abundance of each of the tree species on the island are fully examined in Appendix 1, and an assessment of the relative contribution of the various species is presented there. Here I will only state the general conclusions of that assessment. Apart from making use of contemporary descriptions of the tree species composition of the forest, there is an another less direct way of getting a picture of the relative frequency of the various trees in the forests of the island: this involves comparing the frequency with which each tree species is mentioned in the early records. The results of such an analysis are presented in Table 1-9 of Appendix 1 and the associated discussion.

These records are of two types: the trees either occur in lists in which the recorder attempted to name all or most of the trees, either on the whole island or a specific part of it, or else a tree species was recorded in some other context, usually a utilitarian one. Interpretation of these records presents problems, ranging from the fundamental one of determining what tree a recorder meant by his use of a particular name, to the over- or under— representation of certain species in the records due to a positive or negative bias with respect to them. For example, trees considered of greater economic importance, such as oak and pine in the eighteenth century, are likely to appear more frequently in the records on that account. These problems are discussed in Appendix 1 for each of the species.

For the broad-leaved trees, the analysis in Appendix 1 indicates a marked predominance of the shade-tolerant climax forest species (i.e. beech, yellow birch and sugar maple) in comparison with the early successional species, and among these tolerant hardwoods, beech appears to have made a greater contribution than yellow birch or Sugar maple. At the same time, all of the other broad-leaves, including the early successional shade-intolerant trees that are now so abundant on the island (especially white birch and trembling aspen), are much less frequently mentioned, and thus appear to have been far less important in the island’s forests prior to European settlement. For the conifers, the equivalent data suggests that spruce and pine were far more common than fir (though the possible over- representation of pine in the records must be borne in mind); and fir in turn was more common than hemlock, tamarack and cedar, all three of which occur at about the same level of frequency in the records. I stress that this sort of data should only be taken as an indicator, and that the analysis of the on-the-ground records found in the

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surveyors’ field notebooks and maps held by the provincial archives should ultimately greatly expand our knowledge on the relative importance of the various trees.110

The forest along the coast — Seven descriptions of coastal forest were found in the literature for various parts of the island‘”. It is evident from all of these descriptions that the forest that occurred around the edge of the island differed markedly from that occurring further inland, both in terms of its structure and in its species composition. Several of the records indicate that the tree species that comprised this coastal strip was ‘spruce’, which formed a single-species "thicket” of poor stunted trees along the shores of the island wherever sandstone cliffs or banks occurred.112 Although the particular spruce species is never named in any of the records, it can only have been white spruce. We have explicit evidence of the occurrence of such coastal

spruce at widely scattered sites‘”, and an

especially vivid description of it has been left to us by Johnstone (1822):

spruce as thick in proportion as hemp some of it dead and withered, though still standing, and some of it

”0 The field notebooks of Alexander Anderson (b. 1795, d. 1884), who between the 18305 and the 18705 was contracted by the island's government to carry out many official road and township surveys in Prince County and the bordering townships of Queens County, survive intact in the Provincial Archives, and in addition, many of the hundreds of contemporary maps held by the archives contain information on woodland types, including the main trees.

‘“ Anon. 1762; Holland 1765: Plan of the Island of St. John; Curtis 1775; Selkirk 1803; Johnstone 1822, 1823; Land Commission 1875: evidence of William S. McNeill of Lot 24.

“2 Johnstone (1822) states this explicitly: initially he said that what he called spruce “thickets” occurred “almost everywhere on the southern side of the island round the shore", but he went on to generalize the “thicket" for all the shores of the island: it occurred “round the greater part of the island [wherever there was] a steep bank of various heights, from four to more than twenty feet".

”3 Coastal spruce (“small’ or ”indifferent") is reported by Holland (1765: Plan) for Lots 1, 2, 3, 28 and 30 (the lack of such reports for any of the other lots is simply due to the general absence of tree species names in the forest descriptions of Holland‘s report). Also the "impenetrable Rampert of a thick kind of Brush wood" reported between North Cape and West Point by Anon. (1762) must have been white spruce. Johnstone (1823) describes trying to penetrate such a “thicket” at what seems to be Abells Cape near Fortune. Selkirk (1803) also recorded such coastal spruce at Point Prim, as well as on the coast in the vicinity of Wood Islands, where he noted that “the bank down to the sea is as usual [my italics] stunted spruces blasted by the wind“. Finally, William S. McNeill stated to the Land Commission (1875) that before settlement “scrubby spruce" had occurred on the ‘front' of Lot 24 (he must mean the area between Cavendish and North Rustico).