their encounter with the forested landscape, the new immigrants coming to the island were in effect travelling back in time by several millennia to the period when their ancestors in the British Isles had faced the similar task of making farmland out of a primeval forest.

As a consequence, immigrants from the British Isles arriving on Prince Edward Island in the eighty years between 1770 and 1850 had no experience at all of living in or near wilderness or ’heavy forest’, nor of the hard labour that was required to convert that forest into an arable farm on which a man and his family could then maintain a livelihood. In fact, it is likely that very few of the new immigrants had any direct experience of even what woodlands were still to be found in the British Isles at the time of their departure, since most of these had increasingly come under the

control of the great aristocratic Iandowners765.

However, this does not mean that they were arriving with no prior conception of the extent of the forests in their new homeland, nor of the severity of the tasks that would be required to achieve their clearance. For, most of the many handbooks produced for prospective emigrants — both those of a general nature applicable to the whole of British North America, and those specifically written with Prince Edward Island in mind (usually by persons with direct experience of the island and for the purpose of encouraging immigration to it) — did not disguise the fact that the island was covered with ’heavy forest’ to the water’s edge, and for the most part, they also did not make light of the difficulty of the tasks required to undertake its clearance.766 And, for some of the new arrivals there would also have been personal letters from neighbours and family members who had preceded them to the New World, and who, having successfully made the

Ireland they persisted in some areas into the early eighteenth century (Rackham 1986; pp. 34-36).

765 See footnote 759.

766

Namely; [Cambridge] 1796; Stewart 1806; Selkirk 1805; Anon. 1808, [Hill] 1819, Johnstone 1822, MacGregor 1828, 1832; Lewellin 1832; Hill 1839, Lawson 1851 and Bagster 1861. Exceptions are [Clark] (1779) who omits to mention the hardships Involved, and the anonymous author of a lengthy article in the New Month/y Magazine in 1818, who painted a picture so grossly rosy and misleading that it could not have been believed by anyone (Anon. 1818). I note also that one island resident (Anon. 1836) considered that even the British America of John MacGregor (1832) gave a picture about life on the island that was slanted more to the well-to-do.

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transfer themselves, were anxious, for various reasons, that others should join them in the struggle against the forest.767

The attitudes to the forest that these new arrivals brought with them, and to its products and their use, would have depended on their experiences of woodland in Great Britain and Ireland, which, as I have said, was very limited for most of them. Some of them would also have had only a very limited idea of even the value or use of wood and timber, especially because in the home country most houses were built largely of stone or brick, or even of sods (though wood always made some contribution), while the fuel for many people, especially those from the upland zones of the British Isles was not wood, but peat from the local bog.

Thus most immigrants would largely acquire their attitudes to the forest of the island as a result of their contact with this forest after their arrival in the New World — and though the attitude of most of those who came as settlers would be antagonistic to the forest, they would quickly come to realise that at the same time it was a vital source of important commodities that were essential to their livelihood on the island, especially of firewood, fencing wood, and building materials, for either their own use on the farm, or through its sale or barter, providing a means of paying the rent or the local Storekeeper.

At the same time, there were other immigrants who came specifically to Prince Edward Island partly or wholly on account of the timber resources that they knew it to possess. These were persons who, having experience in working with wood and timber in the British Isles, saw an opportunity of transferring that Old World experience towards the exploitation of the super—

767 It is likely that only a very few of the many letters that were

sent back to the home country from the island have survived — or at least have come to the attention of researchers on Prince Edward Island. Two that have: O‘Grady (2004) (pp. 116, 281) quotes from an 1832 letter (still in the possession of descendants in Ireland) from the furniture-maker John McNally, living at East Point. to his brother back in County Mayo; in which he cautioned him about emigrating as he said it would take five years to cut the trees, remove the stumps and prepare the land for crops. Contrast the encouraging letter of Archibald McLean to a relative in Scotland in 1848; in which he urged him to come out and participate in lumbering (see footnote 552) [Archibald McLean, living at an unspecified location on P.E.|., to Neil Rankin in Scotland, 3 March 1848. PARO 2716/1] (See also the four letters from the island published in the Belfast News Letter in Ireland in the 17705 (Anon. 1771, 1772, 1773).)