island with Charlottetown.213 Long-distance roads not only gave prospective settlers arriving at the town access to the more distant parts of the island but, as importantly, with the filling up of the ’front lands’ along the shores and rivers, the new roads themselves began to serve as lines along which new farms could be laid out, passing, as they often did, through areas of hardwood forest, and at the same time providing the necessary survey lines from which farm boundary lines could be offset. With very few exceptions, the settlement and clearance of the ”inland lands” of the island (to use Lord Selkirk’s phrase) was always preceded by the opening up of a road. This means that in the interior parts of the island, the earliest possible date for the beginning of settlement and forest clearance is likely to have been the date of the construction of the first road through an area he its survey and tree clearance). Thus the large amount of data on road construction that can be found in the provincial archives in the form of surveyors’ maps and survey notebooks, and in the government accounts allocating money and contracts for road survey and building, should be very useful in working out the history of forest clearance in particular areas. Economic and social factors. The land ownership system — The proprietorial system of land ownership that was imposed on the island by the British government in 1767 had a profound influence on the pattern of settlement and forest clearance. As has been noted earlier, the British government transferred to private ownership all land on the island except for the very small Lot 66 and the three Royalties around each of the county towns. A principal reason for 213 See Vass (1986) for an outline of the development of the island‘s early road system, as well as Clark (1959) (e.g. p. 72, and Figs. 26 and 28). I should note here that there was little carry-over of the few roads constructed during the French period, chiefly because they were few and very insubstantial, most travel having been by water in the French period. As far as I can tell (based on the French period roads as mapped by Holland in 1765) only three roads survived into the British period: the old ‘portage‘ road connecting Mapeque Bay to Bedeque Bay and still running through Travellers Rest and Reads Corner; the road running from St. Peters to Fortune; and, for a time, the road between the Hillsborough River and St. Peters (see Arsenault 2004). I question however whether the “old French Road or Portage [crossing Point Prim from Belfast] to Pinette River“ mentioned by Selkirk (1803) is actually a French period road. It is shown in PARO map 05233 (dating from about 1803), and in part and in a somewhat straightened fashion, became the ‘Portage Road’ shown in ‘Meacham's Atlas' (Allen 1880) (p. 119); it is now part of the Trans- Canada Highway. However, it is not shown in Holland's map of 1765. 37 the creation of the land-holding system had been to facilitate the more speedy settlement of the island. Towards this end, each grantee (in the event, more often his successor — since many lots were sold in the decade after the lottery“) was under the legal obligation to settle his township with 100 persons within ten years (i.e. one person per 200 acreslm. If every proprietor had fulfilled this obligation, it would have resulted in substantial inroads being made into much of the upland hardwood forests over the whole island before 1800.216 However, only a few of the more enterprising landlords initiated the settlement of their townships: in the early 1770s proprietor-led settlement began on lots 18, 21, 34, and 36, as well as on a few others.217 In all of the other townships, there was very limited, if any, settlement and forest clearance before 1800, and for some townships this state of affairs continued well into the nineteenth century (though, as we shall see later, when we come to the timber harvest, this did not mean that their forests were immune from exploitation)?18 In some cases this failure to develop a township was a deliberate policy on the part of the landlord, while in others it was due to simple neglect, though the result was the same, with forest clearance in such townships being very much delayed.219 Aside from the sponsorship of their own colonizing ventures, there was another way in which a 2" See Clark (1959) (p. 50) for an estimate of the turnover in ownership ofthe lots in the years following 1767. 215 It should be noted that it is ‘persons‘ and not ‘heads of families‘, which meant that women and children could be counted separately as contributing to the fulfilment of the terms of the grant. 2‘6 If the terms of the grant had been fulfilled by every landlord, the island would have had a population of 6,600 by 1777, a size that was not achieved until thirty years later in the first decade of the nineteenth century (the Desbarres cenus of 1805 gives a count of 6,957 — see Clark 1959, p. 237). 2” See Bumsted 1987 (Chapter III), and also Clark (1959) (pp. 55-57). Proprietors who undertook the early settlement of their townships were Captain Robert Stewart on Lot 18 in 1770; James Montgomery on Lots 34 and 59 in 1770; Captain John MacDonald on Lot 36 in 1772; and Robert Clark on Lot 21 in 1773. After this initial outburst of activity by the proprietors in the 17705 there were only a few other proprietor-led colonizing ventures — though they did make an important contribution to the settlement of particular townships. One of the most important was that of Lord Selkirk in 1803 in the Belfast townships of 57 and 58, and in part of lot 53, and that Father John MacDonald in the 18305 and 1840s in Lot 36. 2‘8 See Clark (1959) (p. 50, and Figs. 23 and 24) for the low levels of settlement on the island up to the end of the eighteenth century. 2‘9 See Robertson (1996) (pp. 13-19), for a review of the factors influencing the proprietors' attitudes and actions — or lack of action.