) distinguished between the ‘swamps‘ and the ‘barrens' of Lot 13, as did the surveyor Alexander Anderson in giving evidence to the Land Commission (1875), when he said that there were “some swamps and some barren lands" on Lot 13. John Cocheran used a similar description for Lot 7, and though their phrasing is less precise, the words used by Peter Doyle for Lot 7 and Joseph Mooreshed for Lot 10 also imply a distinction between the two land-types.

as [MacDonald] (1804), however, says that they were improperly so named, as he considered that none of the island's swamps were really so “deep or wild" as to be true swamps.

9° There were exceptions however: it is evident that for some writers the word ‘swamp’ also encompassed what we would now call bogs (these include Stewart (1806), who refers to those “swamps which, having few or no trees, are covered with a soft fog or moss, in which a man will sink to his knees"; and MacGregor (1828), who under the word ‘swamp' included areas “resembling the turf bogs of Ireland" where “scarcely any thing but shrubs and moss grows”. Also, Shuttleworth (1793) refers to a habitat near Morell that he says the local population called the “Carribou swamps", but which from his description could only have been a bog (it was the habitat of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea, a plant confined to bogs) — he himself seems to use the name ‘moss’ for the habitat. Similarly, I also note in the evidence to the Land Commission (1875) the use of the word ‘moss‘ or ‘moss swamp‘ for what we would today call a bog: the surveyor Owen Curtis referred to the presence of “all kinds of swamp" on Lot 36, one kind being “moss swamps“ that were “very poor land", while Robert Holton of Lot 9 referred to a “kind of swamp [that is] flooded, and wet, and covered with deep moss”. Oxford (1989) gives ‘moss' as the word used (and still in use) in the north of England and in Scotland for the habitat to which we would now apply the name ‘bog’. ‘Moss’ is in fact the original Anglo-Saxon word for the habitat, ‘bog‘ only entering English in the sixteenth century from Scottish or Irish Gaelic. It is interesting that the word ‘bog' is rare in the historical literature for the island, MacGregor (1828) and Gesner (1847) being the only two recorders that l have come across who use it in the sense of peat bog.