John Lewellin 1832: There is pleasure in creating a farm out of the wilderness, which, with every returning season yields increased cause for exultation.

John Lawson 1851: Stick to your farms make apples, pears, plums, cherries, grapes and peaches take the place of pine, the maple and the fir, and you will earn purer fame and be entitled and receive more tokens of respect and esteem, than if you made tiresome speeches of four hours’ duration.

And for those for whom ’respect and esteem’ were not encugh, Lawson had a financial inducement:

Every acre of land redeemed from its wilderness state and subdued by the plough, may be computed at an addition of E3 sterling, at least, to its sunken capital.

Also intended to assist psychologically in the clearance of the forest, was the use of military metaphorsaoz. In John Lawson's exhortation above, the wilderness is 'subdued’ by the plough. A more explicit example is provided by the anonymous writer of an article on pioneer days in the Summers/d9 Progress in 1867, who, in a review of the changes that had occurred over the preceding forty years, described the pioneer settler as ”waging war against the forest with fire and steel” 803. Religious metaphor was also popular: apart from that used by John Cambridge, already mentioned, we have John Lawson’s reference in 1851, above, to ”redeeming the land from its wilderness state” — the ’redemption’ of wilderness being a recurring metaphor that was widely used elsewhere, especially among those of a religious inclination.804 For some, the struggle against the forest also had a moral and ethical aspect, as in John Hill’s contrast between two types of settlers:

“02 Such metaphors were commonly used elsewhere — see Nash

(1967) (p. 27).

803 Anon. 1867.

80‘ Lawson 1851, See Nash (1967) (p. 35) for the use of the word ‘redemption' of wilderness by other religiously-inclined writers in the Thirteen Colonies. A part of the poem of William Pope (1848) (p. 17, not extracted) (while on the island he was a part-time Methodist preacher), in which he eulogized the British settlers of the island, also contains a religious metaphor:

Hardy, robust, inured to toil,

They cultivate the grateful soil,

Till desert wilds beneath their hand Become like Goshen‘s fertile land.

The “land of Goshen“ was the “the best of the land“ in Egypt,

where the lsraelites lived in prosperity for some four hundred years (see in the Bible, Genesis, 45: 10-11; 47: 5-6).

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the ”industrious settler”, who, as we have seen, ”goes on to clear more land”, and who ”will enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the value of his lands increasing, as he cuts down the trees and extends his clearance”, and idle settlers, who ”satisfied after clearing a sufficient quantity of land to supply them with food make no more improvements spending [much of] their time in idleness, if not profligacy”. Thus is the battle against the forest a test of the industry and application of the settler; it is also akin to a type of parable bearing the moral that hard work will bring its material reward.

Forest clearance and the theme of progress — Apart from the use of metaphors and maxims, writers and observers attempted to give an additional psychological boost to the settler- combatant by lauding the collective achievement of the community in the war against the forest. Words like ’advancement’ and ’improvement’ were frequently used when referring to the results of forest clearance, and a sense of progress was also instilled into the island’s population by periodic reviews of what was being achieved in the ’war’ — both in the official reviews carried out by the government, as well as in the unofficial comments of private individuals as recorded in published books and diaries. The most important of the official indicators was a statistic that was recorded each time that the government carried out a census on the island: at census time the contribution that each settler family had made in the ’war’ against the forest was recorded as the number of acres of ‘arable’ land on their farm (later termed 'improved’ land), every acre representing an acre of wilderness forest that had been ’subdued’. The summation of all of these acres for the whole colony provided an important overall indicator (as we have already seen in Figure 3, p. 40) of the current state of affairs in the battle against the forest.

At the individual level this sense of ’progress’ is most earnestly expressed in island records in a number of comments recorded by John Lawson in 1851. Starting from the premise that "the gradual but steady increase in the acquisition of arable land is to my mind, one of the most convincing proofs of the increasing prosperity of the Island”, Lawson went on to back this statement with quantitative data from the census of 1848 showing that there were 3.4 acres of cleared land per person, compared with only 2.4 acres in the 1827 census. Lawson also signalled the advance of the settlers over the wilderness in metaphorical form: "since the Survey of Captain Holland [i.e. in