m

p l i i t e t f *-•: "i^m^m^^^0m

35^

atid

I n early August 1727, along the

short portage that ran from the

riviere du nord-est [Hillsborough

River] to the havre a Vanguille ["eel

harbour/7 now Savage Harbour], the

silence that usually held sway in the

virgin forests of lie Saint-Jean was

broken by the clear sharp sound of

axes echoing through the trees. Then,

after a moment of silence, a large pine

tree came crashing to the ground.

These sounds, uncommon on Prince

Edward Island at the time, came not

from any of the Island's 300 or so

French settlers felling trees to clear

farmland or to get logs for a home-

stead. They came instead from a small

and rather unusual party made up of

soldiers from the Port La-Joie garrison

as well as at least four civilians. They

were acting in response to an order

from the minister in charge of the

department of the Marine at far-off

Versailles in France. In doing so they

were carrying out an activity new to

the Island: they were making a survey

of large pine trees as potential masts

for naval ships. If their report on the

trees at Savage Harbour was favour-

able it could lead to lie Saint-Jean

becoming a major supplier of masts

for the French navy.

The leader of this survey party

was the senior military and adminis-

trative officer for the Island, Jacques

d;Espiet de Pensens, commandant of

the 30-man garrison that had been

posted to Port La-Joie in the previous

year. Pensens, now probably in his late

50s, had been transferred with some

reluctance from the comparative com-

fort of Louisbourg to the small fron-

tier post - "in a corner of the woods" as

he described it - when the administra-

tion of the colony once more became

the direct responsibility of the gov-

ernment at lie Royale [Cape Breton

Island] after the short-lived seigneurial

venture of the Count of Saint-Pierre;s

Company of lie Saint-Jean.

Also present was an official who

had come across from Louisbourg,

Sebastien LeNormant de Mezy, the

24-year-old assistant to his father,

Jacques LeNormant de Mezy, the com-

missaire ordonnateur of lie Royale.

After the governor the commissaire

was the highest-ranking official in the

colonial hierarchy at Louisbourg. As

commissaire Mezy held the govern-

ment purse-strings for both lie Royale

and lie Saint-Jean and had overall

responsibility for all trade and related

matters. He thus had a direct interest

in this search for masts, which is prob-

ably why his son and second-in-com-

mand was in the party. Apart from

soldiers - who, we may presume, pro-

vided most of the physical labour -

there were also three "accadiens" des-

ignated in the documents as charpen-

tiers (translatable as either "carpen-

ters" or "shipwrights77) there to carry

out the inspection. One of these was

65-year-old Michel Hache Gallant of

Port La-Joie, who seven years before

had come over with some of his fam-

ily from Beaubassin to settle as one

of the first Acadian families on the

Island.

Both Pensens and the elder Mezy -

as well as the governor in Louisbourg,

Joseph de Saint-Ovide, had a per-

sonal stake in the matter. Not only

were they keen to demonstrate an

appropriate zeal in carrying out their

official duties, they must also have

known that if the enterprise were

successful, and the French navy did

decide to draw masts from lie Saint-

Jean, each could benefit personally,

not only in terms of their careers,

but also financially, from the various

spin-offs - both on and under the

table - that might occur. However,

what Pensens, Mezy and Saint-Ovide

did not know was that all of their

efforts would be brought to a sud-

den end two years later by a single

sentence in a letter from the minister

of the Marine.

Despite the fact that it never real-

ly got off the ground, this first offi-

cial effort to exploit and export the

timber resources of Prince Edward

Island is worthy of investigation -

1 0

for in miniature it represents events and circumstances that occurred on a larger scale elsewhere in Canada at various times during the French regime. And as elsewhere, it demon-strates that the local officials, on the Island and at Louisbourg, were in the grip of political and economic forces beyond their control. But before we look in detail at this enterprise of the 1720s, it is useful to know something of the background against which it was operating - in particular the importance to France of finding a source of masts for its naval ships.

Masts and the Navies of Europe in the 18th Century

In the 18th century masts were of vital strategic importance to the naval powers of western Europe. Every man-of-war had three masts, and in the largest, each was made up of three separate "sticks" rising one on top of the other. In addition, 14 smaller sticks were needed for the spars and yards. Collectively all of these sticks were called "mature" in French, the smaller ones being termed "matereaux" The largest -the lower mainmast - ranged in size from 40 inches in diameter and 123 feet in length in a first rate ship-of-the-line, to 20 inches in diameter and 72 feet in a frigate.

All of these masts and spars had to have particular properties: an exactly tapering straightness, a proper pro-portion of length to girth - the stan-dard was three feet of length for every inch in diameter at the large end or "heel" - suppleness, strength and durability These in turn depend-ed on properties of the tree from which it was cut: its species and age, the closeness of its grain, the amount of resin in the wood and the absence of knots and rot. From experience such properties had been found to vary with factors such as the country of origin (climate and soil were considered to be important); forest

A

t

**«^IK, #**% j

^ f 5 ^ nk-flp

!»,&*. I

French ship of the line, 18th century. In battle, vessels sailed bow-to-stern; or in line ahead/' in order to bring as many of their cannon as possible to bear. A "ship-ofthe-line" was thus a vessel deemed capable of holding its own in a large-scale sea battle. Ratings depended on the number of cannon carried. The largest - first rates' -had three decks and deployed at least 100 cannon.

structure (closed forests produced tall straight trees); felling, handling and transport techniques; the time that had passed since cutting (with time the natural resins that gave durabil-ity evaporated); and storage condi-tions (protection from the weather was very important - to prevent dry-ing out, some advocated storage in wet sand).

Because they were vital to the sur-vival of the ship, both in battle and in stormy seas, European navies were very particular about the masts they bought. Their purchasing agents and the inspectors in their own dockyards were very rigorous in their assess-ments and this rigour was under-pinned by an innate conservatism that favoured tried and tested sup-pliers and materials - which largely meant the east Baltic ports and in particular Riga.

Many years' experience had revealed that only certain tree spe-cies were acceptable for masts. The European pine [Pinus sylvestris; called "Scots pine" in the British Isles] was considered to be the best and was

the standard against which all other trees were judged. Since the Middle Ages its main source had been the east Baltic ports, especially Riga and Danzig, and from 1715 also St. Petersburg, all of which lay at the mouths of rivers that led far into the hinterland of Russia and Poland. In the back forests of these coun-tries, generations of landowners and their woodcutters had been carefully selecting trees for sale to the main naval powers of Europe, and a com-plex commercial network had devel-oped to supply the demand. These "northern" masts however did not come cheap - a mast tree of the largest size could cost more than 2000 livres or -£100, though the price dropped considerably as the diam-eter decreased by even a few inches.

However, trees capable of provid-ing the larger mast sizes were scarce even in the Baltic market and they became more so as each decade went by. One solution developed in the dockyards was to make up the larger masts by shaping and joining small-er pieces, often five or nine, around

1 1

a central spindle; all bound tightly with iron hoops. However such "mats d;assemblage" - "made masts;; to the English - were not considered as good as a single sound stick.

Apart from using trees from their own forests - limited in quantity and, from experience never as good as the northern masts - another solu-tion open to France and England was to look to the vast forests of their north Atlantic colo-nies; where virgin stands of tall pines grew near the water's edge in much of New France and in northern New England. The North American red and ^ white pines [Pinus resinosa and Pinus strobus] were tried early and found to be acceptable substitutes; especially the more resinous red; which could even exceed the European pine in quality. However; the main prob-lem in using these trees was the wide and dangerous ocean across which they had to be transported to the naval dockyards of Europe. This could have been circumvented by building vessels in the New World near the source of supply but there were entrenched prej-udices; as well as economic and infra-structural factors operating against this; and the French navy only began to do so in a small way in the 1740s.

The British navy had begun get-ting some of its larger masts in North America as early as 1652; when sticks of the largest sizes were first shipped to England. France on the other hand was much slower in utilising its North American mast resource. However, from 1669, when the department of

%*£*

Cross-section of a French warship, 18th century.

The 1720s Search for Masts on lie Saint-Jean

The first mention in the available records of the 1720s masting opera-tion occurs a year-and-a-half before the 1727 survey near Savage Harbour. It is found in a letter dated 18 December 1725 from Governor Saint-Ovide to the minister of the Marine at Versailles; 25-year-old Jean-Frederic PhelypeauX; the Count of Maurepas. Having just been given responsibility for lie Saint-Jean; Saint-Ovide writes that he is getting reports from people

t k e Marine was set up with respon- in the colony that it has a significant sibility for the overseas empire; the navy and the ports of France; period-ic attempts were made to explore the possibility of using North American pines. One of these was the venture that occurred on lie Saint-Jean.

*The French inch [pouce] and foot [pied] of the 18th century were 6.6% larger than the English inch and foot.

mast resource7 some of it7 he says; at a place called Trois Rivieres [the present Georgetown area]. He also reports that about two years before; the Count of Saint-Pierre's Company had cut 400 to 500 mast trees on the Island - "all" he has been told by the charpentier involved; "of red pine; from 50 to 75 feet inlength and up to 24 inches in diameter/7* Saint-Ovide

adds that if the minister gives the order "it will be easy to have enough masts brought down the river of Port La-Joie to fill one or two vessels.77

Crossing the Atlantic with Saint-Ovide7s letter was another to the

$ minister, written three days later, r7 from the man who would later lead f* the 1727 survey party at Savage

| \ ^ Harbour, Jacques de Pensens. While still at Louisbourg planning his move to the Island for the following year, he re-enforces Saint-Ovide7s comments by saying that he knows the colony to have a

good supply of timber which could become a source of masts

and building materials for the navy and he offers to give all

his attention in his new posting to the exploitation of this resource. To encourage the minister's approval; he adds that the logging operations should attract Acadians to the Island -i.e. from the Fundy marshlands which the Treaty of Utrecht had transferred to British ownership in 1713. Once they come over to the Island to cut wood; he argues, they will be likely to stay on. Pensens was very aware that the enticement of the Acadians to French territory where they might become producers of food for the newly-established fortress town of Louisbourg; was an important element of government policy

It was not; however; either of these letters that actually sparked the enterprise. Before they reached the Count of Maurepas, another letter had arrived on the minister's desk. It VVCIO 11V7111 CI JLJLICI V^llCLllL 111 i-tCL lVXJV^llCll 'C

referred to in the correspondence as "Sieur Fleury.77 La Rochelle; a major commercial port on the Bay of Biscay, was the main departure and landing point for merchant vessels sailing to and from New France, and this Sieur Fleury can only be Charles de Fleury Deschambault, a member of a Canadian merchant family who had established himself in La Rochelle as

1 2

a banker, merchant and ship-owner. Significantly, Fleury was one of the directors of the short-lived Company of lie Saint-Jean. Although the com-pany had failed the previous year, with the loss of money to all involved, Fleury had clearly not given up his hopes for the Island. In his letter to Maurepas he claimed that "masts of any size and quantity" could be got from lie Saint-Jean, that "they are of a better quality than those of Canada," and that they would cost much less - he does not say why, but presumably one factor was the shorter trans-Atlantic journey from lie Saint-Jean.

It is unlikely that Charles Fleury had ever visited lie Saint-Jean, and thus his comments on the Island's timber stocks are likely to have been partly supposition, though his claims are in general agreement with the reports that the Company's agents on the Island had sent back to France some five years earlier. Fleury added that there were some masts from the Island already at La Rochelle avail-able for inspection - presumably some of the masts that Saint-Ovide had reported to have been cut before 1725. Acting on this informa-tion, the Count of Maurepas instruct-ed Francois de Beauharnois, the Marine's intendant at the naval port of Rochefort, just eleven miles south of La Rochelle, to organize an inspec-tion of the masts at La Rochelle.

The inspector's report, sent back to the minister at Versailles on 6 April, contained bad news for Charles Fleury: the masts had been

La Rochelle 1762 by Joseph Vernet

found to be "full of knots, of a wide grain and dried out" - making them completely unacceptable for use on French naval vessels. However, Fleury did not give up. He attributed the dryness of the masts to their having been cut some time before, and it appears that he urged Beauharnois to recommend to the minister that Commissaire Mezy at Louisbourg be asked to obtain a new sample of "quelques pins et epinettes rouges et blanches7 - "a few pines and red and white spruces."

However by 28 May, when the min-ister dispatched his annual correspon-dence to his officials at Louisbourg, he had decided to go a step further; instead of asking for a small sample of trees to be sent to France for inspec-tion, he directed Mezy to immedi-ately organize a detailed survey of the mast resource of the Island using whatever experts he can find locally. It is evident that something more than Fleury's request had led to the

Louisbourg 1731.

minister's directive. "The difficulties of getting masts from Canada, where costs are causing the price to rise considerably," he writes, "cause me to draw masts from lie Saint-Jean." This can only refer to a costly mast-ing operation that had been on-going along the St. Lawrence River since 1724. To further speed up the process he instructs Mezy to send him the estimates of any qualified persons at Louisbourg who might undertake a full-scale masting contract and says that soldiers from the Port La-Joie garrison should be used for the cut-ting - presumably both to speed the process, and to reduce the cost to his cash-strapped department.

Even before Maurepas' directive arrived, Governor Saint-Ovide and Commissaire Mezy were writing of the promise shown by the Island's forests. Mezy remarked on 14 August: "masts for topmasts* of the largest vessels are of good quality and found in abundance on the island," and on 18 September Saint-Ovide, who had visited the colony several months earlier, commented that he was "sure that abundant quantities of good masting will be found on the island." He also writes that he had seen 300 logs that had been cut for the defunct

*At the close of the Napoleonic wars the main-topmast of a ist rate ship had a diameter of 21 inches and a length of 23 yards.

!3

Company of lie Saint-Jean. Thus, with regard to the prospect of obtaining masts from the Island the three men involved in its governance - Saint-Ovide; Mezy and Pensens - were sing-ing from the same hymn-sheet - a rare occurrence, especially for Saint-Ovide and Mezy who were often in bitter dispute.

When the minister's letter of 28 May arrived sometime that fall the three must have been delighted. The governor and commissaire were quick to reassure Maurepas that the poor results shown by the timber at La Rochelle was not indicative of what might be found in Island forests:

It is not surprising that [the masts]... were found to be of poor quality: they were from old spruce, [this conflicts with Saint-Ovide;s let-ter of a year before in which he had said the Company's masts were all of red pine!] cut from scrap material, which had been exposed for a long time to damage from the open air. This must not influence your opinion on the masts of pine that are abun-dant on lie Saint-Jean - whose soil, a rich red sand, should produce fine and good mast material We believe those found at the waters edge are more spongy and less impregnated with the gum that gives these masts their good quality, but those that will be obtained a little farther from the banks of rivers will be of a much better quality All the Acadian char-pentiers who have made use of them tell us of their marvels....

Mezy and Saint-Ovide also informed Maurepas that after sneak-ing to several Acadian charpen-tiers about cutting the timber, the best proposal had come from a man named LeComte who

French flute, 18th century. A flute was aflat-bottomed vessel with a loading port in the stern.

offers to supply two hundred masts from 8 to 18 inches in diam-eter, ... half to be made up of masts of 12 inches or less, and half greater, up to 18 and 20 inches, which could come to about 7000 livres. We will not use the masts cut down previ-ously, most of which are worm-eaten, and anyway belong to the Company of lie Saint-Jean.

Though 7000 livres would only have bought five or six large masts in the Riga market, it was a lot of money in the Marine's budget for lie Royale and would not have been allocated lightly. In fact the minister's response to the proposed contract, dated 10 June 1727, is entirely concerned with expense. Maurepas queries whether the esti-mate includes the cost of delivering the logs to a place where they can be embarked for France, attaches a price-list asking that Mezy get the best deal possible and requires that the final contract not be signed until he has given his approval.

And so it was that in the following July and August of 1727 we find the party led by Pensens and the young-er Mezy examining pine trees near Savage Harbour. In an affidavit dated 12 August they both swear on oath that in the portage between the river

of Port La-Joie and Savage Harbour, where the defunct Company of lie Saint-Jean had been cutting:

having cut a dozen living trees of different sizes, from 9 to ij and 18 inches in diameter, without selection, we found them to be healthy, well grown and resinous, of a fine and tight grain, very supple, although some full of knots at 30 or 35 feet from the large end, generally straight and bearing their proportions, that is their length in feet at least three times the diameter in inches, and the small end two-thirds the width of the large, all done in the presence of Charles Pinet and Frangois Paris, Acadians and charpentiers.

In a more general report on the summer's survey sent to the Count of Maurepas the following November, Pensens says that in addition to Savage Harbour (or havre Cadocpichs as he calls it) - which offered "the best masts on the Island" - he had found a second harbour with fine mast trees: havre a Yours ["Bear Harbour," later renamed Murray Harbour by Samuel Holland]. However, he makes no ref-erence to the pines at Trois Rivieres mentioned by Governor Saint-Ovide two years before, and it would seem that he did not visit the western part of the Island, where in 1732 he would report very fine pine stands at "Malpeck." Pensens also adds that to carry out his duty as commandant he needs both a shallop and a 20-ton vessel and requests that these be pro-vided out of the royal accounts. This will enable him, he reasons, to assist

the contractor in transporting the soldiers and their supplies to the

logging sites. He ends by say-ing that he is awaiting the end

of a stretch of poor weather so that he and 10 addi-tional soldiers assigned for the cutting can leave

Louisburg for lie Saint-Jean to carry out the logging over ^ the winter. In a separate

H

Red pine near Savage Harbour.

The trees were cut near havre a I'anguille, modern-day Savage Harbour.

Because of the amount of detail on this early masting operation that survives in the records of the department of the Marine in France we not only have a good

to the south-eastern corner of Savage Harbour and thence to Havre Saint-Pierre, described in Colonel Franquet;s report of 1751 and shown on Captain Hollands map of 1765. Rather it is a much shorter portage (probably following an earlier Mi'kmaq trail), shown on two early maps of the French period, that runs directly from the river to the present Maclntyres Creek. The evidence suggests that the full-scale logging operation of the following winter of 1727-1728 also occurred in this same area, and it appears to have'also been the source of at least some of the 400 to 500 masts taken earlier by the Company of lie Saint-Jean.

Mezy s letter of November 1728 accompanying the mast shipment to France

been the masts taken earlier by the Count of St. Pierres' Company), and this leads |

ring-counts from borings taken in the 1980s suggest that they originated about \

time they represent the rare survival of the same forest-type and habitat in an area

15

letter to the minister that December Mezy encloses the new contract with "Maitre" LeCompte - now designated "carpenter, builder and mast-maker." As the river of Port La-Joie is too shallow to send "the King's ship" to the embarkation point, he assures Maurepas that LeComte is required to deliver the masts to Louisbourg at his own expense. He also adds that the estimates are in accordance with the minister's price list.

The next mention of the enter-prise comes a full year later, in October 1728. In the meantime Louis LeComte had cut the mast trees near the top of the Hillsborough River and transported them to Port La-Joie and thence to Louisbourg, where a good number were loaded onto the King's flute Le Dromadaire. Accompanying them were letters. from Pensens and Mezy, which indicate that neither was entirely confident in the quality of the shipment. Pensens7 letter in particular is full of contradictions:

The masts are of very good quali-ty. They are not perfect on account of many knots, which however I assure you are not bad. The small masts and spars are good,... if they are found to be so at Rochefort, as I believe [they will be], it will be easy to obtain from lie St-Jean, the amount wanted. ... If the masts are not as fine as they ought to be, [it is because] Sieur LeComte has not been able to get others because of the difficulty of getting them out of the woods [due to] several impassable bogs.

He adds that when tracks are cut

-•--S?S ' ^ 2ei5Bf ™i™2BTJ8 5E

lill™RiBl^^^KS^i;^ LECHAMEAU, 1720/1725

Le Chameau was a sister vessel to Le Dromadaire. Note how much of the main and foremast were below a vessel's main deck.

space but also because some were "very knotty." However he cites the tes-timony of four captains - presumably of merchant ships then at Louisbourg - who had been given five of the masts and judged them very good. In their opinion, he writes: "knots in red pine are part of the body of the wood and do not weaken the masts." He ends by saying that even if there are flaws in the wood, the low cost - 6664 livres including the cost of 340 pine planks - as well as their usefulness, should be given consideration.

Le Dromadaire arrived at Rochefort with the mast shipment some time before 18 January 1729. Pensens'and Mezy's excuses were to carry little weight in the dockyard - the mast inspectors were not so willing to overlook what they viewed as seri-ous flaws. On 8 March Intendant Beauharnois sent the minister the report on the shipment. The masts, including the small masts and spars, were found to be "full of knots and the wood very dry." They "will not be of much use" in the dockyards. Finally on 22 May, the minister sent his ver-dict on the matter to Louisbourg.

i n t o t l i P cit<=»c l A r h i r n VIA l i a c alr«=»prl\A UT^ ^ ^ ^ , , ^ ^ + +X-.<>+ TV/TA^r o n U ^ ^ , T + C -1-IXI.V^ *.xx^ o x u ^ o , wxxxv^xx xxv. xxvxo «.xxwu.v^ 1 1 c i c u u c D i o LIICLL i v i c ^ y , a o 1 1 c u u t i s begun to do, they will be able in future to get better material from farther inland. It is clear from his apologies-in-advance that he is trying to put the best face on defective materials.

Commissaire Mezy's letter reveals even less confidence. Only a third of the masts brought to Louisbourg were loaded onto Le Dromadaire, he explains, partly due to lack of cargo

it, "refrain from sending any more such masts" - thus bringing to an end all future masting operations by the Marine on the Island. When this letter arrived at Louisbourg there must have been a great deal of disap-pointment for all of the local offi-cials, and especially Pensens, who had devoted considerable time and effort to the enterprise.

Why did the enterprise fail?

The immediate cause of the oper-ation's failure was that the quality of the masts in the 1728 shipment did not meet the high standards of the naval inspectors at Rochefort. The rejection of this single shipment, however, does not explain why the Marine failed to carry out any fur-ther surveys of the mast resource of lie Saint-Jean.

To understand the reason for this we have to put the Island operation into a wider context. The 1728 ship-ment came at the tail-end of over 60 years of surveys and trials of North American masts by the department of the Marine. Over the years almost all of these surveys and shipments had ended in disappointment - with

. no masts or sub-standard masts being delivered - and always at what the Marine considered to be a high cost.

Especially relevant to the lie Saint-Jean operation was that it had the misfortune to follow directly upon one of the more costly and disap-pointing of these searches, the one referred to obliquely by Maurepas in his 1726 letter. For three years., from 1724 to 1727, a survey party had visited forests along the St. Lawrence from the Bay of Chaleur and the Saguenay to the Richelieu River. Their reports on the resource were generally favourable. However, the survey was undermined when the masts that had been cut were consid-ered so defective that they were not even embarked on the large flute sent

16

out to ship them to France. While the governor and intendant at Quebec tried to shift the blame from the trees to those doing the cutting, the Count of Maurepas, under pressure from the treasury to cut his budget and exas-perated by the costs involved - "16 thousand livres in pure loss" - notified the governor in 1728 that "His Majesty has given no indication that he intends to carry out other [mast] surveys for a long time to come/7 Indeed, the ship-ment from lie Saint-Jean later that year would be the Marine's last attempt to find suitable masts in the North American colonies.

Since the British, after 1763, were to successfully obtain good quality naval masts for over a century from many of the same areas available to the French, it would seem that the rea-son for the failure of the French gov-ernment to exploit the forests of New France cannot have been the quality of the timber available. Examination of the evidence rather indicates it had more to do with what the Marine per-ceived as a high cost of the operations in combination with their failure to deliver a reliable product.

The cost of such enterprises was indeed high. Though the timber itself was free - it was already considered the property of the king - harvest and transport was expensive because in most of the areas where the tall pines grew there was no infrastruc-ture of personnel and equipment to carry out logging operations. This is especially true of lie Saint-Jean, which a 1728 census indicates had a population of only 297 settlers plus 125 fishermen. Thus on the Island, as at many of the mast sites elsewhere in New France, all stages of the enter-prise - from the initial survey, to fell-ing and preparation, transport and embarkation - had to be funded by the Marine from scratch. In the lie Saint-Jean operation, as we have seen, Pensens requested both a shallop and a 20-ton vessel, in part to support the masting operation, and warned

he would have to cut trails to get at trees farther from the water's edge. On top of this, labour costs in New France, and especially at Louisbourg, were high in comparison with the home country due to the small size of the skilled work force. Even though the Port La-Joie garrison supplement-ed this labour pool, the contractor had to pay the soldiers at the going rates. Added to this was the cost of ship-ping the masts across the Atlantic. This often meant the costly charter-ing of merchant ships or assigning special vessels like Le Dromadaire. Such shipping was not always read-ily available, which meant that the masts might lay about in the open air for several years before they could be shipped - as seems to have hap-pened to the 300 logs belonging to the Company of lie Saint-Jean and Fleury;s masts at La Rochelle.

Count of Maurepas.

However, these costs were no high-er than would have had to be spent purchasing masts in the Baltic mar-ket. Given this, the Marine might have been satisfied if the financial outlay had resulted in the delivery of a reliable product. But the maxim "you get what you pay for" frequently did not apply to masting operations in New France - for having paid out the money, the product that arrived

at the dockyards at Rochefort often proved unusable - if it arrived at all.

If the Marine had analyzed the reasons for their failure to success-fully exploit the mast resource of New France they might have realized, as we can certainly do from hindsight, that the solution was a considerable invest-ment in the infrastructure needed to support such operations - as British entrepreneurs were later to do. And this leads us to the root of the prob-lem; the department of the Marine simply did not have the finances to invest in the infrastructure needed to exploit the mast resource, and the reason for this lay with a level of gov-ernment outside the control of the Marine and its minister.

The ultimate cause of the failure of France to exploit the mast resource of its North American empire can be traced to the military priorities of Louis XIV and his great grand-son, Louis XV, who in succession occu-pied the throne of France from 1643 to 1774. Louis XIV;s political ambi-tions, and the wars in which they involved him, lay on the continent of Europe. Though England was always lurking on the periphery, the Hapsburg monarchies of Spain and Austria were viewed as France's chief enemies. In these wars the navy was always considered of secondary importance to the army, and as a result it was chronically under-fund-ed. The navy got even shorter shrift after the accession of Louis XV in 1715 when, with a rising public debt, the finances of the Marine were squeezed even further. Thus the var-ious ministers of the Marine were always trying to manage the diverse responsibilities of their department on a severely restricted budget. Except for a brief period in the 1660s, and after the accession of the more navy-friendly Louis XVI in 1774, the Marine always had a funding prob-lem. It was this under-funding that played a key role in all the attempts to develop a mast supply in the New

17

Maindeck of a French warship, 18th century.

World. In the end, given the limited funds available, it was safer for the Marine to spend its mast budget in the Baltic market where, even if the masts were more expensive, their quality was more certain.

Thus it was the wider strategic pol-icy of the French government with regard to its perceived foreign ene-mies, based partly on the whims of the king in an absolute monarchy, that helped to save the pines of Savage Harbour and elsewhere on the Island from the French navy's axe. Whether Prince Edward Island, given its small size and limited pine forests, would have ever been able to supply a significant number of masts to the French navy is doubtful. And we will never know whether the rest of the Island's pine resource would have fared any better with the

mast inspectors at Rochefort than did the shipment of 1728.

In the end, the impact of the oper-ation on the Island's timber resourc-es was negligible. The felling appears to have been confined to a small area not far from the Hillsborough River along the portage to Savage Harbour [see Box]. It consisted of only a dozen pine trees in 1727, followed by 200 or so in 1728. We may thus presume that most of the pines at Savage Harbour were left standing. However, they were not to stand for long. In 1736 and 1742 there were major for-est fires in the north-east of the Island, and one or both burned through the area around Savage Harbour. We know this from Captain Samuel Holland's interim report of March 1765 on his mapping survey of the whole Island:

About 24 years since there hap-pened afire that destroyed the great-est part of the timber: the course it ran was from the Bay of Fortune to St. Peters, from thence to the North East River, along Savage Bay Tracady Harbour and very near to Racico which in many places affords a very extraordinary appearance, particu-larly at the Carrying Place betwixt the North East Rivers and Tracady, where the burnt timber looks at a dis-tance like lofty pillars or columnes.

When it came to Holland listing the best sites on the Island for mast timber he named only "Three Rivers, Bear Harbour and Malpac." The Savage Harbour pines - "with-out an equal on the island" according to Pensens - were clearly no more, or at most were among those trees visible from a distance as blackened "lofty pillars or columnes."

Sources The story of the 1720s masting operation is based on primary sources; the originals of which are found in the French Archives, with copies available at the National Archives of Canada and at the Centre for Acadian Studies in Moncton. These and other sources of the period are currently being collected together in their original French (with English translation) in my Early Descriptions of the Forests of Prince Edward Island: A Source Book. Part 1: The French Period, 1534-1758 which will be available from the P.E.I. Forestry Division. Secondary sources that I have used have included the Dictionary of Canadian Biography for all of the main participants: Pensens (Vol. II), Mezy the father (Vol. Ill), Mezy the son (Vol. IV), Beauharnois / V o l TTT\ a n r l S a i " t ^ n v i r l p / V o l TTT^ grnr\

the Nouvelle Biographie Generale (1861) for the Count of Maurepas. Other second-ary sources have enabled me to put the Island operation into a wider context: espe-cially valuable has been Forests and French Sea Power 1660-1789 by Paul W. Bamford (1956), as well as R. G. Albion's (1926) Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy 1652-1862. Also useful for the general political and economic background of the period has been Dale Miquelons (1987) New France 1701-1744.