inclusion of the Lloyd’s reports for the island vessels that were inspected at British ports between 1834 and 1855. This however would necessitate a visit to the National Maritime Museum in England, and if ever carried out, would be a more time-consuming task, as it would be necessary to locate and extract a sufficiently sized sample of island-built ships from the Lloyd’s records for the different British ports.6

METHODS

From the more than twelve hundred vessels that were inspected on Prince Edward Island between 1856 and 18807, I decided to take a sample of just sixty, twelve for each of five different years, at five-yearly intervals, the first 1856, the first year of local inspections, and thereafter 1861, 1866, 1871 and 1876. The twelve ships for each year were selected objectively by taking the first vessel inspected in the year, and then, using the Lloyd’s numbers, the fourth, eighth, and twelfth vessel, and so on, until the forty-fourth vessel was reached, giving a sample of twelve. Where a Lloyd’s number was missing from the records, the next numbered report was used; and where, as in 1861 and 1871, there were fewer than forty-four vessels inspected, the final few vessels needed were selected randomly from those that had been previously passed over.

Each Lloyd’s inspection form was examined and the information required was entered onto a standard data collecting sheet that I had prepared for the purpose. I was interested primarily in the types of wood listed for the various structural components of each vessel. Over the twenty-one year period the number of components listed on the forms varied slightly, ranging between 25 and 28 (see Table 4-4 for the names of the

6 Table 4 of Craig (1968), which lists the number of island-built

ships that were registered in the various British ports in the years 1831. 1841 and 1846, suggests that the British ports to target in the search for island inspections are, not surprisingly given the connections between the island and the West Country, Bideford (31 island ships were registered in those three years), Bristol (48), and Plymouth (48); also as expected, Liverpool (73) and London (81). but, surprisingly. also the Irish ports of Limerick (35), Cork (32) and Belfast (30). I say surprisingly for these last, because I am not otherwise aware of any particular connection between the island and these lrish ports.

By the way, not all vessels built on the island in these years were offered by their owners for inspection by Lloyd's: in fact, of the 410 vessels built on the island in the five sample years (the figure comes from De Jong & Moore 1994), only 257 (Le. 62.7%) were inspected. Of the 153 vessels not inspected 101 were schooners, presumably intended for the local coasting trade. (Even so, twelve of the 113 schooners built in these years were inspected.)

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components and Table 4-5 for their definition). It should be noted that frequently more than one type of wood was listed for a particular structural component of a ship, but there was usually no indication of the relative amounts of the various woods used in that component.

Unfortunately, the forms did not require the inspector to list the type of wood used in the ”masts, yards, &c.”, requiring instead only a comment on their ’condition'. Even so, in both 1856 and 1857 (but not apparently thereafter), the inspector sometimes inserted a brief statement on the types of wood used in the masts of particular vessels, and so I thought it worthwhile to examine all reports from 1856 to 1864 for this information.

RESULTS

Tables 4-3 to 4-5 (inserted at the back of this appendix) present in summary form some of the data that was extracted from the reports. Table 4- 3 lists by name the sixty vessels that were sampled and for each vessel shows the number of structural elements that were listed for each wood- type. Table 4—4, which is a re-working of the same data, shows for the five years combined the overall contribution of each of the wood-types to the different structural components of the vessels (see Table 4-5 for a definition of each of these components). Table 4-6 shows all of the information available in the inspection reports on the wood-types used in the masts of ships built on Prince Edward Island between 1856 and 1864.

Table 4-1 contains a summation of the values contained in Table 4-3, with the lower part of the table presenting the data in the form of the percentage contribution of each of the principal wood—types. It should be noted that these percentages provide only an index of the relative frequency-of-mention on the forms of the various wood-types, and are not necessarily related directly to the amount of wood of each type that was used — to obtain this would require further calculations that take into consideration the size and the number of the various structural components.

ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

It is evident from Table 4-1 that the principal hardwoods used in island-built vessels in the period from 1856 to 1876, in order of frequency (for all five sample years combined) were: ’birch’ (i.e. yellow birch) (20.7%); ’beech’ (13.4%); and ’maple’ (undoubtedly sugar maple) (3.5%), with smaller amounts of ’oak’ (probably mostly imported