The Crown

The Crown is the British sovereign authority whose grants and timber rules help turn colonial forests into contested property and commercial resource. In the novel, its reach is material as well as political: it licenses pine cutting for the Royal Navy, underwrites a system of land grants that enriches insiders, and stands behind a transfer of Indigenous territory that Indigenous characters deny the monarch has any right to make.

Authority Over Land and Timber

In 1730, the Crown granted Ralph Gulston a five-year mast-procurement license. It authorized him to enter Maine lands considered public because they belonged to the Crown in 1691 and cut mast pines for the Royal Navy. The license joined imperial naval demand to a claim of sovereign ownership: trees on land classified as Crown property could be taken for the ships’ stores, even where ownership had since changed.

That change is central to the Frost–Leighton trespass dispute. Gulston hired the colonial logger William Leighton, who cut and hauled the pines through the winter of 1733–34 without objection. By spring, however, John Frost held title to the land. The Royal Surveyor General disregarded Frost’s title, and Frost sued Leighton for trespass; the court found for Frost. The case exposes a gap between the Crown’s earlier classification and the property rights that had accrued in the intervening years, while showing how an imperial timber license could reach into land now claimed by a private owner.

Grants, Patronage, and Colonial Resistance

The Crown’s land-grant system is described as a source of private accumulation as well as public authority. In a discussion of the political order, the Crown’s men are said to have granted land while reserving adjoining five-hundred-acre corners for themselves. By accumulating these parcels, officials and allied landholders built control over thousands of heavily timbered acres. The practice ties political access to forest wealth: the grant is not merely a boundary on a map, but a means of converting office and influence into concentrated ownership.

Colonial resentment also gathers around restrictions on timber and trade. The Royal Board of Trade set rules governing the cutting of forests and the supply of masts, bowsprits, yards, pitch, and tar to the Royal Navy; the Acts of Trade and Navigation constrained colonial commerce. In conversation about the Crown’s determination to shackle timber interests, Jan Duke argues that the company must remain cordial with all factions while watching new Acts and testing the political climate. The Crown’s authority is therefore met not only with open criticism but with evasion, strategic accommodation, and efforts to preserve commercial room to maneuver.

Competing Claims to Territory

The novel places the Crown’s territorial claims beside Mi’kmaq understandings of belonging and sovereignty. When Sosep tells Theotiste that the French king has given their lands to the British, Theotiste rejects the premise: the land, she insists, is theirs, not the French king’s to give. The exchange makes a change of imperial possession legible as a decision made by European rulers, while exposing its lack of legitimacy from the perspective of the people whose country is being transferred.

That conflict is reinforced by Père Crème’s account of Mi’kmaq loss. He tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq love the country being taken from them and that their children are being changed by colonial goods and forceful ways. His defense contrasts the people’s longstanding life on their land with the strategic language of empire, which treats territory as vital access and a possession to be defended. The Crown’s authority belongs to this broader contest over who can name a territory, transfer it, and decide what its inhabitants may do there.

The Human and Ecological Cost of Rule

The consequences of colonial expansion are rendered in changes to everyday life and the landscape. Settlers clear forests, establish farms, and bring animals and plants that displace existing sources of food. Sosep describes the Wenuj as taking more land, while their beasts damage food supplies, their boats and nets take fish, and introduced plants overrun local ones. He warns that Mi’kmaq people are few beside the newcomers and urges them to keep their own world alive in memory and practice—a world in which plants, animals, birds, and people are persons who help one another.

The Crown does not personally carry out each act of settlement or extraction in these episodes. Its significance lies in the political order that authorizes transfers, regulates timber, and enables colonial claims to operate across generations. Against that order, the novel repeatedly sets Indigenous testimony, private titles, and local resistance: forms of belonging and law that do not disappear simply because an imperial authority declares land public, grants it away, or treats its forests as supplies for the navy.