Forest as an inexhaustible resource

The forest as an inexhaustible resource is both an economic premise and a historical delusion in the novel. Charles Duquet turns it into a plan for lasting wealth, imagining that timber can replace the uncertain fur trade and supply markets indefinitely. Across later generations, however, that confidence meets evidence of ecological change and colonial dispossession: forests are cleared, animals and plants become harder to find, and industrial logging leaves lasting changes even where new growth appears. The forest does regenerate, but regeneration does not mean that what was lost returns unchanged.

A business built on permanence

Duquet’s conviction takes shape after he witnesses the fur trade’s instability. Beaver pelts arrive in great quantity, yet he understands that animal populations may vanish through overtrapping or disease and that markets can be glutted as readily as starved. He wants a fortune that will endure for a hundred years and pass to his sons, and he imagines his family name becoming an honor. Looking for a resource with lasting value, he rejects beaver, fish, seals, game, and birds as vulnerable to disappearance and fickle demand. The forest, by contrast, seems to him an everlasting commodity Europe lacks: it can provide ship timbers, building materials, and fuel, while the immense woods of New France appear capable of replacing what is cut.

He does not abandon the fur business at once. His plan is to earn money from pelts, prepare himself, and move into timber when ready. He briefly presents the proposed shift to the Trépagny brothers as a future partnership, but they respond without enthusiasm. The decision nevertheless gives the forest a new place in the novel’s commercial history: it is not simply a landscape but a resource Duquet expects to organize, transport, and sell on a larger scale.

Trade routes and the cut forest

The timber venture connects distant forests to overseas demand. In India, Captain Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks for food, spices, and a chest of opium intended for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet notices the route and considers whether a triangular trading system might also serve a lumber merchant. His attention follows the commercial network as much as the trees themselves: a forest’s value depends on moving its products to buyers.

That network becomes concrete when Dred-Peacock introduces Duquet to an English shipbuilder and a promising yard on the Clyde, which needs good timber. Duquet accepts the opportunity and shares the profits with Dred-Peacock. The arrangement is secret, complex, expensive, and dangerous, but the prospect of supplying shipbuilding helps drive the cutting of hardwood stands along New France’s rivers. The account makes the imagined permanence of the forest inseparable from the expanding reach of commerce: distant shipyards create demand, and local woods bear the cost.

The idea survives as the family business changes scale and geography. Much later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia. Its buyer, Harry Blustt, seeks a decade-long supply contract and is also interested in New Zealand kauri. The company’s search for overseas timber sources echoes Duquet’s earlier ambition: new markets promise continuity, while the pressure to keep supplying them encourages the next expansion into forest country.

What regeneration hides

When Duquet returns to Wobik, the landscape unsettles the belief he had formed about the forest’s permanence. The village has grown by fifty houses and acquired a grain mill, a water-powered sawmill, and a large sheep commons. Rough fields and crops between stumps have replaced the woodlands, and the former muddy trail west has become a fair road. For a moment, Duquet wonders whether the forest might prove as vulnerable as beaver. He concludes that it will recover: trees resprout from stumps, seeds spread, and new growth rises from roots. He treats this visible capacity for renewal as proof that the forests of New France cannot disappear.

The wider account complicates that conclusion. Acadian agriculture has plowed woodland, drained salt marshes for livestock, and altered places that had supplied generations with berries and edible roots. Moose, caribou, and bear retreat; beavers decline under heavy trapping, and their skins become a form of money rather than part of a burial custom. These changes are not a single cleared tract that can be measured against a promise of future growth. They accumulate across food sources, animal life, and cultural practice.

Sosep also observes that introduced livestock consume nutritious and medicinal plants within walking distance. Pigs forage in the forest and on the shore, making clams harder for Mi’kmaw women to gather; one attacks and kills a toddler. In his account, settlers’ boats and nets take fish, their plants displace local plants, and their animals damage food sources. He acknowledges that most settlers do not intend harm, yet their growing numbers bring an encroaching force. His warning that “All these woods once ours” connects environmental change directly to the loss of access and control over Mi’kmaw land.

Logging, labor, and altered forests

The change continues through commercial logging. Achille finds crews cutting pine in hundreds of places, with sawmills appearing wherever there are falls. Although seedlings rise on cutover land, the gaps in the canopy alter the succession of species from tract to tract. The forest remains alive, but, as the narrative stresses, it is no longer what it was. Regrowth is therefore not a simple rebuttal to depletion: a new stand may occupy the ground while the composition and character of the woodland have shifted.

The timber economy also assigns its dangers unevenly. In logging camps, Mi’kmaq workers are put to river work, the most hazardous stage of moving logs toward mills. A camp boss explains that water moves the logs and powers the mills, so the company must accept the expense of driving them downstream. His explanation treats the river as essential infrastructure and the workers in it as part of the operating cost. The daily camp routine demands long hours and risky cutting, while river work brings drowning and severe injury. The costs of the timber supply chain fall on laborers as well as on the forest.

Across three generations, the Sel family witnesses and works through a succession of tools and transport systems: poll axes give way to double-bitted axes, then crosscut saws; older gang saws yield to circular and band saws; oxen give way to horses, engines, and geared locomotives; and roads and trucks displace river drives. These changes make distant timber easier to reach and accelerate the scale of extraction. The novel links technological capacity to the leveling of the continent’s remaining ancient forests, rather than presenting efficiency as an uncomplicated improvement.

The false promise of endless supply

The belief in limitless forests is sustained by treating recovery as equivalent to permanence. Duquet sees new shoots and seeds and concludes that the forest can always return; commercial enterprises similarly move from one timber source to another as demand persists. But the novel’s long chronology records consequences that this reasoning excludes: altered species succession, shrinking animal populations, lost plant foods and medicines, Indigenous displacement, dangerous work, and extensive forest waste.

In New Zealand, logging stations combine camps and trading posts dealing in flax, spars, and lumber. As Europeans take timber from the shore forest, operations move on, leaving smoldering stumps and deep waste. The cutting first targets kahikatea and then kauri; felled wood can carpet the ground for days, before it is burned along with brush, vines, birds, insects, fruit, bats, epiphytes, ferns, and forest litter. The settlers’ assumption that “The forest was there for them” exposes the same logic that underlies Duquet’s confidence: the living forest is imagined as an available storehouse, while the damage and waste remain in the place of extraction.

The concept therefore links family ambition, global trade, colonial land use, and ecological transformation. The forest’s capacity to regenerate is real within the story, but it does not vindicate the claim that forests are inexhaustible. New trees can grow while a woodland’s species, uses, and relations with the people who depend on it have been irreversibly changed; in that distinction, the novel places its critique of endless-resource thinking.