"this because he does not wish to leave himself 
     
     without the means of obtaining fuel”. However by 
     
     1860 the Land Commission of that year 
     
     considered that after 20 years of settlement 
     
     ”perhaps 30 or 40 acres of cleared land” per farm 
     
     to be the norm3°3, a value that embraces the 
     
    
   
   
    
     average value obtained from the census of 
     
     1861.30“ 
     
    
   
   
    
     The effect for the forest was that clearing began in 
     
     the narrow front of each farm that faced the coast 
     
     or the road, with the cleared area being pushed 
     
     into the back end of the farm only gradually.305 
     
     The overall result was that a large body of 
     
     uncleared and initially old-growth woodland was 
     
     retained, comprising the contiguous back ends of 
     
     adjacent farms, and these would most probably 
     
     run into the back ends of the farms on the next 
     
     roughly parallel road. During the course of the 
     
     nineteenth century these large areas of uncleared 
     
     forest gradually became the ’islands’ of forest that 
     
     are very evident in Chalmers' map of 1895, and 
     
     that are still with us today. 
     
    
   
   
    
     The landscape effects of forest clearance 
     
     Though we cannot divorce the effects of forest 
     
     clearance from other effects on the landscape that 
     
     were occurring at the same time (I am thinking 
     
     especially of the effects of forest fire that will be 
     
     described in the next section), | wish to consider 
     
     here only the effects on the landscape of 
     
     settlement and forest clearance. In the eighteenth 
     
     century, as we have already seen, the island had 
     
     been described by many recorders as being 
     
     completely covered with forest.306 With the 
     
     beginning of British settlement in the 17705, as 
     
     the trees were cut down to create farmland, 
     
     inroads began to be made into this forest in a few 
     
    
   
   
    
     3‘” From the Appendix to the Report of the Land Commission 
     
    
   
   
    
     (1860) (not extracted), as cited by Clark (1959) (p. 214). 
     
     30‘ The average amount of cleared land per farm in 1861 was 33 
     
     acres. Average values from some of the other island censuses 
     
     are as follows: in 1841 — 22 acres; 1848 — 24; 1855 — 34; and 1881 
     
     — 44. These are of course averages, and second and third 
     
     generation islanders, and perhaps the longer established 
     
     immigrants, would have had amounts of cleared land greater than 
     
     this on their farms. (These calculations are based on census data 
     
     for the number of farms as quoted in Clark (1959) (pp. 95, 134), 
     
     and for the total area of arable land on the island as contained in 
     
     Glen [see footnote 200].) 
     
    

    
     305 As Johnstone (1822) and Lawson (1851) point out, many 
     
     farms on the island took the form of a long narrow strip with 10 
     
     chains (660 feet) of frontage along a river or coastline, or later 
     
     along a road, and 100 chains of depth (a legacy that has remained 
     
     with us ever since, as can be seen in ‘Meacham's Atlas'). 
     
    
   
   
    
     306 See footnote 17. 
     
    
   
   
    
     49 
     
    
   
   
    
     selected areas. As a result, the landscape of the 
     
     island began to undergo a profound 
     
     transformation, which to begin with, was slow and 
     
     gradual, but which was to greatly speed up in the 
     
     nineteenth century in line with the accelerating 
     
     rate of settlement.307 
     
    
   
   
    
     I think that the most useful way of demonstrating 
     
     the changes that occurred in the landscape due to 
     
     agricultural clearance is to present six different 
     
     landscape descriptions from the contemporary 
     
     records, each containing a visual image of the 
     
     island at a different stage in its settlement. The 
     
     first of these comes from a letter written in 1793 
     
     by the Quaker John Cambridge from his base at 
     
     Murray Harbour, to two women back in England 
     
     who were about to set sail to join him on the 
     
     Island of St. John. Settlement at that time was 
     
     restricted to the shoreline and waterways of the 
     
     island, and Cambridge’s aim was to prepare the 
     
     newcomers psychologically for a landscape very 
     
     different from that of their English homeland: 
     
    
   
   
    
     Let me intreat you both to prepare your minds not to see 
     
     numberless green fields but groves upon groves of 
     
     wilderness woods with here and there a mean house in 
     
     a small opening erected on the edge of a river. . But 
     
     thy Experience has long told thee not to seek a Paradise 
     
     on Earth. 308 
     
    
   
   
    
     The second vignette, from a lengthy essay written 
     
     for a local newspaper by an unnamed author in 
     
     1867, recalls the landscape of the island as much 
     
     of it had been thirty or so years before, in the 
     
     1830s and 1840s. He describes an island where 
     
     the new roads that had been pushed into many of 
     
     the 'inland’ parts were beginning to attract newly- 
     
     arrived immigrants to settle along them: 
     
    
   
   
    
     307 The rapidity of landscape change from the 1820s onward is 
     
    
   
   
    
     evident from two extracts from the journal of Horatio Mann, the 
     
     proprietor of the northern half of Lot 27, who visited the island six 
     
     times between 1821 and 1844. In the first extract, on 29 July 1829 
     
     he wrote: “The rapid improvements made and still making is truly 
     
     great; for Mr. P[ope] [said] that only 11 years ago that this large 
     
     settlement [of Tryon] also the great improvements on the road for 
     
     upwards of 12 miles [between Bedeque and Tryon], was at that 
     
     period a compleat Wilderness of heavy Woods"; in the second, on 
     
     24 August 1840: “We started from Charlottetown [along the 
     
     Princetown Road heading for Bedeque]... the roads were most 
     
     excellent. In short, the number of log houses going up on the road 
     
     side, with burning and chopping down trees, and that for miles, and 
     
     in places beholding fine clearances and in many places good farms 
     
     of from 20 to 30 acres with the prospect of good crops, The 
     
     appearances to me after 6 years absence gave an entire new 
     
     aspect to the country around." 
     
    
   
   
    
     3°” Cambridge 1793.