The masts are of very good quality. They are not 
     
     perfect on account of many knots, which however 
     
     I assure you are not bad. The small masts and 
     
     spars are good, if they are found to be so at 
     
     Rochefort, as lbelieve [they will be], it will be easy 
     
     to obtain from lle St-Jean, the amount wanted. .. 
     
     If the masts are not as fine as they ought to be, [it 
     
     is because] Sieur LeComte has not been able to 
     
     get others because of the difficulty of getting them 
     
     out of the woods due to several impassable bogs 
     
    
   
   
    
     — adding, that when tracks are cut into the sites, 
     
     which he has already begun to do, they will in 
     
     future be able to get out better material from 
     
     farther inland. It is clear from his apologies-in- 
     
     advance that he is trying to put the best face on 
     
     defective materials. 
     
    
   
   
    
     The letter of Commissaire Mézy79 reveals even less 
     
     confidence. He says that fifty-six of the masts 
     
     were left on lle Saint-JeanBo (Pensens in his letter 
     
     had said forty) and that only a third of those 
     
     brought to Louisbourg had been loaded onto the 
     
     Dromadaire — partly due to lack of space on the 
     
     ship but also he says that some of them were not 
     
     embarked because they were ’very knotty'. 
     
     However, he then goes on to cite the testimony of 
     
     four captains (presumably of merchant ships then 
     
     at Louisbourg) who had been given five of the 
     
     masts and had found them very good. They have 
     
     told him, he says, that ”knots in red pine are part 
     
     of the body of the wood and do not weaken the 
     
     masts”. He ends by saying that even if there are 
     
     flaws in the wood, the low cost (6664 livres 
     
     including the cost of 340 pine planks“) as well as 
     
     their usefulness should be given consideration. 
     
    
   
   
    
     The records in the Marine indicate that the 
     
     Dromadaire arrived at Rochefort with the mast 
     
     shipment some time before 18 January 1729.82 
     
     Pensens’ and Mézy’s excuses were to carry little 
     
     weight in the dockyards — the mast inspectors 
     
     were not so willing to overlook what they viewed 
     
     as serious flaws. On 8 March83 Intendant 
     
    
   
   
    
     79 Mézy, 1728: 14 November. 
     
    
   
   
    
     8° Pensens said that the forty masts were left due to lack of sufficient 
     
     transport (Pensens 1728: 31 October). 
     
    
   
   
    
     8‘ The 340 planks and boards that were part of the shipment are 
     
    
   
   
    
     referred to by Beauharnois 1729: 8 March, and by Maurepas 1729: 
     
     29 March, to Beauharnois. 
     
    
   
   
    
     82 Maurepas 1729: 18 January, to Beauharnois. 
     
    
   
   
    
     “3 Beauharnois 1729: 8 March. 
     
    
   
   
    
     169 
     
    
   
   
    
     Beauharnois at Rochefort sent the minister the 
     
     report on the shipment: the masts, including the 
     
     small masts and spars, were found to be ”full of 
     
     knots and the wood very dry” — they thus ”will 
     
     not be of much use” in the dockyards. Over two 
     
     months later, on 22 May, the Minister wrote the 
     
     final letters on the matter to Louisbourg“: he 
     
     requested that Mézy, as he put it, ”refrain from 
     
     sending any more such masts". When this letter 
     
     arrived at Louisbourg there must have been a great 
     
     deal of disappointment for all of the local officials, 
     
     and especially Jacques de Pensens, who had 
     
     devoted considerable time and effort to the 
     
     enterprise. 
     
    
   
   
    
     WHY DID THE ENTERPRISE FAIL? 
     
    
   
   
    
     The immediate cause of the failure of the operation 
     
     was that the quality of the masts in the 1728 
     
     shipment did not meet the high standards of the 
     
     naval inspectors at Rochefort. The rejection of 
     
     this single shipment, however, does not explain 
     
     why the Marine failed to carry out any further 
     
     surveys of the mast resource of ile Saint-Jean. 
     
    
   
   
    
     To understand the reason for this we have to put 
     
     the island operation into a wider context. The 
     
     1728 shipment came at the tail-end of over sixty 
     
     years of surveys and trials of Canadian masts by 
     
     the department of the Marine that had begun in 
     
     the 16605 when Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis 
     
     XIV's chief minister, had dispatched inspectors to 
     
     survey Canadian forests“. Over the years almost 
     
     all of these surveys and shipments had ended in 
     
     disappointment for the Marine — with no masts or 
     
     sub-standard masts being delivered — and always 
     
     at what the Marine considered to be a high cost.86 
     
    
   
   
    
     Especially relevant to the lle Saint—Jean operation 
     
     is the fact that it had the misfortune to follow 
     
     directly upon one of the more costly and 
     
     disappointing of these searches“, the one referred 
     
     to obliquely by the minister in his 1726 letter to 
     
     Mézy and Saint-Ovide“: for three years, from 
     
     1724 to 1727, a survey party had visited forests 
     
     along the St. Lawrence all the way from the Bay of 
     
    
   
   
    
     3“ Maurepas 1729: 22 May, to Mézy; 22 May, to Pensens. 
     
    
   
   
    
     “5 Bamford 1955, p. 115. 
     
    
   
   
    
     86 
     
    
   
   
    
     Bamford 1956, pp. 113-28. 
     
    
   
   
    
     “7 Fauteux 1927, pp. 200-210; Bamford 1956. pp. 123—124. 
     
    
   
   
    
     88 Maurepas 1726: 28 May, to Saint-Ovide and Mézy.