And to the same Commission, Amos McWilliams, a farmer and lumberer in Lot 7, in response to a battery of questions from the commissioners (which were not recorded in the Commission’s report, and thus have to be imagined), stated, perhaps somewhat too candidly, what was undoubtedly the attitude of many islanders to the ownership of the timber:

I have been over the land looking for timber. l have had a permit sometimes, and sometimes a roving commission [whatever that was], and when I got a stick I told them. If the stick suited me I cut it, and told them of it. Of late years I always did so, but I will not swear that before 1860 | always told. It would not be stealing. To take money would be stealing. I believe many did more than I did. I do not know how Stewart [/'.e., the proprietor, Robert Bruce Stewart of Strathgartney] could lose what he never had. The proprietor’s land is public property to us. I cannot tell

exactly how much I paid Stewart.905

McWilliams will never have heard of the phrase, but what he was voicing was a version of the ‘frontier ethic’, namely that the land (including the forests on it) belonged to those who lived on or near it, and they had the right to utilize its

resources. 906

There have always been persons who have no respect for private property, especially where the valued resource is, as timber is, a natural product of the land, and especially when that property is out of the way of observing eyes, and can be readily sold to a buyer who asks no questions.907 To such a person it is ‘nature’s bounty’ or ‘God’s gift’, free to whoever has the wit and the means to take it. Since the beginning of European settlement to the present day there have been unscrupulous persons stealing timber and other forest products on Prince Edward Island, as witness the recent large—scale theft of ground hemlock from private forestland. 908

905 Land Commission 1875: evidence of Amos McWilliams.

9‘” Cox etal. 1985, p. 178. 9“ Lower (1938) (pp. 75-76) noted similar practices in New Brunswick, especially before 1820: “persons could do virtually as they liked with the timber on accessible Crown lands and [they] need not be too particular whether the lands were Crown lands or private lands, so long as they were far enough away from observation". Also, in the new United States, from the time of the founding of the republic to the end of the nineteenth century, what was euphemistically called ‘timber trespass’ was prevalent, with timber being stolen on a large scale from either private or public land. Despite official efforts to suppress it, it was hard to get juries to convict (Cox et al. (1985) (pp. 139-40; 177-79)).

9°” Not only hemlock, but according to one woodlot owner speaking at The Island Forest Forum in 2001 (MacDonald 2002b,

139

'MORAL' ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE TIMBER TRADE

The root of the conflict between farming and lumbering — A year after the formal transfer of New France to Great Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (commonly known as the Board of Trade), already alerted to the agricultural potential of the Island of St. Johngog, announced that the Board’s plan for the colonization of the island was to be a settlement based upon agriculturef’10 In the furtherance of this aim, the Board instructed Captain Samuel Holland to sub—divide the island into counties, parishes, and townships, each of 20,000 acres; and three years later, in 1767, the Board proceeded to grant sixty-six of the townships to some one hundred individuals with the stipulation, that within ten years they were to settle their townships with one person for every 200 acres of land. Clearly, the Board of Trade envisaged the island as comprising a colony of small farmers who would take advantage of the suitability of the island’s soils for agriculture, a suitability that had been further confirmed by the report of Captain Holland.

Holland’s survey however had also confirmed another finding of the earlier reports and letters: the soils considered so suited for agriculture were for the most part covered by various kinds of useful timber trees including "pine extremely large and fine”, “very good” ‘maple’ and ‘beech’, and "useful” ‘black birch’.

And so, right from the beginning of the British period in the history of Prince Edward Island, the stage was set for a potential conflict between the two different and often competing motivations that, in the words of the historian Arthur Lower, had up to that time attracted, and would continue

p. 22), timber theft and other nefarious practices are still carried out by a number of ‘rogue and bandit” forest contractors operating in the forests of the island, a situation that he describes as akin to the “wild west’.

909 The Board of Trade was aware of the supposed agricultural potential of the island from several surveys and reports including those of the Frenchman Thomas Pichon of 1760 (see Sobey 2002, p. 111), and that of the anonymous officer who ‘ran over‘ the island in 1762 (Anon. 1762). (See especially Bumsted (1987) (Chapter 1) for the various proposals and options open to the Board of Trade for the colonization of the Island of St. John.)

91° To quote directly the words used by the Board of Trade on 23 March 1764, the settlement of the Island of St. John was to be based upon “those Principles of Settlement, Cultivation, and Government, which have been adopted for many Years Past" (Bumsted 1987, p. 20).