the only record of its possible continuing presence during the British period is that of Samuel Holland in October 1765 who noted in his list of the island’s animals that there were ”some, but very few Carriboux) (a kind of Deer)". If it were still present in 176591, then it would seem to have become extinct shortly after, for ten years later Curtis (1775) recorded that none of the inhabitants that he had met, knew of any deer on the island”. Thereafter, as Lawson (1851), Bagster (1861) and Rowan (1876) report, the past presence of the caribou on the island was witnessed by the occasional finding of a ’time- worn’ antler in the woods — though such antlers were also sometimes erroneously cited as evidence for the past occurrence of the moose on the island (see below).93

MAMMAL ABSENCES

The beaver — The only record for the occurrence of the beaver (Castor canadensis) on Prince Edward Island during the historical period is that of

9‘ I say ‘if', because there is evidence that Holland used second-

hand information for some of the elements of his report: I have found that his list of the island's sea-birds has been taken straight from Thomas Pichon's Lettres et Mémoires of 1760, a copy of which, not surprisingly, he must have had with him while doing the survey. I also note that Holland does not list the caribou as one of the animals that the Acadians hunted for food, which they surely would have done, had it been present. As has often been demonstrated elsewhere, there is a general tendency for people to believe that an extirpated animal is still present long after its extirpation, and this may have been so for the caribou, Holland perhaps having been told by the refugee Acadians of its past presence in small numbers.

92 Thomas Curtis had arrived on the island in late 1775 expecting to be able to shoot ‘deer'(as well as turkeys) “from the Windows" (he claimed that Robert Clark, the proprietor of Lot 21, had told him so — though see the more circumspect statement on wild game that Clark put in writing [Clark 1779]). Curtis added that “during the Seven months l was confined their, I heard from many of the Inhabitants that their had been no Sutch a thing Seen on the Island by the Oldest lnhabytants". The oldest inhabitant (in the sense of longest established) that Curtis mentions staying with may well have been George Hardy who had arrived on the island in 1768 three year's after Holland's departure (Greenhill 1983), and who lived in isolation on the abandoned Acadian lands of Lot 13, on the west side of Malpeque Bay.

93 It is likely that the ‘horns' found by four of the respondents to the Questionnaire (1876), as well as those reported at Miminegash by Lawson [1877-1878], were all caribou antlers, and not from moose, as they thought. The tradition that caribou had once occurred on the island may survive in the name given to a type of habitat: Shuttleworth (1793), living at Morell, wrote that a peculiar plant, that from his description seems to be the pitcher plant, Sarracen/a purpurea. which is a plant of bogs, was found on land that the local people called “Carribou swamps“. Could this be a lingering folk-memory of a habitat once utilized by the island's extirpated caribou population?

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Bain (1890) who says that it was "once common here and the remains of its dams are still to be seen in many parts of the country”.94 This is a curious statement since fourteen years earlier Rowan (1876) had said that he had not seen or heard of any "beaver works" on the island, and he was thus "inclined to think" they had "never lived on the island", as "their traces endure long after they have become extinct". So also Sutherland (1861) had included it in a list of the mammals found on the mainland that did not occur on the island. The validity of Rowan's conclusion and Sutherland’s statement is strongly supported by the fact that thirteen of the other list-makers did not include the beaver in their lists of the island’s mammals, including Stewart (1806), Johnstone (1822) and MacGregor (1828) who made fairly comprehensive lists, as well as by the fact that its absence from the island had been noted during the French periodgs. Given its commercial importance as a fur—bearer and its relatively large size, it was a mammal that, had it been present, would not have been overlooked. Apart from Bain's comment, the only other mentions of the beaver that l have come across in the historical records are its inclusion in a list of the retail prices of pelts, printed in an anonymously written pamphlet for immigrants to the island (Anon. 1808), and the presence of beaver pelts among the skins of several other furbearers transported to Halifax on an island ship in 180296. Since pelts were easily transportable from the mainland where the species did occur, neither record indicates its presence on the island.97 Its inclusion as a species native to

9" Also, Peter Sinott, one of the eleven elderly respondents to the

Questionnaire (1876) who answered the question on “wild animals on the Island in your young days", listed the beaver. It may be that he was recalling his early years in Newfoundland before coming to the island.

95 Louis Denys de La Ronde in 1721, at the time of the first French settlement on the island, recorded that there were no beavers on the island (see Sobey 2002, pp. 148, 157).

96 They were in a consignment of “4 Trunks of furs containing Rabbit, Fox, Martin & Beaver skins, a few seal skins & 30 Dozen loose rabbit skins" that were loaded on the Betsy on 19 June 1802, [Ref.: 0.0. 231/2, R.G. 9: Collector of Customs. Shipping outwards all points (1802-1827) (1831- July 1845). Reel # 7.]

97 Another record of the presence of beaver pelts on the island, this time from the French period, has been communicated to me by Earle Lockerby: In a document of 4 Jan, 1724 [Minister to Dodun, AC, Serie 8, 46-1, p. 5], the minister of the Marine requested that a lawsuit against the priest Rene-Charles Breslay be dropped, and that he have restored to him the eight beaver skins which the Indians of his mission were sending to the King and which had been seized upon Breslay‘s landing at Nantes, (Breslay was stationed at Port La-Joie from 1721 until the springlof 1723 whereupon he went to France. Prior to his posting to lie Saint- Jean, he had served at an Indian mission at the west end of the Island of Montreal). Given La Ronde‘s statement of 1721 that there were no beaver on He Saint-Jean, Breslay‘s skins must have