working directly with that resource, ranging from the skilled carpenter and millwright Benjamin Chappell, to timber merchants and ship-builders such as James Peake, and mill-owners such as William Schurman and J. C. Morrism. Then, it is also an attitude expressed in the actions of those who, though not the legal owners of that resource, made attempts to steal it from its lawful owners775; and it is an attitude expressed by the many tenant and leasehold farmers whose words were taken down as evidence by the Land Commissions of 1860 and 1875776. It also even pervades the descriptions and the lists of the island’s trees made by some of the ’scientific’ recorders from the 18505 onwards, such as the Reverend George Sutherland and the naturalist Francis Bainm, as well as those persons, like Father Alfred Burke and the civil servant W. H. Crosskill, who at the end of the nineteenth century lamented the loss of the resourcem. In fact, it is so pervasive an attitude throughout the writings presented in this sourcebook, that for the vast majority of recorders it is the only point of view that they ever express towards the forest. The forest as a provider of farmland — In addition to the useful timber and wood products that could be obtained from the forest, most writers acknowledged that there was an even more important 'utilitarian’ resource that was initially contained within the forest — though little credit was given to the role of the forest in its creation: this was the land that the forest occupied and the soil that had developed under it in the many millenia since the end of the last glaciation. As we have seen earlier, it was the island’s upland hardwood forests that was pointed out by many of the handbooks for emigrants as the most suitable for conversion to farmland 779, and it was simply taken for granted that the utilization for farming of these upland soils would involve the total destruction of the natural forests on these areas. 774 Chappell 1775-1818; Schurman 1819, Business Papers 1836; Morris 1864-1868. 1824; Peake "5 See the comments of Peter Stewart (1783) on the alleged unethical activities of Philips Callbeck; those of Anon. (1826), on timber thieves in general; and those of John Prendergast (1834, 1835) on the allegations of timber theft made against James Yeo, "6 Land Commission 1860 (passim); Land Commission 1875 (pass/m). 7” Sutherland 1861; Bain 1890, 77B Burke 1902; Crosskill 1904. 779 See pages 24-30. 115 A few recorders, especially in the early nineteenth period, even went so far as to say that all of the forested land on the island - including even the swamps and the barrens — would in the long term also be convertible to agricultural land, and to these persons this seemed a desirable and commendable objective.780 'PSYCHOLOGICAL' ATTITUDES TO THE FOREST The ’psychological’ attitudes of new immigrants from the British Isles, and elsewherem, to the forests of Prince Edward Island were complex, being affected not only by their own direct experience of the forest after their arrival on the island, but also by pre-existing perceptions of the forests of North America that had become part of the New World culture, some of which they may have become aware of even before their departure from the British Isles.782 Before we examine the various attitudes that are evident in the surviving records for Prince Edward Island, it is useful to consider briefly the range of descriptive names used on the island for the pre-settlement forest, since the use of particular names, some of them carrying a pejorative sense, may reflect particular attitudes to the forest. 75° It is Walter Johnstone (1822) who best expresses such a view when he states that “the whole Island might be cultivated if the wood were destroyed, except the marshes, and I believe even some of these only require draining to render them fruitful" — see also the section on the swamps and barrens (pp. 13, 16), where a number of writers considered that even they were capable of cultivation. However, as settlement progressed, it became evident that there were many areas under poor forest that were useless for agriculture, and this view was stated by many witnesses to the Land Commission of 1875. m The notable exception to post-1763 immigrants to Prince Edward Island coming from the British Isles are the Loyalist refugees, several hundred of whom came from the new United States after the American War of Independence. Even so, since many of these would have come from long settled areas in the Thirteen Colonies, wilderness would have been as alien a concept for them as it was to immigrants from the British Isles. Others of the Loyalists who came to the island had been first-generation British immigrants who had settled on the pioneer fringe of the Thirteen Colonies and had subsequently got caught up in the struggle, and such persons may already have had some experience of wilderness clearance before coming to the island. (See Jones 8. Haslam (1983) for the backgrounds of individual Loyalist families.) 7” An entire book, Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Nash (1967) analyses the various historical attitudes of the Americans to the wilderness that occupied their country prior to settlement, much of which also applies in a general way to Canada and the Canadian wilderness. Also, for Prince Edward Island an article “The Gloomy Forest" by David Weale (1983) in The Island Magazine provides a good introduction to various attitudes towards the forest.