22 OUR ISLAND STORY

The population of Isle St. Jean at the end of the French period of occupation has been variously stated. By a writer who lived on the Island shortly after the British took posses- sion, it was estimated to be ten thousand. Another local historian stated that it was no more than four thousand. When Captain

Holland surveyed the country a few years after the tragedy ‘— of the expulsion of the French in 1755, he found that there

remained “only thirty families, all extremely poor, living in huts in the woods.” As many as ten thousand eight hundred and eighty-five acres of land had been cleared by the French. But the cleared land was “so much overgrown with brush and small. wood, that it would be extremely difficult to make it fit for the plough. All the houses of the villages were in ruins. There remained three hundred and fifty-two detached houses; but “very few were fit for anything, and by no means tenable.”

The early French settlers were admirable pioneers. They were, it is stated, “hardy, laborious, frugal,—-—capable of turning their hands to any kind of farm work, light-hearted and con- tented with their lot.” Their harvests of wheat were reported “equal to any seen in France, Spain or Italy.” Although secluded and laborious, life in those days on Isle St. Jean was not wholly barren of comforts and enjoyments. The fertile land the people cleared and tilled was their own. The sea at the door swarmed with fish, and the forest outside their farms, abounded in game. So, apart from the years in which their crops were ravaged by mice and grasshoppers, they liV ed prosperously. ‘

The reasons why the French people living on Isle St. ~Jean were deported after the fall of Louisburg in 1758, were clearly stated by General Amherst in the course of a letter to General Whitmore, his successor in command of the fortress and the governorship of the Isles Royale and St. Jean. In the course of his instructions to General Whitmore, General Amherst wrote: “I would have the settlements in the different parts of this Island absolutely destroyed. It may be done in a quiet way: but pray let them be entirely demolished, and for these reasons—that in the flourishing state this Island was growing to, many years would not have passed before the inhabitants