this wood over the hardwoods.” We are thus not

able to use the inspection reports as evidence that the hardwoods, such as yellow birch and sugar maple, were in decline on the island — though we would expect that they were from other evidence.

Two further points emerge from the study: it is of interest that all but one of the 65 ’juniper’ ships in our sample were built in those parts of the island where we would expect tamarack to have been an important component of the forest, namely, in the areas from Summerside westward, and east of the Hillsborough River (Figure 4-1)”. This suggests that despite the fact that there is a contemporary reference to the internal movement of tamarack on the island (by schooner) from a place where it grew to where it was required for shipbuilding”, it was the general practice for ships to be built near the source of supply rather than to transport the wood any great distance. Secondly, all 41 of the ships inspected in 1876 were built either in the west or the east of the island (unlike in 1856, when 13 of the 49 inspected ships were built in the region lying between the Bedeque-Malpeque isthmus and the Hillsborough River). The eastern and western parts of the island were of course likely to have contained the principal black spruce forests.14 Thus both of these findings suggest that the geographical distribution of ship-building on the island was determined by the local availability of supplies of suitable wood, and the second finding adds support to the observation of De Jong and

1‘ It should however be noted that the Lloyd's classes of island

ships in the 18705 were all generally higher than those of the 18505 and 18605: for example, the ‘juniper’ vessels in Table 4-3 were all classed as 7A in 1856, 1861 and 1866, with all other vessels being classed as 4A, whereas in the 18705 all the juniper vessels in the table were classed as 9A, spruce vessels as 7A, while all others were classed as either 5A or 6A. As Craig (1968) (p. 29), however notes, there is no evidence that this ‘upgrading’ reflected a higher quality of vessel in the later period than previously; rather, since they were applied at the time to all vessels throughout the Lloyd's Registers without distinction, he believes that it was due to a general re-setting of the classes. There is also the complicating factor that in the 1861 and later samples the inspector noted the use of “vertical iron knees" (sometimes along with wooden knees) in most of the ships — these must have been imported from Britain, but I do not know how the use of such knees affected the rating of the ships. What is required is an examination of the instructions issued to inspectors, but I have not been able to obtain these.

12 The exception was the vessel built at Charlottetown, to which place tamarack could easily have been floated from sites up the Hillsborough River.

13 House of Assembly (1853): speech of Joseph Pope. He said that “a large schooner had been employed in carrying juniper timber from about Egmont Bay", but he does not state where it was carried to.

‘4 See Sobey & Glen (2004) for the distribution of remnants of black spruce forest in 1990.

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Moore that, as the wood supply was depleted in various localities, ship-building also declined in those areas.‘5

The survey of mast materials, for which data from only fourteen vessels (all in 1856 and 1857) was recorded (Table 4-6), indicates that ’spruce’ was by far the predominant contributor to the masts and yards of all fourteen vessels; hemlock (called ’white hemlock’ in two of the reports‘s) was used in the bowsprits of two vessels, and in the masts of a third; while ’pine’, ’white pine’ or ’yellow pine’ (all probably white pine, Pinus strobus) contributed to the masts of three vessels. Thus by the 18505 it would seem that the principal wood used on the island for masts and spars was black spruce.

In conclusion, I wish to stress that this has been a very limited study: it has made use of only five of the more than twenty years of data available in the Lloyd’s Register in the Provincial Archives (more than forty years of data, if we include that on Prince Edward Island ships in the National Maritime Museum). Also, even for these five years the analysis was entirely restricted to the frequencies of usage of the various types of wood. Much more use could be made of the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, even on the subject of the wood used in ship construction, it being possible, for example, to measure the volume of timber that went into the construction of each ship, and to allocate this to the various tree species.

REFERENCES

Anon. (1978) Visual Encyclopedia of Nautical Terms under Sail. Crown Publishers, New York.

Cousins, J. (1973?) Those gallant ships. The Canadian Antiques Collector. (Prince Edward Island Centenary Issue) Vol. 8, No. 1: 58—60.

De Jong, N. J. 8i Moore, M. E. (1994) Shipbuilding on Prince Edward Island. Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Craig, R. S. (1968) British shipping and British North American shipbuilding in the early nineteenth century, with special reference to Prince Edward Island. In: Fisher, H. E. S. (editor), The South‘West and the Sea. Exeter Papers in Economic History, No. 1: 21—42.

Greenhill, B. & Giffard, A. (1967) Westcountrymen in Prince Edward's Isle. University of Toronto Press.

Sobey D. G. & Glen, W. M. (2004) A mapping of the present and past forest-types of Prince Edward Island. The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 118: 50420.

‘5 See footnote 700, p. 104 ofthe main text of this report.

16 See footnote 234 of Appendix 1.