Timber exports to the United States ~ Due to the domination of the British North American timber trade by the market for ton timber in the British Isles, as well as the institution of protectionist measures and duties by both the United States and Great Britain, there was very little export of timber from any of the Maritime colonies to the United States prior to the late 1840s.629 For Prince Edward Island, the sudden appearance in the colony’s customs records in the late 18405 of one particular wood product marks the beginning of a short-lived but intensive export of the product to the United States: the products were ship knees of tamarack — always called ‘juniper knees’ in the contemporary records (Table 5). As the name implies, knees were right—angled pieces of timber that were used as bracing in the hulls of wooden ships. They were cut from the base of the tamarack tree where the main woody roots grew out horizontally from the trunk. The records do not reveal how many knees could be obtained from a single tree, but it is likely to have been several.

The export of ’juniper knees’ to the United States occasioned one of the few interventions of the island’s Legislature into the field of the timber export trade. Alarmed by the large number of knees being exported, in 1852 the House of Assembly, in an attempt to retain the knees for the island’s own ship-building industry, imposed a duty of three pence on each knee with effect from 1 July 1852 — and, because this had little effect, it was raised fourfold, to one shilling, in 1853.630 However even this further rise in the duty (which added about twenty per cent to the price of a knee) appears to have had little effect: as Table 5 shows, some 10,855 knees were exported to the United States in 1854. 63‘ Thereafter, the duty fell into abeyance with the advent of the Reciprocity Treaty in January 1855, which had been

529 Lower 1938 (pp. 87-88). Again, a full analysis of the island's

customs records is required in order to determine how much trade in timberto the United States there really was.

63" House of Assembly 1852, 1853 [see Appendix 6].

63‘ The records assembled in Table 5 may not be complete — there are certainly anomalies, the most obvious being the omission of the duties that must have been collected in 1854. Also it is possible that at some island ports, knees were not listed as a separate item but were included with timber in general. It is also worth drawing attention to the comment of Lower (1938) (p. 126) that in the British American colonies “custom officials were interested primarily in the collection of duties, not of statistics, and consequently such records as were kept cannot be too fully relied uponT

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negotiated by the British and American governments the previous year, and which allowed for the free movement without any duties of all natural products between Britain’s North American colonies and the United States.632

The debate on the increase in the duty in 1853 in the House of Assembly, which was reported almost verbatim in the Charlottetown newspaper Hazard’s Gazette, gives us important information on a number of forest-related topics, some of which will be considered later.633 Here I will only note that several members of the Assembly asserted that tamarack trees were being felled solely for their knees with the rest of the tree (the wood of which was very valuable for ship- building“) being left to rot in the woods, or to burn in subsequent forest fires.635 The debate also reveals that the knees were being purchased by several Americans who were living on the island at the time, presumably temporarily. After the beginning of Reciprocity, as Table 5 shows, juniper knees disappear altogether from the custom records summaries, though it is probable that they continued to be exported.

The types of woods exported — Returning to the main timber export market of the island, the British Isles, studies in other parts of Canada indicate that there was a much greater demand in Britain for the North American softwoods than for the hardwoods, and among the softwoods it was pine, and especially white pine, in the form of either ton timber or deals, that was the primary exports“. That this was also true for Prince Edward Island is evident not only from the custom records already cited, indicating the large amount of pine ton timber that was exported in the early decades of the nineteenth century”, but also from the

comments of two island recorders who especially

632 See the Joumal of the House of Assembly 1855 (Appendix A, p. 4) for the terms of the treaty, as well as Appendix W for further details on its implementation. The treaty specifically included the free movement without any duty of “timber and lumber of all kinds, round, hewed and sawed, unmanufactured in whole or in part".

633

See page 142.

634

See pages 102-103.

635 House of Assembly 1853: speeches of Messrs. Palmer,

Longworth, Montgomery and Clark.

636 Lower 1973 (pp. 30-31) and Wynn 1981 (pp. 35, 41—43).

637 The amounts exported between 1806 and 1820 are tabulated

by De Jong 8. Moore (1994) (p. 26).