proprietor could exert an important influence on the pattern of forest clearance in his township, an influence that continued right up to the end of the land—holding system in the 18703. This was through his attitude (or sometimes that of his local agent) to the mode of transfer of land on his property to small farmers, both to immigrants who had arrived on the island by their own means and to native-born islanders. Townships owned by ’liberal’ landlords willing to sell land outright were more likely to attract settlers, at least those who had sufficient money to buy the freehold, and thus such townships would be more subject to forest clearance than those where the landlord would only lease the land.220 However, leasehold land still held an attraction for those settlers who did not have sufficient money to buy land, though for such persons both the rental charge and the length of the lease were important considerations. The longer the lease the more attractive it would be to a prospective settler (leases could range from as short as 21 years to ’perpetual tenure’ of 999 years)?21 We may assume that it was the townships where only short leases were offered that would be the least attractive of all to prospective settlers and thus the least developed, though this is an area where there is a need for further study.222

At the same time it should be noted that settlers could act completely outside the official land- holding system by simply occupying land without any legal title — 'squatting’ was the term for this. Squatting was not uncommonm, and could even be a communal act involving the settling of a

22° An example of a landlord willing to sell land outright to settlers

was Lord Selkirk, as is evident from his diary (Selkirk (1803); see also Campey (2003) (pp. 41 -46) for the sale of Selkirk land). However, most landlords were not willing to sell land piecemeal to individual farmers (see Robertson (1996) (p. 23) for their reasons for not doing so).

22‘ See Hatvany (1996) (Chapter 4) for the importance of leasehold farmers having sufficient capital to cover their building, clearing and other expenses; and Robertson (1996) (pp. 19—24) for the terms and length of leases

222 We should note the comment of Nathaniel Carrington (1837), a visitor to the Worrell estate, comprising five townships in the St. Peters Bay area of Kings County, in his journal that "[Mr. Worrell‘s] friends & acquaintances say that he will not give leases for more than 40 years, consequently but a small portion of his land is cleared and farmed as a man to enter on the thick forest cannot clear, erect necessary buildings and make anything of a farm [in] under 12 to 15 years“.

223 According to Robertson (1996) (pp. 12, 52), in 1861 6.7% (by acreage) of the occupied land on the island, comprising 875 farms, was held by squatters See also Clark (1959) (pp. 95 and 99, and Fig. 52).

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whole group of people in an area““. It is likely that many squatters, especially individuals acting singly, had an effect on the forest that has left no trace at all in the archival records.

in the end, in terms of the effects of the proprietory system on settlement and forest clearance, each township will have been subject to its own particular circumstances, and so will have its own history, which will only be revealed through research studies at the township level.

Social factors — In addition to the factors so far discussed that drew people to particular areas, there was also what might be called ‘social attraction’. At a basic level there was the social attraction that drew people to areas where settlement and clearance had already begun, and the avoidance of areas without settlersm. But this social attraction frequently had both an ethnic and a religious denominational overlay, which is most evident among those settlers whose language was not English (namely the French Acadians and the Gaelic Scots), who were usually attracted to those localities where there were already persons of the same language.226 But it also occurred in English-speaking groups, notably the Irish; and for all groups it included a denominational attraction towards co-religionists, whether Catholic or Protestant. ”7

22‘ Examples of such ‘communal' squatting that come to mind

include the Acadian settlements of western Prince County: namely, Tignish (founded in 1799), Cascumpec (Lot 5), and in Lot 15 and adjacent parts of Lots 14 and 16 (from 1812) (Arsenault 1989, pp. 64-66); the settling of Scottish settlers on Lot 13 in the 17705 (see Sobey 1997); and the spill-over from the MacDonald townships of Lots 35 and 36, that extended along the northern shore of Kings County (e.g. Clark 1959, pp. 60-61).

225 Lawson (1851), noting that there was “an immense quantity of the very best land still lying in a state of wilderness” in the far west of the island, said that this was from “no other reason than that no one likes to be the first in to break ground".

226 For the Acadians this ‘social attraction' had a negative

manifestation: one of the factors that led the Acadians to found new settlements in relatively isolated parts of west Prince County between 1799 and 1815 (at Tignish, Cascumpec and Egmont Bay) was the distance of these areas from the British settlements on the island (Arsenault 1989).

227 The journal of Lord Selkirk (1803) contains a number of examples of such social attraction in action: he comments in general (p. 39, not extracted), on “the social clannish disposition of the Highlanders", who "would not go (Le. emigrate from Scotland] without their friends"; he also records (p. 37, not extracted) that Father McDonald was encouraging the Catholic settlers from Uist to settle in Lots 57 and 58 so as to be "nearer their friends 8. other people of their own church" (in the end most settled as a group in Lot 53); and Selkirk himself (p. 35, not extracted) felt it best to keep his Presbyterian and Catholic settlers on the island apart from each other “on account of the probability of religion creating differences".