these lists can help to give us an idea of the relative abundance of each tree species on the island. The tables also contain (either in the table itself or in their footnotes) all of the English common names used for each of the tree species on the island.3

Also helping to give us an idea of the relative abundance of each tree species on the island is the data contained in Table 1—1: this contains for each tree genus a tally of all of its mentions in the documents additional to those occurring in the lists“

Once each of the tree genera and species have been looked at individually, I will at the end examine the data for all of the trees collectively to see what it can tell us about the overall composition of the forests of the island as a whole during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

THE CONIFERS

In the late eighteenth century the naming and identification of the island’s conifer trees seems to have presented fewer problems for the first British officials and pioneers than it had for the earlier French.5 For, by the 17703, when the first British settlements were being established on the Island of St. John, as Prince Edward Island was then called, most educated British persons were reasonably familiar with the main types of conifer,

3 I have not included in the tables the Latin nomenclature used by

those few recorders who used Latin binomials, Instead, the Latin nomenclature has been analysed in Addenda 1-1 and 1-2 of this Appendix. These are Stewart (1806), and those who I call the ‘scientific' or ‘botanical’ recorders of the latter half of the nineteenth century: Bagster (1861), Bain (1868-1884), [Bain] (1882), Bain (1890), McSwain and Bain (1891), Macoun (1894), Johnson (1895) and [Watson] (post 1904). Also using Latin names for some species (though not providing lists) are Perley (1847), Sleigh (1853) and Chalmers (1895).

A recorder whose tree records are not included in the tree tally

is Chappell (1775-1818), since his repeated use of particular woods in his carpentry work would have biased the overall results towards those species. Also for the same reason are omitted the trees mentioned in the Peake Business Papers (1836) and the Morris Account Book (1864-1868). However, these records have been appended as a footnote to Table 1-1. 5 This is despite the fact that only three species of conifer are native to Great Britain and Ireland: the Scots pine Pinus sy/vestris, the yew Taxus baccata, and the juniper Juniperus communis. This last species, which is usually a shrub rather than a tree, is circumpolar in its distribution, occurring also on Prince Edward Island. However, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries other European species of conifer, including spruce, fir and larch, were being planted in the British Isles as either ornamentals or in the forestry schemes of some of the great estates (James 1981, p. 165),

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and despite the lack of a clear distinction in appearance between some of the conifer species, an accepted vernacular nomenclature had developed applicable to the different genera. Also, from about 1800 onwards, new settlers and visitors to the island, were on their arrival coming into contact with an increasingly island-born population already familiar with the forest trees of the island and making use of standard common names. Thus, interpreting the names used for the conifer trees in the records of the British period for Prince Edward Island does not present as great a problem as it did for the French period.6

THE PINES

White pine (Pinus strobusl Red pine (Pinus resinosal Jack pine (Pinus banksiana)

Identification and nomenclature The three species of pine that now occur on Prince Edward Island were undoubtedly present in the eighteenth century. The genus itself is quite distinctive in appearance from the other conifer genera on the island, and the three species are also easily distinguished from each other. Also, since a pine species (Pinus sy/vestris, Scots pine), is the principal native conifer tree in the British Isles, the genus was likely to have already been familiar to many of the early British recorders.7 As well, because of their importance as a potential source of masts for naval ships, the island’s red and white pines were likely to have attracted special attention, especially in the first decades of British settlement.

From the first visits of British explorers to North America the name 'pine’ seems to have been used as the standard English name for all of the North American species that we now place in the pine genus". Fifteen of the recorders who made tree

6 See Sobey 2002, pp. 119-144.

7 Although during the historical period Pinus sy/vestn's in the

British Isles occurred naturally only in the eastern and central Scottish highlands (Tansley 1939, pp. 253-54), from at least the eighteenth century it had been planted in the southern part of Britain (Miles 1967, p. 36), as well as in Ireland (McCracken 1971, p. 17), and it would thus also have been a familiar tree to many persons coming to the island from England and Ireland.

5 The name ‘pine' is an early medieval borrowing into English from Latin. Confusingly, the older vernacular name for Pinus sylvestris, the Scots pine, is ‘the fir' or ‘Scotch fir’, names still in common use in the British Isles for the species. ‘Fir’ (sometimes as ‘Riga fir') was also the name generally used for the species in British naval records (P. sylvestris was the principal source of masts for European naval ships, and these masts came mostly from the