Chaleur and the Saguenay to the Richelieu River. The reports produced on the mast resource were generally favourable. However, the work of the survey was undermined when the masts that had been cut were considered so defective that they were not even embarked on a large flUte sent out to ship them to France in 1727. While the governor and intendant at Quebec tried to shift the blame from the trees to those doing the cutting, the Count of Maurepas, under pressure from the treasury to cut his budget89 and exasperated by the costs involved — ”16 thousand livres in pure loss” — notified the governor in 1728 that ”His Majesty has given no indication that he intends to make other [grants for mast surveys] for a long time to come.”90 And it did indeed prove to be a long time — for apart from the shipment from lle Saint—Jean later that year no further searches in New France for masts for the French navy were carried out by the Marine up to the loss of Canada in 1763.91

Since the British after 1763 were to successfully obtain good quality masts for their navy for over a century from many of the same areas available to the French, it would seem that the reason for the failure of the French government to exploit the forests of New France cannot in the end have been the quality of the timber available.92 Examination of the evidence rather indicates that it had more to do with what the Marine perceived as a high cost of the operations in combination with their failure to deliver a reliable product.93

The cost of such enterprises was indeed high. Though the timber itself was free — it was already considered to be the property of the king — the costs of both its harvesting and transport were high because in most of the areas where the tall pines grew, there was no infrastructure of personnel and equipment to carry out the logging operations. This is especially true of lle Saint-Jean which, as already noted, a census carried out in 1728 indicates had a population of only 297 persons (plus 125 fishermen).94 Thus on the

”9 Bamford 1956, p. 125.

9° Bamford 1956, p. 124. The date of the minister's letter was 14 May 1728 (Fauteux 1927, p. 210, citing AC, Série B, Vol. 52-1, p. 56).

9‘ Bamford1956, p. 125. 9" Bamford1956, p. 128. 9’ Bamford 1956, pp.125-26.

9‘ Clark 1959, p. 28.

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island, as at many of the mast sites elsewhere in New France, all stages of the enterprise had to be funded by the Marine from scratch — from the initial forest survey, to the felling and preparation of the trees, the transport to the embarkation point, and the loading onto ships.95 In the lle Saint-Jean operation, as we have seen, Pensens had made a request for both a shallop and a twenty ton vessel in part to support the masting operation, and he had also said that he would have to cut trails to get at trees farther from the water's edge. On top of this, labour costs in New France“, and especially at Louisbourg‘”, were high in comparison with the home country, due to the small size of the skilled work force in the colony. And even the soldiers of the Port La-Joie garrison who had been put to work in the woods would have had to be paid by the contractor at the going rates.98

Added to this was the cost of shipping the masts across the Atlantic.99 This often meant the costly chartering of merchant ships or assigning special naval flares — such as was the Dromadaire for the he Saint-Jean shipment in 1728. Such shipping was not always readily available‘°°, which meant that the masts might lay about in the open air for several years before they could be shipped — as seems to have happened to the 300 logs belonging to the Company of lle Saint-Jean, as well as Sieur Fleury’s masts at La Rochelle.

However, given these costs (though they were in fact no higher than what would have had to be spent in obtaining masts in the Baltic market)‘°‘, the Marine might have been satisfied if the financial outlay had resulted in the delivery of a reliable product. But the maxim ’you get what you pay for’ frequently did not apply to the Marine's

95 See Bamford (1956) (p. 120) for some of the costs.

9° Bamford 1956, p. 120.

9’ Miquelon 1987, p. 115.

9“ Adams 1978, p. 95.

9" Bamford 1956, pp. 121—22.

1°° See Eccles (1964) (pp. 216-17) on the problems in obtaining and using flL‘Ites to transport masts.

10‘ For example, the amount allocated in the 16905 by the department of the Marine to the Canadian masting enterprise was 8000 livres a

year — a sum that in the Riga market would have bought only six or seven of the larger masts (Bamford 1956, p. 119).