Other negative impressions are more explicitly stated. To Lord Selkirk (1803), approaching the south side of the Pinette River in a wooden dugout canoe, the stunted spruce wood along the river had a ”forbidding appearance”794; while to Walter Johnstone (1822), while still on the deck of the ship that had brought him from Scotland, his first view of the eastern end of Prince Edward Island (and, for that matter, of the New World — they had only caught a brief glimpse of Cape Breton Island through a thick fog), rather than a joyful experience, as might be expected after thirty—eight days at sea, was expressed in ominous tones: he describes the island as "rising like a dark cloud from the bosom of the ocean”, refers to ”the dark colour and closeness of the wood" and goes on to say that "the appearance of the country was so wild and uncultivated, that it struck a damp upon us all”.

Both Selkirk and Johnstone were visitors to the island and both knew that they would be leaving after a short stay. But for immigrants arriving with the intention of making the island their permanent home as farmer-settlers, the forest had the potential of having an even more disturbing effect, as is described by Lord Selkirk in his book Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland, written within a year of his second visit to the island. Devoting a whole chapter to his settlement at Belfast, he provides a considered analysis of the psychological effects of the new forest-covered land on immigrants arriving from the British Isles:

There cannot be a more extreme contrast to any country that has long been under cultivation, or a scene more totally new to a native of these kingdoms, than the boundless forests of America. An emigrant set down in such a scene feels almost the helplessness of a child. He has a new set of ideas to acquire: the knowledge which all his previous experience has accumulated, can seldom apply; [He] is unacquainted with the methods, by which a practised woodsman can find his way through the trackless forest. Every time he leaves his hut, he is exposed to the danger of being bewildered

especially the Puritans of New England, who contrasted the pre- settlement ‘wilderness' that they encountered there in the seventeenth century with the cultivated landscape that was their biblicaIIy-based conception of paradise. As Nash (p. 8) puts it: "Anyone with a Bible had available an extended lesson in the meaning of wild land".

79“ He had previously used the same adjective to describe his first direct experience of the forests of the island, when even before reaching Charlottetown, he had left the becalmed Dykes in a small boat to explore the forests along the coast near Wood Islands in one of his townships (Lot 62).

117

and lost; if he has been sufficiently warned of the danger, to teach him the requisite degree of attention, still he can feel no confidence that his children will have the same caution; and must still shudder, when he thinks of the howling wilderness that surrounds him. The horror of these impressions has, in many instances, completely un—nerved the mind of the settler, and

rendered him incapable of any vigorous exertion.

Throughout this passage what Selkirk particularly stresses is the effect of the forest on the state of mind of the immigrant: ’set down' in the forest he ”feels almost the helplessness of a child”; his mind is ”un-nerved” by the 'horror’ of his first impressions; he fears that he or his children will be ”bewildered and lost"; he ”shudders when he thinks of the howling wilderness that surrounds him".

In similar vein, in 1828 John MacGregor described the new immigrant from Britain about to begin the clearance of a ’wood-farm’ on the island, as ’staggering’ in the face of ”a thousand seeming, and it must be confessed, many real diffICUlties”, and as being ”discouraged at the sight of wilderness land covered with heavy forest trees, which he must cut down and destroy”. In 1839 Samuel Hill used the comparable word, "disheartened”, to describe the immigrant's reaction to ”the sight of a tall forest, encircling sometimes a single farm, and the stumps of the

trees up to the doors of the ill-constructed

dwellings of many of the settlers”. 795

Allowing for some literary license and the relay of conventional ideas796 such negative first

I

795

Unlike Selkirk, both MacGregor (1828) and Hill (1839) had had from a young age a direct acquaintance with the ‘wilderness’ forests of the island, though whether either would have been directly involved themselves in the physical labour involved in its clearance is unlikely, Samuel HiII being the son of John Hill, a major timber merchant and proprietor.

796 Although much of what Selkirk wrote is based on his direct experience of his settlement on Prince Edward Island (he had spent five weeks on the island in 1803 and a week in 1804), in the year between his two visits he had also traveled across the north— east United States in order to visit the site of a second Scottish settlement that he was about to develop at Baldoon (near present- day Windsor Ontario) (though his settlers had not yet arrived there). He had thus seen the frontier fringe of both the United States and Upper Canada. He must also have read widely on the subject since many of the evocative phrases that he uses in his chapter on Prince Edward Island — phrases such as "the trackless forest", the “howling wilderness“, “the terrors which the woods inspire", “the gloomy impressions of the wilderness" — are artful re- workings of stock phrases that had been used in the description of the North American wilderness forest in the previous two centuries. (Nash (1967) (p. 26) notes that the same words appear again and again in early descriptions of the forest: ”wilderness was ‘howling', ‘dismal', ‘terrible’ ".) In this respect it is a curious fact that in his