Acts of Trade and Navigation

The Acts of Trade and Navigation are imperial restrictions on colonial trade that the novel presents not as distant rules but as pressures shaping the timber economy. They bind colonial merchants to English commercial priorities; the resulting evasions help build fortunes, while the pursuit of timber intensifies the transformation of forests and Indigenous homelands.

Restrictions and Colonial Opposition

During his Amsterdam conversation with Benton Dred-Peacock, Charles Duquet learns that many colonists resent English rule and the taxes supporting England’s wars. Dred-Peacock particularly condemns the Acts of Trade and Navigation, describing them as constraints on colonial trade at every turn. The rules operate alongside the Royal Board of Trade’s restrictions on cutting and supplying timber for the Royal Navy, including masts, bowsprits, yards, pitch, and tar. Together, these controls make forests both a source of colonial wealth and an object of imperial regulation.

Dred-Peacock’s account gives the restrictions a practical political dimension. He says that colonists want the right to trade worldwide if they can produce goods and timber, and he points to influential local connections as a means of securing access to valuable white-pine townships. The conflict is therefore not simply between law and lawlessness: colonial merchants challenge metropolitan control while seeking their own profitable foothold in the same forests.

Evasion and Duquet’s Expansion

At a private table in the coffeehouse, with rum ordered as the conversation deepens, Dred-Peacock describes sly ways New Englanders evade the rules, often in collusion with colonial officials and sawmill owners. Duquet asks to learn how townships can be acquired. His interest in the mechanisms of evasion links the trade restrictions to his own move from forest labor and local commerce toward a transatlantic timber business.

Dred-Peacock connects Duquet with an English shipbuilder and a promising yard on the River Clyde, which needs timber. Duquet accepts the opportunity, and Dred-Peacock receives a substantial share of profits that grow year by year. The trade with English and Scottish buyers begins as secret, complex, expensive, and dangerous. Its scale is made concrete by the estimate that fifty acres of oak are needed for a seventy-four-gun warship: the demand for naval timber turns New France’s hardwood stands into the material basis of Duquet’s commercial ambitions. Yet the distance from Kébec to the centers of capital continues to hamper him, and Dred-Peacock urges him to move his operations to Boston.

Law, Land, and Unequal Claims

The novel places trade regulation within a broader colonial system that converts forest and land into resources through overlapping claims of authority. In New France, Monsieur Trépagny defends river-to-forest land strips as a deliberate allocation of fertile soil, flood-safe ground, and timber. His account of orderly property distribution is inseparable from his stated purpose of clearing and subduing the wilderness. This land system differs from the British trade controls, but both make forests legible as property and productive supply.

The consequences extend beyond settler commerce. Years later, a report to Duquet describes farms spreading near René Sel’s place and woodland plants disappearing as settlers clear the land. Mari mourns the lost grottos where medicinal plants once grew. In another scene, Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq suffer as their country is taken and their children are affected by colonial goods and coercion. Sosep later recalls that the woods once belonged to his people and that settlers’ animals, boats, nets, and introduced plants increasingly damage their food and subsistence. These scenes show that the commercial order enabled by imperial rules rests on a deeper contest over land, livelihood, and whose claims count.

A Recurrent Logic of Extraction

The novel’s later account of American timber acquisition shows the extractive logic continuing beyond the specific restrictions Duquet confronts. Under federal land laws, Duke Logging uses dummy settlers, fraudulent homestead claims, and bribed land agents to obtain large tracts cheaply, then cuts the timber and abandons the claims. The methods differ from the earlier evasion of imperial trade rules, but both episodes depict commercial actors turning legal systems into instruments of access to forests.

Across these episodes, regulation does not halt extraction; it redirects it into negotiation, concealment, and manipulation of ownership. The Acts of Trade and Navigation matter because they make colonial timber a contested commodity—valuable to imperial fleets, desired by colonial merchants, and acquired at the expense of forests and Indigenous communities. The novel’s wider historical arc exposes the gap between disputes over who may trade and the more fundamental question of who has the authority to claim the land and its trees.