In the light of the above it might come as a surprise to find that in the records extracted in this sourcebook there is not one person who, as a result, goes on to place a high economic valuation on the forests of the island per 39.930 It would thus seem that, though many persons — ship— builders and Conservative politicians especially — were quite willing, when necessary, to come to the verbal defence of ship—building and the timber- trade as bringing a benefit to the colony (as in the debate on juniper knees in 1853931), at the same time, they themselves shared in the prevailing attitude, that these forest-based industries were adventitious activities having a limited time-span. In taking this view, they were also viewing the island’s forest itself as a short—lived resource, to be exploited for financial gain while it still existed, but not to be viewed as capable of yielding a sustainable or renewable product, nor was it considered desirable that it be capable of such. Given such an attitude, it is not surprising, as we shall see in the next section, that no one placed any importance on the conservation or protection of what remained of the forest resource.

THE ATTITUDE TO FOREST CONSERVATION

Though the records for the British colonial period begin as early as 1758, the first time that even a passing mention of any need to either conserve or protect the island’s forests is mentioned in all of the literature assembled in this source-book, comes well over a century later”: the topic is first given a voice in 1871, in a report by the geologist (and principal of McGill University) William Dawson, who had been commissioned by the government to carry out a survey of the

their income and wealth were based upon either direct participation in the industries or on financial investment in them.

93° Admittedly, Lawson (1851) (pp. 60-62, not extracted) did add

the value of both timber and ships to the customs records in his armchair calculations of the trade balance for the island, but he did not, on that account, 90 on to laud the forests per se as an important resource base in the economy ofthe island.

93' House of Assembly 1853 (see the speeches of Edward Palmer, the ‘Speaker' (Alexander Rae) and Joseph Pope). As an example: Pope said “the carrying on of ship-building was of the greatest importance to the general interests of the country", and “it could not be denied that very great advantages to the country at large resulted from it.”

932 It is ironic that the topic of forest conservation on the island, on account of the important products it produced, had received the attention of French officials as far back as the 17305 (see Sobey 2002, pp. 27-28),

143

colony’s mineral resources.933 Noting the "rapid disappearance of the forests”, Dawson expressed concern about the sustainability of the future firewood supply of the island’s population, and added, cautiously, that it was ”worthy of consideration whether measures should be taken by the Government for the protection of the remainder of the forests”. That it should be as late as the 18703 that anyone should make a reference to the conservation of the island's forests from even the point of view of the useful resources they contained, is not surprising, since, as we have seen, the prevailing view of the forest had always been as an obstacle to progress simply on account of its presence, taking up, as it did, land that c0uld otherwise have been used for agriculture, though it was allowed that during its clearing it was useful in providing a supply of timber.

It may seem short-sighted to us now that even intelligent and thoughtful men such as John Stewart and Walter Johnstone should express no concern about the need to conserve a part of the forest as a source of a sustainable supply of timber and firewood934, but we must remember that when they were writing, the forest was still all—pervasive in the landscape over much of the island. And both men, as well as others in the early nineteenth century, believed that more or less all of the land on the island, including the swamps and the barrens, was capable of

conversion to agricultural use“, with Stewart's

9” Dawson 1871. I should mention that in 1853, almost twenty

years before Dawson's report, in the debate in the island’s House of Assembly on whether to increase the export-duty on ‘juniper knees' [tamarack ship knees] (House of Assembly 1853), in the speech of William E. Clark there is a reference to “protecting what is left ofthe lsland’s valuable timber'. However, by ‘protection' it is clear that Clark did not have in mind conservation measures for the island’s tamarack, but rather the use of ‘prohibitory duties‘ in an attempt to ‘reserve‘ the trees for the use of island ship-builders, rather than allowing them to go to the Americans who were willing and able to pay more for them, — or, as Edward Palmer put it, the aim of the duty was “the preservation of juniper trees for the service of our own shipbuilders”,

93‘ Though Johnstone and others did mention the need to maintain the forest as a source of fuelwood (see page 77 of this report), they still could foresee a time (see pages 78 and 79) when the wood would all be gone, and the island would then either need to call upon its limited peat reserves and/or import coal from Nova Scotia.

935 Johnstone (1822): “the whole Island might be cultivated if the wood were destroyed, except the marshes, and I believe even some of these only require draining to render them fruitful" — also Selkirk (1803), Stewart (1806), MacGregor (1828), Hill (1839) and Gesner (1846) make passing comment on the cultivability of either the barrens or the swamps (see pages 13 and 16 of this report). However, as the century passed its mid-point the reality,