“The forest was there for them”

“The forest was there for them” names an extractive worldview in which woodland is treated not as a living place with its own relations and histories, but as a supply of profitable materials awaiting human use. Its force comes from the contrast between the apparently limitless forest imagined by traders and the real consequences of taking timber: damaged landscapes, displaced communities, and the erasure of Indigenous claims and knowledge.

A Forest Imagined as Wealth

The assumption appears early in Charles Duquet’s effort to escape the uncertainty of the fur trade. Watching beaver pelts accumulate and then recognizing that animal resources could vanish or lose market value, he searches for a commodity that might secure wealth for generations. He settles on the forest, imagining it as vast, self-renewing, and capable of supplying timber for ships, houses, and fuel. His plan is to keep earning through furs while preparing to move into timber, a business he hopes will expand and dominate. The forest’s supposed permanence converts an ecological assumption into a financial strategy.

The same commercial reasoning reaches beyond New France. During a trading journey, Duquet notices the exchange of goods in India and considers whether a three-cornered route could serve a lumber merchant. Later, when Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of pine to Sydney, a prospective buyer raises the possibility of seeking a logging partner in New Zealand. These moments show how the forest-as-resource outlook links distant woods to shipping, investment, and overseas demand: particular forests become interchangeable supplies within a growing trade network.

The Phrase Made Material in New Zealand

The clearest embodiment of the expression appears in the account of logging around New Zealand’s shore stations. Camps and trading posts dealing in flax, spars, and lumber attract warehouses, sawmills, and small shipyards. Operators take the most valuable timber, move their camps when a site is depleted, and leave behind stumps and deep accumulations of waste. The logging then shifts from one prized tree to another, while vast quantities of felled wood are burned to clear the land. The phrase “The forest was there for them” concludes this description, turning the newcomers’ unexamined assumption into a concise indictment of the system it sustains.

The damage is not limited to the trees selected for sale. Burning clears brush, vines, and forest litter along with birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, and ferns. The narrative thus measures extraction not only by the timber removed but by the living complexity discarded in the process. The commercial operators understand the country chiefly through what can produce a return; the forest’s other forms of life and value remain outside that calculation.

Land, Knowledge, and Unequal Costs

The phrase also resonates with the novel’s account of colonial land claims. Père Crème argues that the Mi’kmaq love their country and that France is taking it, while Sosep insists that the land belongs to his people rather than to a French king who can give it away. These statements directly unsettle the premise that a forest is available simply because a colonizing power or settler enterprise treats it as such. The conflict is not only over use of trees but over whose relationship to the land is recognized as authoritative.

Sosep describes the practical consequences of encroachment: settlers’ animals damage food sources, boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants displace local ones. He recalls a time when Mi’kmaq people could travel through the woods without hindrance and warns that survival requires sustaining Mi’kmaq ways and the understanding that people, plants, animals, and birds are persons who help one another. Against the forest as a stockpile, his account presents a living community of relations and knowledge. The contrast makes the commercial assumption appear not inevitable but culturally specific—and consequential for those whose land and livelihood it overrides.

A Recurring Critique of Extraction

Across these episodes, the expression ties together commercial ambition, colonial power, and ecological loss. Duquet’s confidence in a permanent forest supplies a rationale for converting woodland into a long-term fortune; later timber enterprises extend that confidence across oceans, leaving waste and ecological damage at the sites of extraction. Indigenous voices, meanwhile, identify the land as their own and describe how colonial settlement alters the conditions of life. The phrase’s blunt certainty therefore carries an irony: the forest is treated as though it exists for the taking, even as the novel records the losses that this belief makes easier to ignore.