to have lasted for only a day or so, they are more likely to receive mention in diaries or in the newspapers of the day rather than in many of the accounts that are included in this sourcebook. It is thus not surprising that l have come across only three records of storms bringing down trees.

The first is the retrospective recollection of a ’hurricane’ that had occurred 66 years before: in an article in The Presbyterian newspaper in 1877, a resident of Brackley Point recalled ”a terrible hurricane” that had occurred in 1811 that ”blew down all the trees in the settlement”. To add further veracity to the extent of the damage, he added that ”the crew of a West India vessel in Rustico Bay at the time, declared that they never

saw worse in their native Islands".179

The second storm was recorded in response to one of the questions in a long questionnaire sent out in 1876 to the ”oldest inhabitants” of the island: ”Do you know anything of a great storm called the Michaelmas Gale, and when was it?” John Brooks of Murray Harbour South, aged 74, who had emigrated to the island in 1822, wrote the following in response:

I remember a great storm on the 13th of Sept. 1839, which swept over this part like a hurricane, the trees were in leaf and loaded with nuts, and the ground was soft with rain, and the woods fell before the wind, like a

field of grain before a heavy roller.180

Trees "loaded with nuts” can only have been beech trees. In the absence of further research this is all that we know of this storm.

The third record is of a better known storm, the ’August Gale’ of 1873, and it occurs in the diary of Francis Bain:

1873 August 24—25: A great storm of rain and terrifick blow of wind from the North with the point east. Many trees are prostrated, large limbs broken off and such quantities of green leaves stripped off that the ground is strewed with them as with brown leaves in autumn.

”9 [Lawson] 1877-1878. An entry in the daybook of Benjamin

Chappell suggests a possible date for the hurricane: on 30 September 1811 he wrote: ”Cloudey and the hardest gale of wind from 6 to 8 at night we have had these 7 years. Blow‘d down four house frames." [Chappell (1775-1818), not extracted]

18° Questionnaire 1876. Brooks‘ storm cannot be the Michaelmas Gale (whenever that was) that the compilers of the questionnaire had in mind, since Michaelmas, or the Feast of St. Michael, falls on September 29.

32

The crops are all beaten down and many fences tumbled

over.181

Given the time of year in which they occurred, these three storms must have been all extra- tropical cyclones (in common parlance, ’hurricanes’) that had made their way north from the Caribbean or the mid-Atlantic.182 And as was so for hurricane Juan, the amount of damage caused to trees by these storms is likely to have varied over a short distance. However, it is impossible at this distance in time from these storms to gauge the amount of damage that they caused to the natural forests. In 1811 and 1839 much of the island would still have been covered by old-growth forest, which would have been heavily cut into in places — more so in 1839 — which would have made the potential for tree damage even greater. However, by 1873 much of the natural forest would have been cleared — with the larger trees having been removed from what forest remained.

Undoubtedly there were other major storms, though it would require an extensive archival search of newspapers and diaries to document them.183 One such search — for ”major storm events" since 1850 — carried out by Albert Hoving (as part of a study of the Townshend Woodlot near Souris), turned up two other major storms before 1900: the well—known Yankee Gale of 1851 and the Saxby Gale of 1869, but it is not known whether either of these caused any damage to the forest.184 Certainly in the Townshend Woodlot the growth measurement techniques that Hoving used did not yield evidence of any on-site effects on the trees due to either of these storms (nor of the August Gale of 1873). Even so, it is likely that

“‘1 Bain (1868-1884). The August Gale has been the subject of

a recent paper in The Island Magazine (MacDonald 2004).

'82 The path of the August Gale is shown in MacDonald (2004). ‘83 A comprehensive search of the ‘daybooks‘ of Benjamin Chappell, which span a thirty-four year period (with gaps) between 1775 and 1818 (using the index provided by Gilbert Hughes in 2003), reveals many ‘terrible' or ‘great‘ storms. some causing damage to buildings or ships, but never does Chappell mention any damage to trees or the forest (Chappell 1775-1818).

18‘ Hoving 1995. l have also come across on an internet site a third such storm that escaped the notice of Hoving: on 23 December 1853 (which seems too late in the season to be a hurricane of tropical origin), the Islander reported what it called “the most disastrous storm ever experienced in the colony“ when a south-east gale struck the island “with hurricane-force winds, felling trees, and buildings by the score". [Reported 23 December 1998 in ‘The Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar' on the ‘Weather Network' internet site]