Twenty—four year later, Sir George Seymour visited the island and for the first time got to see for himself his twenty thousand acre township. In the company of James Yeo, who was acting as his host and guide, he travelled on horseback and by canoe over much of the township. His diary records his concerns about the dwindling timber resource: Turned up a timber trail which carried us through the heart of the Reserve [i.e. land (near present day Tyne Valley) that he was reserving for a proprietor’s residence] — a few pines left, much hemlock and young hard woods but the plunder of timber is evidently going on. At Sheep River [on the western side of the lot] ...[we came across] a boat attending a raft of Yeo’s . It seems to be the rendezvous for the timber Yeo bags or cribs [i.e. steals]. Struck into [the woods] in a SE direction through Sheep River at a narrow spot where Huggins and Yeo are competitors for building a saw mill, but it will probably be used principally in cutting the few pines remaining. Proceeded through some good woods again spaces where there were a few pines still standing & traces of mine having been plundered. The greatest difficulty is about the protection of the timber for which a resident agent would be the only security and he would require to be most vigilant.880 It is interesting that Seymour made no attempt at any point during his visit to confront the ’bagger’ of his timber, James Yeo, about the theft going on under his very eyes. In effect he must have considered that there was little point — the damage had been done and the remaining timber was as good as lost. That he considered it pointless to do anything about it, is further suggested by the comment that Seymour recorded about Joseph Pope, a ship-builder and timber exporter, as well as a member of the government, at whose house in Bedeque he stopped for lunch on his return to Charlottetown from Lot 13: Mr Pope... is... an acute & able Man. | see he is inclined to respect all property except that in timber which even he who is reckoned a high principled man gets when he can without any question of ownership [his underlining]. If even a man of high principles — and the leader of the Conservative pro-proprietor block in the island’s Assembly — was involved second-hand in timber theft, what prospect was there for a landlord living in England to protect the timber. In fact just six years after his visit to Lot 13, and with the concurrence of Thomas H. Haviland, his 83° Seymour 1840. 135 business advisor on the island, Seymour offered Yeo the position of agent for the lot. Haviland wrote to him at the time: I do not think we can do better than adopt your suggestion by giving the requisite authority to Mr. Yeo; as he has already pretty well stripped the lot of what little timber it possessed - as was evident upon your visiting, it is scarcely susceptible of further damage. 881 And, some ten years later, having stripped the lot of much of its timber, James Yeo himself became the owner of the lot, purchasing it for £4,000 in 1857.882 The tenant-farmer’s grievance There is considerable evidence in the testimony recorded by the Land Commission of 1860, that the ownership and access to the timber growing on leased land was a major bone of contention between landlords and their tenants, and that this was an additional factor contributing to the resentment of the island’s tenant farmers to the leasehold system on the island. When a proprietor sold 100 acres of land outright to a small freehold farmer (it was the most common farm size), the forest and trees on the farm became the property of the farmer. However, the ownership of the timber was not so straightforward on land that was leased to a tenant farmer.883 For it seems to have been the standard practice for leases to contain a clause reserving all of the timber on the 33‘ Greenhill & Giffard (1967) (p. 155), citing the Seymour of Ragley Papers in the Warwickshire County Record Office: Letter of T. H. Haviland to Sir George Seymour, 23 March 1846. Haviland continued on in the same letter with the points in Yeo's favour: “there is no one better calculated to convert the rents to a remittance [i.e. at rent-collecting] than Yeo“, and he added that Yeo could also “advance the settlement of the Lot" by bringing out new settlers from England on his ships. “2 Land Commission 1860 (p. 158, not extracted). ”3 Leased land comprised the greater part of the island: the 1861 census indicates that 60% of the occupiers of land (comprising 52.8 % of the occupied acreage) were either tenants or squatters (see Roberston 1988, p. xi, and 1996, p. 12). In 1850 there were five major ‘estates’ on the island and many others of smaller size: the Worrell estate comprised 81,000 acres on Lots 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, and 66; the Selkirk estate comprised land in Lots 53, 57, 58, 59, 60 and 62; the Cunard estate comprised 213,000 acres in Lots 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 20, 27, 32, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 63, 64 and 65; the Sulivan estate comprised 67,000 acres on Lots 9, 16, 22 and 61; and the Stewart estate comprised 67,000 acres in Lots 7, 10, 12, 27,30, 46 and 47 [the figures are from Clark (1959) (pp. 52, 93, 97) for the Selkirk, Worrell and Cunard estates, and from the Land Commission (1875) for the Sulivan and Stewart estates]. The Worrell estate was purchased by the island's government in 1854; the residue of the Selkirk estate in 1860 and the Cunard estate in 1866. All of the remaining estates were purchased as a result of the Land Purchase Act of 1875.