New England is a changing forest region whose history in the novel links colonial law and commerce to settlement, Indigenous dispossession, and the depletion of old-growth woods. It first appears as a resource-rich frontier imagined by traders and timber merchants; over generations, roads, farms, mills, and logging networks remake that landscape. Its changing forests expose the distance between the promise of inexhaustible wealth and the environmental and human costs of extraction.

Forest, settlement, and competing claims

The forest is not simply unoccupied space awaiting improvement. In New France, Monsieur Trépagny explains a land-allocation system in which long strips running from river to forest provide settlers with fertile fields, flood-safe ground, and timber. His argument makes forest clearance part of both settlement and property-making. Later, around Wobik, René Sel cuts firewood and makes potash as farms spread through the woods. Mari, known for healing, mourns the loss of woodland places where medicinal plants once grew. Their differing responses make visible what a celebratory account of agricultural progress leaves out: the transformation of the forest also removes places and resources important to Mi’kmaq life.

That conflict also concerns who may define ownership. In the dispute over René Sel’s property, Démon Meillard invokes a notarized title and a sale recorded in Captain Bouchard’s ledger to deny the claims of René’s Mi’kmaq children. The official instruments of ownership do not settle the moral or familial question; instead, their force is used to dismiss competing claims. Elsewhere, Sosep tells his community that the French king has given their lands to the British, although the land is not the French king’s to give. Such scenes place New England’s forest economy within a larger colonial contest over territory, where law and imperial authority can ratify possession while obscuring Indigenous belonging.

Timber wealth and colonial politics

For Charles Duquet, the forest seems to solve the instability of the fur trade. Watching beaver pelts accumulate and markets swing between surplus and scarcity, he rejects animals and other living resources as unreliable foundations for lasting wealth. He instead imagines timber as a commodity Europe needs and the colonies possess in apparent abundance: a source of ships, houses, and fuel, with profits he expects to endure. He intends to use fur trading to build capital before turning to timber, and briefly proposes that the Trépagny brothers join him in that future enterprise. The plan rests on a powerful assumption—that the forest can replace what is taken and supply wealth indefinitely.

But timber commerce is shaped by political restrictions as well as resource availability. In Amsterdam, Duquet learns from Benton Dred-Peacock that colonial merchants resent the Royal Board of Trade’s rules governing timber for the Royal Navy and the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which constrain trade. The rules make forests a point of conflict between imperial authority and colonial business interests. The John Frost–William Leighton trespass case makes that conflict concrete: after the Crown grants Ralph Gulston a mast-procurement license for Maine lands that belonged to the Crown in 1691, Leighton cuts pines in the winter of 1733–34. By then, however, John Frost holds title to the land. When Frost sues Leighton in spring 1734, the court finds for Frost. The case turns on the collision between an old royal claim and a later private title, demonstrating that control of timber depends on contested rules of land and jurisdiction, not merely on the presence of trees.

A region of war and expansion

New England’s forests also shelter people and shape conflict. One account describes Scots-descended settlers in New Hampshire as clannish, tough, and deeply familiar with the country; their knowledge of ridges and watercourses makes the forest both refuge and route. Dud McBogle and his family belong to this world. At the coast, ongoing war and raids push settlements toward the tidewater margins, where small shipyards serve a region bound to maritime trade. Charles Duke establishes a large house at Penobscot Bay, near the river’s outlet to the Atlantic, and values the area in part for its mast-pine associations. The house’s business room, dominated by a pine table made from a single slab four feet wide, gives the forest a place inside the machinery of trade and family enterprise.

Imperial and colonial pressures extend beyond local settlement. A French missionary warns a governor that English forces press on New France from several directions and that the Mi’kmaq are repeatedly called upon to fight despite their diminished numbers. He argues that they suffer as their country is taken and their lives altered by colonial goods and coercive practices. Later, discussion of the colonial snake cartoon “Join, or Die” reveals a growing division of opinion within Duke & Sons: older French allegiances coexist uneasily with the ambitions of American-born generations. The forest regulations imposed by the Crown are identified as one source of the wedge between colonists and England. New England’s woods thus belong not only to a commercial frontier but to a contested political landscape.

From old growth to industrial damage

The novel renders forest loss as a gradual change in the texture of everyday life. Around the Penobscot settlement, trees fall and tracks widen from a few trails to networks of roads. Muddy routes turn to choking dust in summer. Logging companies and settlers strip the bay’s banks and move upriver; fields replace woods, while linked stumps form barriers for livestock and houses gather behind fences. The Charles Duquet house, still surrounded by uncut forest, stands apart as a relic of the earlier wooden world. Its isolation measures the surrounding transformation: the old forest has not vanished everywhere at once, but has become increasingly exceptional.

The later effects reach beyond the cleared ground. In New England, men cut trees, haul them to rivers, and feed mills that saw day and night. The resulting glut of lumber encourages new settlement and an unprecedented construction boom. When Dieter Breitsprecher prepares to visit George Perkins Marsh, he is interested in the effects of a century of tree-felling for potash and pearl ash. Years later, Charley Breitsprecher describes northern New England as mountains stripped and scarred by railroads and erosion, with logging slash, charred logs, stumps, and washed-out roads. Rivers carry silt, summer fires recur, and the log drives deliver only small sticks to pulp mills and pressed-wood manufacturers. This later description reverses the early promise of limitless timber: the forest has become not a permanent supply but a damaged landscape whose industrial output is diminishing.

Narrative significance

New England’s history connects the novel’s family and business plots to a larger environmental chronology. A merchant’s faith in forests as enduring capital becomes an expanding system of land claims, transport, settlement, and industrial use. At the same time, Mari’s grief for vanished plant habitats and Sosep’s warning that the land was once theirs preserve perspectives that commercial accounts marginalize. The region’s forests are therefore both material resources and witnesses to unequal change: roads and mills register economic growth, while lost woodland knowledge, disputed ownership, erosion, silt, and recurring fires register its costs.