apparently the most destructive in the island’s history, and one or both of them burned through the area around Savage Harbour. We know this from Captain Samuel Holland’s interim report of March 1765 on his mapping survey of the whole island:

About 24 years since (in his final report in October he says ’twenty six years since’) there happened a fire that destroyed the greatest part of the timber: the course it ran was from the Bay of Fortune to St. Peters, from thence to the North East River, along Savage Bay, Tracady Harbour and very near to Racico which in many places affords a very extraordinary appearance, particularly at the Carrying Place betwixt the North East Rivers and Tracady, where the burnt timber looks at a distance like lofty pillars or columnes.111

And when it came to Holland listing the best sites on the island for mast timber he named only three places: ”Three Rivers, Bear Harbour and Malpac”“2. The Savage Harbour pines — ”without an equal on the island" according to Pensens113 — were clearly no more, or at most were among those trees visible from a distance as blackened ”lofty pillars or columnes”.

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“2 Holland 1765: 4 March [as above].

“3 Pensens 1727: 20 November.

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