broken by the middle, forming a thicket impenetrable almost to the foot of man. On the top of [the] bank, the thicket is found extending to the utmost verge of the precipice, and some of the trees having lost their roots, are to be seen fallen or falling over.

Selkirk (1803) deduced, astutely, from one such coastal site on Point Prim, where the soil seemed to be good, that ”the spruce prevails only because of the exposed situation killing the other woods”.

The continuation of the above extract from Johnstone (1822) indicates that the forest that occurred just inland from the spruce thicket also had unusual features:

After passing through this stripe of soft wood we find larger trees, and growing more apart; but it is still unpleasant walking, for should there be little or no underwood, which is often the case, yet one’s way is entirely blocked up by trees fallen down, some broken by the middle, others torn up by the roots in all the different stages of decay, from the tree newly overthrown to the one nearly assimilated in rottenness to the soil which gave it birth.

It thus seems that after ”the strip of soft wood” (i.e. the white spruce zone) there was a zone of larger trees, seemingly not of softwoods, which being near the coast, were very prone to wind damage and uprooting.114

That this strip of stunted coastal spruce occurred all around the island, as Johnstone's (1822) comment suggests, including sites with much higher cliffs than the ”four to more than twenty feet” that he mentioned‘”, is indicated by the evidence submitted to the Land Commission (1875): William S. McNeill reported that there had once been ”scrubby spruce” along the ”front” of Lot 24, a township that contains the high cliffs at Orby Head and Cape Turner on the north shore.116 McNeill is also the only person to give us an indication of the width of this coastal spruce strip: he said that it had "extended about three-quarters

1” The comment on the heavy wind damage to trees near the

coast prompted Johnstone to immediately go on to describe another feature of the island's natural forests, namely the “cradle hills", little hills of earth resulting from the uprooting of trees by high winds, but it is evident that here he is speaking about the island‘s forests in general and not just about areas near the coast.

“5 See footnote 112.

”6 Some of the cliffs between North Cape and West Point where the anonymous officer (Anon. 1762) reported the "impenetrable rampert of a thick kind of brush wood" may be of a comparable height.

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of a mile from the shore”, and he implied that this was before settlement, for by 1875 the spruce had been ”burned over and replaced with laurel”.117 Thus even areas with high cliffs seem to have received levels of salt-spray great enough to exclude all tree species other than white spruce for some distance from the cliff edge.

We might wonder whether in some very exposed areas there might have been a treeless zone, where even white spruce trees could not establish”, and we may also ask how far inland beyond the white spruce zone did the mechanical damage due to the wind, evident from Johnstone’s statement above, extend. Unfortunately the answers to these questions are not to be found in the historical literature, and the only approach to attempting to answer them is likely to be from observations on the present distribution of white spruce and other forest-types on coastal cliffs and banks, combined perhaps with the measurement of salt-spray deposition. Even so, on the basis of the historical descriptions, we may conclude that along the coasts of the island in any areas within reach of salt-spray white spruce is likely to have been the pre—dominant tree in the pre-European vegetation.

We should also note that, prior to the arrival of Europeans, white spruce would also have colonized coastal dunes and dune slacks on the island, though the only historical record is that of Curtis (1775) who reported spruce (though he actually called it ’fir’) ”some in clusters” on a ’flat’ amid sand-dunes which appear to have been part of the off-shore sand-spit now called the Conway

“7 William s. McNeil) lived at North Rustico. I suspect that he may

have been presenting hearsay evidence here since the area would have been settled a century before. ‘Three-quarters of a mile‘ would mean that about three-quarters of the length ofthe farms on the shore side of the road between North Rustico and Cavendish had been under spruce before clearance. It may seem a large amount but McNeill twice states the distance. This also lends support to the retrospective statement of Ready (1899) that before the settlement of Lot 20 “a heavy growth" of conifers that had included spruce, had extended two miles inland (the area is that between Sea View and Park Corner), though this cannot be entirely the coastal white spruce zone, for along with spruce he mentions hemlock, pine and fir as occurring.

”5 It is relevant that in 1534 Jacques Cartier, who had landed briefly at four places on the western shore of the island (between North Cape and West Point), had recorded treeless areas along that coast: “The soil where there are no trees is also very rich and is covered with peas, white and red gooseberry bushes [on currants], strawberries, raspberries and wild oats [or. wheat] like rye, which one would say had been sown there and tilled.” (The translation, except that in square brackets, is by H. P. Biggar in 1924 — see Sobey 2002, p. 37.)