clearly someone who has the interests of the proprietors at heart he may be a resident proprietor himself, or a land agent — and from the amount of legal detail in the letter, he may also be a lawyer. His letter states that the level of theft of timber from proprietors’ property was of a ”wholesale [and] overwhelming magnitude". He cites one township that he had recently ’inspected' where he says all of the settlers were engaged in ’making timber’ ”some of them deeply”; and another half-lot where it is ”supposed that 20,000 tons of timber have been taken without [the proprietor] getting one farthing for stumpage" which at 33. 6d. per ton, he calculates as a loss to the proprietor of "3,500El" (his exclamation mark). However, he especially singles out for attack the island’s timber merchants:

men who, in general, in all other respects manifest a high tone of moral feeling, and would do credit to any society [we recall Seymour’s comment on Joseph Pope], but are seduced by an extensive and long continued practice [my italics] to relax the firmness of their principles, when brought to bear on this subject. If you ask a purchaser of timber, whether he does not feel that he ought to pay stumpage for what timber he knew was pilfered from the proprietor; or whether he ought to buy from settlers who have none of their own, [nor] the means of coming honestly by it without questioning them how they came by it, lest he might be deemed a receiver of stolen goods, he will reply — "I ask no questions. I know nothing about it. It is no business of mine. What is brought to me, that I buy."

The letter-writer offers two solutions to the problem. The first is that proprietors who are not themselves engaged in the timber business should:

give permission to the most honorable merchants they could find, to get timber from their land; fixing annually the number of tons, and amount of stumpage for each kind, under their own direction, or that of an active and trusty agent.

This of course begs the question of how an absentee proprietor living in England was to find both an ”honourable merchant” and an “active and trusty agent”.

But his main proposal is that the island’s legislature should closely regulate the timber industry by creating the office of ‘Timber

Surveyor’, with such surveyors being responsible for the inspection and measurement of ”all ton timber, round saw logs, and ship timber”, as well as the keeping of records on “the township, and whether the timber grew on the leased or unleased

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part, with the proprietor or lessee's name". Under the law already in effect at the time, timber was only to be cut with the written permission of the proprietor or his agent: to enforce compliance with this regulation he proposes “heavy penalties” on any persons cutting timber and then making false statements about where they had cut it, as well as on any persons buying unsurveyed timber. He proposes that the fines be of the order of £50 instead of the current law’s thirty shillings — which, he says, is less than the value of the stolen property.902 Needless to say, the regulations proposed by the writer were never introduced by the island’s legislature.9°3

However, the landlords and their tenants, and leasehold farmers were not only the victims when it came to timber theft: John Lawson (1851) made the wry comment that newly—arrived immigrants trying to choose a place on the island for a farm could not even rely on the advice of established settlers concerning the quality of the unoccupied land in a neighbourhood, since “if they wish to discourage others, that they may themselves cull out the best of the ship and other timber on the unlocated part of the lot, there will be no end of narratives on the badness of the land”. And indeed, if you were paying your rent with timber, or bartering it for store goods, who was to know whether the pine log that you brought in, came from your own land, or from the vacant piece of land nearby belonging to the proprietor.

Another example of local farmers stealing wood, this time not from the proprietor but from a local resident, is relayed by Emanuel McEachern of East Point to the Land Commission of 1875. He said that in the 18505 he had purchased 100 acres of 'wilderness land’ in the area on account of the ’valuable softwood timber’ that was on it. But before long he found that ’the people' from the farms on the south side were ’plundering’ it. 90"

9” See House of Assembly (1773-1849):1780 [20 Geo. III, C. IV], for the law current in 1826,

9“ See House of Assembly 1773-1849: (1833), for an act passed in the 18305, which made little change to the earlier law of 1780.

90‘ Land Commission 1875: evidence of Emanuel McEachern. Another assertion of timber theft: a member of the House of Assembly, speaking in the debate in 1853 concerning an export- duty on ‘juniper knees', stated that most of the knees already exported had been stolen from “the wilderness lands of the proprietors [thus] robbing them of their valuable timber” [i.e. the proprietors, as well as those “who shall hereafter occupy such lands”, (i.e. future tenants)] (House of Assembly 1853: speech of Mr. MacAulay).