expressed an aesthetic appreciation for the island’s trees and forests, and had even considered establishing residences on the island 9‘”, they were soon made aware that on the island, unlike in Britain, they were powerless to protect their forests — even for the timber it contained, let alone for its landscape value — from the activities of the timber thieves and from runaway fires.948 And so, they themselves had little option but to adopt the attitude to the forest prevailing on the island and attempt to "turn to present profit that which [they] w0uld otherwise lose three f0urths part of”.949

It may be idle speculation, but we may wonder, had some of the proprietors settled on their land on the island, whether they might have brought with them their ’aristocratic’ and Old World landscape values, and so have given greater protection to some of the ’ancient forests’ within their estates.950 However, for many different

9" The Worrells and the Stewarts, both ‘new gentry' in British

terms, and both very large landowners of multiple townships on the island. did establish a residency on the island [see footnotes 948 and 950 below; as well as footnote 883, for the size and location of the estates]; the Seymour-Conways, who owned Lot 13, also considered residency over the years: see Sir George Seymour’s (1840) comment when near Tyne Valley: “[we] came out on the reserved land I had destined for a Proprietors Residence the situation is a fine one 8. well calculated for the purpose I had intended." (See also the more explicit statements by Robert Gray, the agent for Seymour's father, on the importance of the 'prospect' [i.e. scenic view], in the selection of a site for the proposed ‘manor farm‘ [Gray 1793 - the paits not extracted are in Sobey (1997) (p.

31 )1.) 9‘8 Sir George Seymour considered that “the Protection of the Timber" was "the greatest difficulty’ in the management of Lot 13, “for which a resident agent would be the only security & he would need to be most vigilant". I note that the Worrell brothers, Charles and Edward, were resident from about 1803 on their island estate of over 100,000 acres in the St. Peters Bay area. There is conflicting evidence on Charles' success in managing the timber on the estate (much of it anyway, had been burned over in the French period fires): Taylor (1985) states that Charles “virtually eliminated the free cutting of timber’; however, Sir George Seymour, on his visit to the estate in 1840, recorded in his journal that Worrell “allows his tenants to cut down what they please on his lands". It should be noted that Charles was viewed as something of an eccentric in the management of the estate.

9‘9 These were the actual words of advice concerning the ‘preservation‘ of the timber of Lot 13, that James Bardin Palmer (1816), as agent, passed on to the proprietor of the township, Sir George Seymour.

950 By the 1850s the Seymours had given up the idea of any family member living on the island, but one absentee proprietor who did make the transfer from England was Robert Bruce Stewart, the son of David Stewart. He settled on the island in 1852, at first in Charlottetown, moving in 1863 to a large estate in Lot 31 that he named ‘Strathgartney' (see Stewart 1987). Robert Harris (c. 1865) described the ‘strangeness’ of coming across a fine house “in a country place that was in some respects a wilderness". It may be that the survival to this day of extensive woodland at Strathgartney in the immediate environs of the house

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reasons this was not to be. Instead, the attitude towards the forests that prevailed on the island was the same as that found throughout the New World: it was, as we have seen, a combination of the utilitarian and the antagonistic, as exemplified in the opinions of the ordinary farmer-settler and of the timber merchant, who, despite the existence of a proprietorial land-holding system on the island, and despite the doctrine of the sacredness of private property that prevailed among the officialdom on the island (and, ironically, among farmer-settlers with respect to their own properties), acted according to the doctrine (to use the words of one witness to the Land Commission of 1875) that ”the proprietors’ land is public

property to us”. 95‘

The anonymous writer of the extended essay "On Timber-stealing” published in the Prince Edward Island Register in 1826, equated the timber thief on the island with that bane of the landlords of Britain, the game poacherg“, just as Sir George Seymour used the same metaphor by referring to James Yeo as the ’bagger’ and ’cribber’953 of his timber on Lot 13. And so, though landowners, such as Sir George Seymour and David Stewart, might express appreciation for their forests in terms of their aesthetic or landscape value, they saw themselves as powerless to control this forest — for on the island it was in effect the farmer- settler and the timber merchant who were the ultimate determiners of the fate of the forest. Nor, did the island government of the day — nor for that matter any government since954 — feel inclined to intrude into the field of regulating private forests. And so, to this day any part of the forest outside of the island’s small area of Crown Lands,

is due to the landscape ethos of the family — it is a topic that requires further investigation.

951

Lot 7.

Land Commission 1875: evidence of Amos McWilliams of

952 Anon. 1826.

953 Seymour (1840) confined these descriptive labels to his private journal, for Yeo was in fact his host and guide on Lot 13. According to the OED. (Oxford 1989) ‘bagging’ and ‘cribbing‘ both denote stealing, ‘bagging‘ in this sense having connections with the act of putting game into a bag — and so with poaching.

95‘ I need only cite the retreat of the island‘s government in 2000 in the face of a protest from some woodland owners to the very limited management controls over the management of privately- owned forests that were proposed at the time (MacDonald 20023, pp. 22-25). (I might add that a similar failure to intervene to preserve the island's architectural heritage has resulted in an irreparable loss (and one that continues annually) to the island‘s small stock of heritage buildings.)