well as other parts of the vessel690 — in fact by the 18405 tamarack, or ’juniper’ as it was usually called, was being used in many ships for virtually all parts of the hull69‘. Also receiving a mention by one recorder each are beechsgz, maple693 and hemlockeg“.695

659 Stewart 1806; MacGregor 1828; House of Assembly 1852, 1853; Land Commission 1860 (evidence of W. McGowan); Bain 1890. The knees were curved pieces of wood that braced the deckbeams. Stewart noted that larch made the best knees, as well as the best ‘trunnells' [tree-nails].

69° MacGregor 1828; Sleigh 1853. 59‘ From the 18405 onward island newspapers commonly record ships as being built largely or entirely of ‘juniper'. Two such newspaper notices brought to my attention by William Glen are: the launch of the brigantine Mary (“the greater part of her is junipei”) at New London (The Islander, 21 July 1848); and the launch of the barque Tuncred, “built of juniper" at Morell (Hazard‘s Gazette, 19 August 1851). I also note other references to ‘juniper ships‘ in De Jong & Moore (1994): the ship Dahlia, launched at Bedeque in 1840, was “built of white oak and juniper” (p. 206); the ship Superior, “built entirely of Juniper", was launched at New London in 1845 (p. 355); the William Yeo, “a fine juniper built ship", was launched at Porthill in 1862 (p. 363); the David Cannon, 3 “fine Juniper built bark", was launched along the Hillsborough River in 1864 (p. 242); and the Constance, “a very superior juniper bark”, was launched at Egmont Bay in 1867 (p. 198). An unnamed “juniper vessel" was also being built at Mount Stewart in 1876 (p. 249). De Jong & Moore also quote a speaker in the House of Assembly in 1862 (the shipbuilder and politician, Lemuel C. Owen) as saying that “one small juniper ship of 500 tons was equal in value to all the grain shipped from a country district” (p. 128), while in the same year they cite (p. 194) the notice of sale of a shipyard at Haldimand River, Egmont Bay, in which the seller noted that “any person wishing to build either seven or four years‘ Vessels will find this the only place where Spruce and Hacmatac [i.e. tamarack] is plentyf’ — the ‘seven or four years' refer to the Lloyd's of London classification for insurance purposes — it was the tamarack vessels that were placed in the higher seven year class. I also note in Morrison (1983) (pp. 86, 90, 91) references to three ‘juniper—built ships’ constructed in Lot 11: the barque Warburton (1853), the brig Conqueror (1855), and the brigantine Victory (1870). Then, in a reference that came to my attention at a late stage (the debate in the island’s House of Assembly in 1853 on the imposition of an import-duty on “juniper knees‘), the importance of tamarack to island ship—building is stressed by several speakers, and is epitomised by a comment of Mr. Davies: “juniper is the most valuable timber which the Island affords for ship-building purposes good vessels cannot be built without it" (see also the speeches of Messrs. Palmer, Montgomery and Pope) (House of Assembly 1852, 1853).

592 Hill (1839) said that beech was “much used in ship building, being found to be very durable under watef’. Similarly, Perley (1847) said that it was “much used“ on the island in ship-building “for those parts of vessels which are constantly wet".

693 Bain 1890. He does not specify the parts of ships that the wood was used for. I note, however, that Perley (1847) in his paper on the trees of New Brunswick records that the wood of sugar maple “when exposed to moisture soon decays, and is therefore neglected in civil and naval architecture".

69‘ MacGregor (1828) - he said that hemlock had been “lately used". The only other reference to the use of hemlock in island ships that I have come across is in an 1835 letter of Thomas Chanter (of Bideford, England) to William Ellis, his shipbuilder, at

103

Then, at a late stage in the preparation of this report I discovered that microfilm copies of the inspection reports that were made on Prince Edward Island for the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping were housed in the Public Archives.696 As a result I have been able to carry out a preliminary and partial analysis of a sample of ships built between 1856, the first year of local inspections, and 1876 after which the island ship-building industry greatly declined. The results of this analysis, found in Appendix 4, has yielded useful quantitative evidence on the types of woods that were used in island ships in this later period. In brief, Table 4-1 in Appendix 4 indicates that the principal hardwoods used in the hulls of island-built vessels between 1856 and 1876, in order of frequency, were: 'birch’ (i.e. yellow birch) (20.7%); 'beech' (13.4%); and ’maple’ (undoubtedly sugar maple) (3.5%), with smaller amounts of ’oak’ (probably mostly imported oak), ’ash' and ’elm'. Among the softwoods, ’spruce’ made the greatest contribution (35.4%) (it was probably mostly black spruce, though red and white spruce may also have been used), followed by tamarack (always called ’juniper’ on the forms) (19.4%), and ’pine’ (sometimes specified as red or white pine) (4.5%), with smaller frequencies for cedar, hemlock and pitch pine this last could only have been imported. From the limited amount of information on the Lloyd’s forms on the trees used for the masts and spars 697, ’spruce’ made by far the

Bideford, P.E.l., complaining that “some of the upper deck hemlock Beams" of the newly built Gloucester had been “shook to pieces" on her maiden crossing to England, and entailed extensive repairs. [Source: Greenhill & Giffard (1967), (p, 114), citing the Porthill Papers in the PARO.]

695 Many of the same woods seem to have been used in ship- building in Nova Scotia, at least in the 18603, and for the same parts of the ship: an analysis of the Lloyd‘s Survey Reports of 49 vessels built in Nova Scotia in 1864-65 revealed four principal woods as being used in specific parts of the hull: ‘Birch‘, ‘Spruce', ‘Tamarac' and ‘Pine‘ (see Johnson (1986) Forests of Nova Scotia (pp. 188-89) - McAskill (1987) (p. 25) contains a copy of the same information).

696 The Lloyd's Register of Shipping, has provided information on ships to insurance underwriters since the eighteenth century, and in the mid-nineteenth century they began to appoint full-time surveyors in British North American ports, a Lloyd's surveyor being appointed for Prince Edward Island in 1856. Prior to this, island- built ships would have been surveyed at the port of their sale in England. The records for the period 1834 to 1945 survive, and are now deposited on loan in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. The PARO has a microfilm copy of the Lloyd’s reports for well over a thousand ships built and inspected on Prince Edward Island from 1856 onwards.

697 See Table 4-3 of Appendix 4.