to attract, Europeans to the New World: "the purely exploitative urge to gain and plunder the natural riches of a new country” (timber was the only natural resource of any value, apart from its soils, that the island possessed), and "the equally human desire to possess the land and on it build new societies”.911 Thus for eighty years and more, settlers and entrepreneurs would be drawn to the island by one or other of these two motivations — and sometimes by both in the same person. And once arrived and settled, thereafter, for many immigrants, as well as their offspring, at various stages in their lives the forest would continue to compete with the farm for their time and attention. However, the plans and actions set in motion by the Board of Trade in the 1760s (including the later establishment of a separate government in 1769 — which further presumed an agricultural population base for its success), meant that from the beginning, the ideological balance was heavily weighted towards farming as the fundamental basis of the economy of the new colony; and the fact that, as settlement progressed, most of the soils of the island lived up to the expectations of the early reports, kept the scales tilted in the same direction thereafter. 9‘2 As a result, from the beginning, the exploitation of the island’s forest for commercial gain was viewed by many island residents, especially in the governing and educated classes, as an adventitious activity, that would provide a possible use for the timber that in any case had to be got rid of during the process of land clearance and settlement. However, to such persons any logging and lumbering activity taking place was only acceptable so long as it did not detract from the basic agricultural purpose of the colony. And so, whenever lumbering, or its subsidiary industries of the timber export trade and ship—building, should so compete, it was bound to draw unfavourable commentary from the island’s governing class, as well as from others. Negative attitudes towards the forest-based industries — The earliest expression of this official antagonism against lumbering occurs in island records even before the island's timber trade had begun on any large scale: it is contained in a letter 9“ Lower (1936) (p. 28), See especially his insightful comments in his Chapter III on the conflict (potential or actual) that occurred between farming and lumbering in all of the British North American colonies. 9‘2 However, not all of the island‘s soils, including some of those cleared for new farms, would prove suited for agriculture. 140 of 1774 from Governor Walter Patterson to the Secretary of State in Londonm: after noting, in response to a written question on the colony’s trade, that ”some timber hath been sent home [i.e. to Great Britain]”, Patterson added that he "[looked] upon all kinds of Trade which [were] not calculated principally to promote agriculture to be detrimental to the peopling of the Island". 9” Half a century later, and at a time when more and more farmer—settlers were being tempted into the forest, John MacGregor (1828) added a moral plank to the perceived economic disadvantages of timbering: As far as regarded the prosperity of the colony, [the timber trade] might be considered rather as an impediment to its improvement than any advantage, by diverting the attention of the inhabitants from agriculture and enabling them also to obtain ardent spirits with facility, which generally produce demoralization and drunken habits, with consequent poverty and loss of health.915 Samuel Hill at Cascumpec, expressed a similar antipathy, calling the timber trade "the very worst branch of trade that a rural population could be called upon to support", adding, like MacGregor, that it ”diverted the agriculturist from his more steady pursuits” and that it ”begets dissolute habits, and is a nursery of moral depravity”.916 We are given a detailed picture of the perceived effects of lumbering on the island’s farmer—settlers by the anonymous letter-writer who wrote to the Prince Edward Island Register in 1826 on the 9‘3 Patterson 1774. 9" Leaving open the question of the sincerity of this statement at the time, there is some evidence that thirteen years later Patterson himself, recently replaced as governor, in his last summer on the island may have attempted to participate in the timber trade. [PARO Acc. 2652: pp. 17, 18 (Letters from William Patterson to Thomas Hooper of Bedeque, 18 Aug. and 6 Sept. 1787).] (See footnote 603 for further details.) 915 From 1827, when he moved from Prince Edward Island to England, MacGregor disseminated this view on a wider and more significant political stage, using it as one of his arguments in his campaign to remove the preferential trade tariffs that sustained the British North American timber trade to Britain, a campaign which was successful in the 18405 (see Bumsted 1985, and Lower 1973, pp. 85-90, 191-92). 916 Hill 1839. Others expressing a similarly negative view are Bouchette (1832) and Murray (1839). Sir George Seymour (1840) also observed some negative effects of lumbering on his estate of Lot 13: “the young men on Lot 13 unfortunately prefer lumbering to agriculture — or from being in Yeo‘s debt are applied by him to the collection of timber as he chooses".