again to the fore, in the speeches of no less a person than the Liberal premier George Coles, as well as the colonial secretary James Warburton, in the debate in the House of Assembly on the imposition of an export-duty on 'juniper knees’ 92“:

COIeS: As to those who abandon agricultural labour to work in the ship—yard, I am persuaded they obtain no lasting or substantial benefit by it. On the contrary, they frequently become so unsettled in their habits, through it, as to be quite unable afterwards, to settle down to any employment, to succeed in which, steady perseverance and patient industry are qualifications indispensably requisite. It would, in fact, in my opinion, have been a benefit to the country, if there had not been half the number of ship—yards in the Island that there have been. Instead of having contributed to the agricultural prosperity of the country, they have greatly retarded it, and, if comparison be fairly made between those who have, for years, worked in the ship-yards, and those who have steadily devoted their energies in the improving of their farms, it will be found that the latter are possessed of much more substance, comfort, and respectability, than the former.

Warburton: In my neighbourhood [Fox/9y River, Lot 11], I am sorry to say, there are too many engaged in lumbering; and however necessary the carrying on of the lumbering trade may be for the supplying of the ship—yards and the benefit of ship—builders, I am very certain that most of the poor men who are so engaged, instead of improving their own circumstances by it, are, year after year, becoming poorer and poorer.

In the same debate, another Liberal member of the Assembly, William Lord — ironically, a ship-builder himself, whose wealth, and possibly, political career, was based on the forest 925 — could not see the end of the forest soon enough:

This country is best adapted to agriculture; and I therefore, think the sooner it is cleared of its timber, the better it will be for the general interest; for then agriculture will be prosecuted with all our energies as it ought to be.

In the end, views such as all of those above had no practical effect on the island's timber trade or on the ship-building industry, for such opinions were simply ignored, alike by the business entrepreneurs, such as the Popes and the Peakes, who invested in the industries, as well as by the small-scale farmer-lumberers and their sons who extracted the timber from the forest. Even so, the ’moral economists’, if we may call them that,

924

House of Assembly 1853.

”5 MacKay 1982.

142

could take heart from the fact that the trade was likely to be transitory and would soon come to an end with the depletion of the island's timber stocks926 — and so it did. 927

ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE ROLE OF THE FOREST IN THE ECONOMY OF THE ISLAND

It is likely that any full analysis of the island’s customs records will show that for much of the first half of the nineteenth century the timber export trade and ship-building, in combination, were as important, if not more so, than agriculture, in the island’s balance of trade.”8 It is also likely that at the personal level these industries were the basis of the wealth of not a few island residents and their families, such as Joseph Pope and James Yeo, a wealth that very likely facilitated their entry into the political arena of the province?”

”6 Bouchette (1832), Hill (1839) and Murray (1839) note with some satisfaction that declining timber stocks were already curtailing the trade.

927 I wonder if this antipathy to lumbering throughout North America might also partake of elements of a long tradition of hostility by the British colonial authorities (as well as of the new United States) to people of European origin availing themselves of the ‘freedom of the wilderness’ where they were beyond the reach of the regulation and authority imposed by society and government (see Nash 1973, pp. 29-30). (This in fact was an antipathy with antecedents in the British Isles, where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the officials of the Crown and the larger landlords, tried to impose their authority on ‘forest-dwellers‘ such as charcoal-burners and lawless squatters (Thomas 1983, p. 195)). However, on Prince Edward Island acting against the significance of this factor was its small size, which meant that ‘society' and government were never more than a day's journey from even the most remote lumber camp.

928 De Jong and Moore (1994) tabulate quantitative evidence

indicating the importance of ship ‘transfers‘ (i.e. the sale of ships outside the island, usually in the United Kingdom) in the island's balance of trade: for the 36 years for which they give data between 1822 and 1876 (see their tables on pp. 39, 100, 128, 166), the value of the ships exported averaged 39.7% of total exports from the island. If we were to add the monetary value of the timber exported for the same years the percentage would rise considerably. (De Jong and Moore present values of timber exports only for the years 1835 to 1844 (p. 66) — though I note that Bittermann (1991) (p. 34) gives values for the years 1823 to 1832.) What is thus required is an in-depth study of the importance of the combinedtimber export trade and ship transfer trade to the island's economy — though a significant limitation in any such study is the fact that the custom figures that were recorded at the time are neither fully reliable nor complete: for example, see Bittermann (1991) (p. 33) for contemporary (in the 18205) island criticism of the reliability of the official export returns, and Lower (1938) (pp, 126-27) for further comments on the unreliability of the customs records for the British North American colonies in general.

929 | make this statement without any quantitative evidence to

support it, either in terms of the numbers of timber merchants and/or ship-builders who entered politics, nor of the extent to which