LeNormant [de Mézy], King’s scrivener, being transported to the top of the river of port Lajoie, accompanied by Maitre Michel Galand, to examine masts that can be extracted from this place in the King’s service, arrived in the portage between the end of this river and the havre a I'anguille (i.e. Savage Harbour) on the north coast of this island where the Company of the Comte de St. Pierre had previously had a number cut,” and having cut a dozen living trees of different sizes, from .9 to 17 and 78 inches in diameter, without selection, we found them to be healthy, well grown and resinous, of a fine and tight grain, very supp/e, although some full of knots at 30 or 35 feet from the large end, general/y straight and bearing their proportions, that is their length in feet at least three times the diameter in inches, and the small end two-thirds the width of the large, all done in the presence of Charles Pinet and Francois Paris, Acadians and charpentiers”.

In the November letter Pensens also added that Commissaire Mézy was drawing up a contract for cutting the masts and that Mézy would report separately on this. He then noted that Governor Sainte-Ovide had given him orders to assist the contractors in any way that he could, including providing soldiers from the Port La-Joie garrison. The cutting was to be done in the coming winter and he was now awaiting the ending of a stretch of poor weather so that he and ten additional soldiers assigned to the cutting could leave Louisbourg for lle Saint-Jean. At the end of the letter he added that to carry out his duty as commandant he needed both a shallop74 and a twenty ton vessel on the island and requested that these be provided out of the royal accounts — among the reasons he gives is to enable him to assist the contractor in transporting the soldiers and their supplies to the logging sites.

72 See Endnote 1 and Figure 3-1 for my attempt to locate the site of

this inspection.

73 From White (1999) (Vol. 2, pp. 1311 & 1481) it appears that these two men were young brothers-in-law. Charles Pinet had been born sometime between 1701 and 1703 and had married the sister of Francois Testard dit Paris c. 1723. Francois had been born at Port- Royal in November 1708 which would make him 18 at the time of the inspection. I note from a map of the Hillsborough River made in 1730 (NAC, map no. 49768) that a ‘habitation de Paris' was almost directly across the river from the logging site.

7‘ A shallop (chaloupe in French), according to Oxford (1971). was a large heavy boat fitted with one or more masts and carrying fore-and- aft or lug sails.

168

The letter of Mézy to which Pensens refers appears to be that written on 11 December 172775 in which Mézy says that, in response to the minister’s letter of the previous June, he encloses the new contract (no longer extant), with ’Maitre’ LeComte, now designated ”charpentier, constructeur et mateur” (i.e. builder and mast- maker are now added to his previous skills). He says that it is not possible to send ’the King’s ship' into the river of Port La-Joie to the embarkation point as it is too shallow, and that he has thus added a clause requiring LeComte to deliver the masts to Louisbourg at his own expense. He also adds that LeComte's estimates are in accordance with the minister’s price list.

It was presumably because he considered that the requirements stipulated in the minister’s letter of 10 June 1727 had been fulfilled, that Mézy authorised the cutting to go ahead that winter — despite the fact that the Minister did not give the nod until the following June”.

The next records that we have that mention the enterprise are a full year later in October 1728. In the meantime in fulfilment of the contract Louis LeComte had had the mast trees cut near the top of the Hillsborough River and had transported them to Port La-Joie and thence to Louisbourg (we are not told how) where a good number of them were loaded onto the King’s flate the Dromadaire.77 However, the letters to the minister from Pensens and Mézy that accompanied the masts back to France reveal that neither official was entirely confident in the quality of the shipment. Pensens’ letter of 31 October 172878 is full of contradictions on the quality of the masts:

75 Mézy, 1727: 11 December. "3 Maurepas, 1728: 23 June. to Mézy. In fact the minister in his annual correspondence with the governor in 1728 (Maurepas, 1728: 18 June, to Saint-Ovide) was more concerned that ten additional soldiers had been posted to Port La-Joie for the mast operation without his permission, to which Saint-Ovide later replied (Saint- Ovide, 1728: 3 November) that he was only fulfilling the request of Mézy. and that the ten soldiers had anyway returned to Louisbourg at the beginning of May.

77 A flute was a cargo sailing vessel of heavy build with a flat bottom; it usually had a large port-hole in the stem to enable the loading of large pieces of timber (Proulx, 1984, p. 18). See also Eccles (1964) (pp. 216-17) on the problems in obtaining and using flates; and Albion (1926) (pp. 237-38) for the building and use of ‘mast ships' in the English colonies.

7“ Pensens, 1728: 31 October.