cut. But what has hurt it more than anything, Mr. Callbeck and Mr. Lawson entered into a contract whereby Lawson engaged by a certain day to have three or four hundred tons of pine cut and ready to be shipped, and Mr. Callbeck on his part engaged to have a ship in readiness to receive it. The ship never came, nor was there one tree cut. Notwithstanding which Mr. Callbeck claimed his penalty and in the true style of a Dublin attorney threatened the poor man with a prosecution if he did not pay it. After a long altercation between them, Mr. Callbeck proposed his having permission from Lawson to cut pine and spruce on your Lordship’s property wherever he pleased and to what extent without paying anything for it. Lawson leaped at the proposal, believing he had, by agreeing to it, saved his £100. In consequence of this infamous bargain Mr. Callbeck has cut and carried off a great number of the best spruce and pine, and upon the whole that land is so much hurt, I fear it may be long without any tenant,

though very pleasantly and advantageously situated.875

Granted that Peter Stewart had an interest in ’dishing the dirt’ on Lawson and Callbeck — his own request to lease part of the above land for the purpose of building a sawmill and harvesting the timber himself had been turned down by Montgomery — even so, I think that the facts that he states are likely to be true. Bumsted (1987) in fact considers that during the years of the American Revolution, acting governor Callbeck was ”Cutting timber off island lots with virtual impunity”, going on to sell much of it to the British government for the fortifications and barracks at Charlottetown. It may well have been the above activity on Lot 34 that the island’s House of Assembly had in mind, when in 1780, noting "the great Waste committed of Pine and other valuable Timber Trees in this Island”, they passed a law aiming to prevent the cutting of trees ”without permission of the proprietor”.876 The act stipulated the very high penalty of thirty shillings for every tree above twelve inches in diameter illegally cut, and ten shillings for each smaller tree, and it aimed to encourage informers by assigning them half of the penalty. There was, however, a significant loop-hole: any legal action had to be taken within six months of the ’trespass’ having been committed.877

8’5 Stewart 1783.

3’5 House of Assembly (1773-1849) (1780). a" It is questionable, despite the belief of Gamaliel Smethurst, who reported the event in his capacity of 'Deputy Surveyor of Woods‘ for Nova Scotia, whether the harvesting of the twelve hundred pine trees at Three Rivers in 1768 (see Smethurst 1774), involved illegal cutting, since the overseer. William Livingston, appears to have been carrying out the activity on behalf of the

134

An area of the island for which there is an especially rich documentation on the illegal cutting of timber, and the landlord’s seeming inability to do anything about it, even though he had an active agent on the island, is Lot 13 in the west of the province. The lot had been bought from the original grantee by the Marquess of Hertford in 1772, passing eventually to his grandson, Sir George Seymour. In 1815 Seymour’s agent, the Charlottetown lawyer, James Bardin Palmer, wrote to him as follows:

The valuable timber on the Lot has been nearly all plundered. It consisted of pine and of some birch and maple, principally about the rivers, and streams running from the east front into Richmond Bay. It was intended to have a saw mill there, but until your orders arrive I have prevented this for the purpose of endeavouring to preserve the remaining timber, a task not very easily performed, and to which your ancestors’ agents do not seem to have directed their attention. if an extensive farmer or trader could be induced to settle [on the Egmont Bay shore of the lot], it might be the means of promoting settlement although at the expense

of the remaining timber. 878

Then a year later Palmer wrote again to Seymour, this time bringing up concerns about the timber on the western side of the township:

Large rafts of timber have been already brought from Egmont Bay to Bedeque. a road across the Lot is now absolutely and immediately necessary A saw mill upon Lot 13 is now to be considered in a different point of view from that it bore some years ago, or even months. Lots 15, 13, 10, 9, 8 and even part of Lot 7 are at present subject to depredations nearly at the pleasure of the public on the south coast, for it is impossible to prevent them unless by actual settlement; there are some saw mills already at work at Bedeque and others are erecting, and there is one lately erected at Cascumpec by Mr. Hill . There is not any great quantity of timber on Lot 13, but there is too much to lose; and experience shows us all here that it is impossible to preserve it. It therefore becomes a consideration whether a proprietor should not, by erecting or encouraging a saw mill endeavor to turn to present profit that which he would in all probability

otherwise lose three fourth parts of.879

grantees, one of whom was David Higgins, later in partnership with James Montgomery, Lord Advocate of Scotland.

”73 Palmer 1815. We have to be wary about taking everything that J. B. Palmer wrote to Seymour as fact, since he was later

found to be embezzling him during the period of his agency (see Robertson 1996, p. 17).

879 Palmer 1816.