Royal Board of Trade

The Royal Board of Trade is the British authority whose restrictions on colonial trade and timber make forests a contested matter of imperial policy, private profit, and local landholding. In the novel, its regulations govern the supply of masts and other naval stores, while their enforcement exposes a widening conflict between the Crown’s claims and colonial interests.

Timber Rules and Imperial Supply

The Board sets stringent rules for cutting the dense forests of the colonies and for supplying the Royal Navy with ships’ stores. These include masts, bowsprits, yards, pitch, and tar: forest products treated not simply as local commodities but as materials central to imperial naval power. The regulations press on both the quantities that may be cut and the procedures for supplying them, making the Board a direct presence in the work and trade of the woods.

The system’s reach is visible in the dispute over pine trees cut for the Navy. In 1730, the Crown granted Ralph Gulston a five-year mast-procurement license allowing him to enter Maine lands classed as public land in 1691 and cut mast pines. Gulston hired William Leighton, who felled and hauled the trees during the winter of 1733–34. But title to the land had since passed to John Frost of Berwick, Maine. The Royal Surveyor General ignored Frost’s title; when spring came, Frost sued Leighton for trespass, and the court found for Frost. The case lays bare the gap between an imperial timber license and a later private claim recognized by a colonial court.

Trade Restrictions and Colonial Resentment

The Board’s forestry rules form part of a broader system of imperial trade control. In Amsterdam, Benton Dred-Peacock tells Charles Duquet that many colonists resent English rule and the taxes supporting England’s wars. He singles out the Board’s restrictions on forest cutting and the Acts of Trade and Navigation, which constrain colonial trade more generally. In his account, the Board’s rules limit not only timber extraction but also the colonists’ ability to make and sell the goods they produce.

The restrictions create friction around access to land as well as commercial freedom. Dred-Peacock warns that Jonathan Bridger, the newly appointed royal mast contractor, may cause trouble over township sales and the cutting of mast trees. He suggests Bridger may be amenable to careful persuasion, but the underlying conflict remains: imperial officials treat timber as a regulated resource for the Navy, while colonial entrepreneurs seek room to trade and profit on their own terms.

Forest, Property, and Colonial Power

The novel sets these imperial claims alongside competing understandings of land. Monsieur Trépagny defends the seigneurial arrangement of New France, in which long strips run from river to forest, giving settlers fertile soil, safer high ground, and timber. He casts clearing and subduing the forest as necessary to settlement. Charles Duquet, meanwhile, comes to regard the forest as an apparently inexhaustible commodity capable of producing lasting wealth, and considers adapting the mast trade into a timber business.

For Mi’kmaq characters, however, the transformation of woodland into farms, livestock pasture, and commercial timber means the loss of country and livelihood. The Crown’s grant of Mi’kmaq lands to the British is rejected by Theotiste on the grounds that the French king had no right to give away land that was not his. The novel thus places the Board’s regulatory authority within a larger colonial order that treats forests and territory as resources to allocate, while Indigenous claims and relationships to the land are repeatedly displaced or denied.

Narrative Significance

The Royal Board of Trade is not depicted through a sustained portrait of its officials; its significance emerges through the rules, licenses, and conflicts that reach the characters. Its regulations connect the local act of cutting a tree to naval procurement, imperial trade policy, litigation, and the colonial pursuit of wealth. The Frost–Leighton case and the complaints voiced by colonial merchants show that control of timber is also a contest over jurisdiction and whose property claims the law will recognize.

That contest carries an environmental consequence. Duquet’s confidence that forests can supply timber indefinitely echoes the broader colonial assumption that woodland exists to be subdued and exploited. Against it, the novel registers the clearing of forests as damage to Mi’kmaq food sources, plant life, and customary freedom of movement. The Board’s role therefore belongs to a wider story of how imperial rules make forests governable and profitable, even as the resulting claims of ownership and progress conceal the costs imposed on both land and its original inhabitants.