1 PROMOTING THE SETTLEMENT IN 1624 OF WHAT are now the Maritime Provinces and the Gaspé Peninsula, Sir William Alexander promised gentlemen a life with "all sorts of objects to satisfie the varietie of desires. I might speake of the sport that may bee had by Hunting, Hawking, Fishing, and Fowling". As commodities of "forreine Traffique", the targets of such sport offered merchants "a great benefit" they could claim "without dispossessing others" because the existing inhabitants did not "appropriate to themselves any peculiar ground, but . . . runne like beasts after beasts, seeking no soile, but onely after their prey".1 Hunting was at once an activity of sport, profit and subsistence – a mark of social rank, an object of commercial exchange and the meanest form of production. Later, it became a magnet for tourists as well. Representations of hunting were central to the economic and cultural construction of empire in the Maritimes.
2 Who hunted, how and for what purpose invested hunting with divergent utilitarian and ritualistic meanings.2 The former emphasized the creation of use or exchange value from a physical environment of exploitable resources. The latter emphasized the symbolic where "nature" served as a special moral or aesthetic realm. As part of his stage theory, Adam Smith posited an unproblematic progression from the former to the latter: "hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity".3 Hunting was likewise important to the economic thinking of British travellers to the Maritimes. But rather than being deployed only sequentially and to reflect progress, utilitarian and ritualistic meanings of hunting often co-existed and exposed considerable anxiety about the economic development travellers otherwise promoted. Moreover, rather than moving directly from necessity to amusement, representations of hunting passed through an intermediate phase as a foil for the values of an agrarian settler society. The relationship between representations of hunting and economic development in a colonial setting was as close as Smith suggested, but not as straightforward. Thus, the balance between utility and ritual shifted as travellers reworked persistent themes to reflect concerns about economic change in Britain and the Maritimes’ role in the empire in three distinct, if overlapping, phases: the mercantilist phase, during the second half of the 18th century, centered on the fur trade; the agrarian phase, from roughly the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the 1840s, centered on the incompatibility of hunting with settlement; and the romance phase, which persisted until the onset of more commercialized tourism in the 1870s, centered on sport.
3 Aspects of each are familiar to Canadian historians who have long studied hunting in the fur trade while more recent work on tourism, leisure and the environment has attended to its other forms. The focus, however, has been identities more often than economics,4 other regions or periods after representations of hunting in the Maritimes had already run the gamut from fur trade to tourist attraction.5 Examining representations of all types of hunting and hunters across an extended period exposes their complex relationship to economic development while the use of British travel texts highlights their imperial dimension and comparisons with economic development in Britain itself. Despite the particularities of specific texts and their authors, representations of hunting within each phase were remarkably consistent. The absence of significant variation or dissent reinforced the power of representations of hunting to shape debates about the economic values and behaviour required for colonial development. For instance, the failure to protect almost six-sevenths of the land granted to the Mi’kmaq along the Miramichi reflected, in part, prevailing views of subsistence hunting.6 Such patterns of land use and the economic values they reflected were not merely "natural" or the inevitable byproduct of European settlement, but were promoted in the context of thinking about alternative economic lifeways in Britain and the region.7
Mercantilist
4 The first, mercantilist phase – rooted in the imperial struggles of the third quarter of the 18th century – reflected debates about how to integrate a sparsely settled region into an expanding commercial empire. Although much of it came under nominal British control by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), only when the Maritimes assumed greater strategic significance did it become the subject of about two dozen "Accounts" and "Descriptions". Four imperial events – the capture by New England forces of French Louisbourg in 1746 and in 1758, the founding of Halifax in 1749 and the American Revolution – prompted most of these accounts of the region. Written by New Englanders and Britons closely associated with the region’s trade and administration, they assessed its economic and strategic value in ways that favoured their own commercial and political interests. Beginning in the 1770s, a few visitors also began to write about the region’s potential for agricultural settlement, although its non-Aboriginal population remained geographically confined and probably never exceeded 20,000 before the American Revolution. While reflecting particular imperial circumstances and interests, these accounts were united in their mercantilist outlook. Urging retention of the island after the War of the Austrian Succession, one compiler of Cape Breton accounts emphasized "that Commerce by which alone they [colonies] are profitable to their Mother Country". Prosperity was a function of state power generated by a favourable balance of trade to which colonies contributed by exchanging their raw materials for British manufactured goods.8
5 Representations of nature, people and hunting reflected the mercantilist equation of national power with regulated trade. The physical environment was related in starkly utilitarian terms as a bundle of potential commodities and the strategic locations, navigable rivers and safe harbours by which they could be exported. Thus, wild animals, said to "abound", appeared on lists of resources as protein or pelts, adding to the region’s value to Britain.9 Extracting such resources required local labour since Britons were to be employed at home by colonial trade, not by emigrating to the colonies. Hence interest in the existing population focused almost exclusively on how it might contribute to that trade.10 Betraying little ethnographic curiosity, John Robinson and Thomas Rispin described Native males in Nova Scotia as "very expert in hunting", but unfortunately "they cannot by any means be prevailed on to assist in any sort of labour". Hunting, however, still secured them a role in imperial trade and thus a place in mercantilist accounts. "That we may go on regularly in viewing the produce of the country, and from hence form a judgement of its value", S. Hollingsworth deemed it "necessary to say something of the natives" before his chapter on "Beasts", that is, "before we mention the grand object of their pursuit, the fur trade". Hunting oriented to commerce made Native men "serviceable to the colony" and thus an item on Hollingsworth’s list of its resources.11
6 Deemed "rich and profitable", the fur trade joined fishing, mining, agriculture and the production of naval stores in a catalogue of the region’s wares. Such colonial activities were typically presented as capable of being carried on simultaneously, not as potential competitors. Even touring agriculturalists did not envisage substantial British emigration.12 Others, often only familiar with coastal Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, readily admitted that much land was unfit for farming and therefore available to sustain a fur trade. Surveyor Samuel Holland judged a great deal of Cape Breton "Savage or Hunting Country as it is fit for nothing else", but it remained of "great Value, by affording a Trade in Furs, with the Indians in Return for English Manufactures".13 As both producers and consumers, the Mi’kmaq were serviceable to the empire.
7 Yet by the time these accounts were published, the Scottish Enlightenment had popularized notions of hunting as a rude stage of civilization to be superseded by shepherding, agriculture and commerce, rather than merely one form of production among many.14 Such a teleology rendered obsolete Samuel Vetch’s early-18th-century colonization scheme for Acadia whereby Scottish immigrants, once they had been trained by Native hunters, would supply local labour for the fur trade.15 By mid-century, the idea of Europeans adopting Aboriginal hunting practices had vanished. Thomas Curtis may have been induced to engage with a St. John’s Island merchant-proprietor by stories of "valuable fur trading" and "game which were free for any one" and plentiful enough "to serve his family without loss of time", but published accounts by those of higher social status associated utilitarian hunting by Europeans with poverty.16
8 The fur trade was valuable, but given hunting’s place in the scale of development, it was not to be encouraged by the state for fear of enticing Europeans into it. Citing the French experience in Canada, Hollingsworth declared that relying on the fur trade would ruin Nova Scotia even if it generated considerable profit. People would "follow the chace with eagerness, in the pursuit of furs" rather than develop the colony’s other resources. Thus, "natives are the properest persons to be employed" in the fur trade while colonists concentrated on "more useful labour".17 The fur trade gave Native hunters a niche in the imperial economy, not only because of their expertise but because hunting, even if profitable, was debilitating. The social division of labour in the region had been "racialized".
9 Accepting stage theories that explained societies by their primary means of production also meant that observers portrayed Native communities as archetypical hunting societies whose characteristics thereby revealed the deleterious effects of hunting. Thus, it was Native peoples’ reliance on hunting that left them "frequently shifting" and "perpetually wandering" – implying aimlessness rather than seasonal adaptation to varied resources. Moreover, with "no settled place of abode", they lacked any sense of private property. Finally, pre-occupied by hunting, Native peoples had no time for "cultivation, or any of those other arts, which are so necessary to the ease of man in an improved state, if not to his very existence".18
10 Regional observers also insisted that the means of production determined economic values. Since beasts, fowl and fish were "that Sort of Provisions which may be got without any Industry", Native males were rendered "lazy" or "indolent" and lacked the foresight and self-discipline needed to accumulate a surplus.19 In the absence of such values, "they live miserably, and suffer great Want, even in the Midst of Plenty, rather than be at the Pains" necessary to accumulate beyond immediate need. Hunting neither produced material security and social progress for its practitioners nor maximized the exports and imports that made colonies valuable. Anticipating Adam Smith, one anonymous traveller was convinced that "if these People would till and sow their Land, feed their Cattle, and raise Poultry; Fishing, Fowling and Hunting might be used only for Exercise and Diversion" instead of subsistence. In the fur trade, British travellers found Native peoples a constructive, if subordinate, role. Hunting explained their "inferiority", justified further colonization and increased British trade without engaging Europeans directly in such a problematic activity.20
11 From a mercantilist perspective, discussions of hunting could – and usually did – stop there. But if hunting was an early stage of evolution, representations of the region’s hunters could be used to measure what had been lost as well as gained by economic "progress". Echoing the idealization of "natural" man by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, a British editor of a French missionary account declared that the region’s "Indians" were "what man really is".21 Positive images of non-utilitarian hunting as an expression of their more "authentic" way of life offered a perspective from which to critique commercial society and the mercantilist treatment of hunting it fostered.
12 Thomas Pichon, a former French official who had spied for the British at Fort Beauséjour before moving to London to compose his account, wrote of Native peoples to facilitate trade, but refused, as fellow mercantilists had, to "represent them to you only as part of the productions of the islands [of Saint John and Cape Breton] I have been describing". They were also rational beings whose pre-commercial society embodied classical virtues Europeans no longer practiced. For instance, copious gift-giving in their rituals of thanksgiving was not motivated by vanity, but by the desire to share wealth: "The fruits of a whole year’s chace, that has cost him an infinite deal of fatigue, he frequently distributes among his friends in a single day; and these distributions are made with far greater joy on the part of the donour than the receiver". The accompanying speeches exemplified classical rhetoric, but "whereas the savages bestow their encomiums only upon necessary merit . . . we lavish ours on things the most absurd and ridiculous". For Pichon, as a hunting society, the region’s Native peoples led a more "natural" life and were thus spared the restless jealousy, boundless material ambition, vanity, inequality and selfishness endemic to a commercial one. He concluded that, "bereft of the comforts of life", they were "perhaps the only happy creatures upon earth" – a sentiment shared by the Scottish traveller Patrick M’Roberts.22
13 The fur trade, as the local manifestation of European commerce, threatened that happiness. Thomas Jeffreys, geographer to the Prince of Wales, repeated the standard critique of hunting by Europeans, but joined Pichon in lamenting the replacement of pre-contact Native traditions of sharing and "disinterestedness" with "selfishness in exchange" in the fur trade. Native peoples knew not "those false enjoyments which we purchase with so much pains, and with the loss of that which is solid and real". There was much to admire in colonial hunting societies from the perspective of an imperial centre thought to have exchanged virtue, stoicism and public spiritedness with selfishness, insatible wants and materialism.23 Expressing stock arguments about the virtue and vices of commercial society, Jeffreys and Pichon presented the region’s Native peoples as hunting societies analogous to Europe’s own classical past and thus morally, if not materially, superior to the "artificial" commercial societies they and other observers otherwise promoted for the region.
14 Thus, when a British officer shipwrecked on Cape Breton Island in 1780 offered to pay his Native rescuers for additional assistance, he recorded "an eagerness in their countenances at the sight of the coin, which I had little expected amongst Indians". Anticipating a pre-commercial people for whom money was unlikely to "be any object", he found instead a "mercenary" people adept at commerce. Alarmed rather than pleased, he feared that only Christian virtue restrained them from outright plunder, but conceded that "perhaps it was this very circumstance of their communication with Christians, that had inspired them with that vehement love of money". Coin, the lifeblood of the British Atlantic, was also the serpent in the garden. Even Hollingsworth, perhaps the best practitioner of the mercantilist approach to the region, was not immune to such doubt. Noting Native peoples’ commitment to independence and equality, he thought "their principal abhorrence to a civilized way of life seems to arise from what they observe among the nations that stile them barbarians, whose corruptions, and false ideas of things, they affect to despise; and none more than the respect that is paid to riches which, as they justly remark, are frequently possessed by the most worthless of mankind". It was a troubling concession for a champion of the commercial imperialism that helped to amass such fortunes.24 Reflecting "what man really is" rather than what commerce had made him, hunting sustained alternative yet praiseworthy values threatened by economic development.
15 Such cultural representations jarred with the dominant image of hunting as a debilitating, if potentially useful, economic activity. Focused on the latter, most mercantilist authors eschewed cultural arguments in favour of commerce already common in French fur-trade descriptions – that commerce fostered, rather than undermined, virtue by softening manners and encouraging toleration and peace. Such cultural arguments for commerce had developed precisely to dissolve the civic-humanist tension between wealth and virtue echoed by Pichon and Jeffreys. Arraying commerce and hunting as opposite stages of social evolution, as Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers had done, made it difficult to conceive of hunting as a commercial activity capable of being defended in the same cultural terms as commercial society in Europe.25 Utilitarian arguments about the fur trade and cultural arguments about imagined Native hunting societies were left unreconciled. For Maritime travel narratives of the first, mercantilist phase, hunting furnished objects of commercial value but reliance on it created the antithesis of a commercial society – a benchmark from which to measure material progress and moral declension.
Agrarian
16 No such ambivalence about hunting survived into the second, agrarian phase from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the mid-19th century. Military and government officials, missionaries and other, mostly genteel, visitors participated in debates about emigration and empire by publishing more than 30 travel narratives about the region as a potential home for Britain’s "surplus" population. Post-war dislocation and distress in Britain had spurred emigration as well as new thinking about the colonies as sites of settlement rather than primarily warehouses of raw materials. By observing the region and its inhabitants – who numbered some 400,000 by 1840 – travellers offered advice on how emigrants might realize in the Maritimes the prosperity that had eluded them in Britain. They insisted that "yeoman" agriculture was less precarious and more ennobling than trade in colonial staples such as furs and lumber or wage dependence in Britain. Agriculture, rather than trade, also became the means by which the region’s Aboriginal population of approximately 3,000 was to be made useful to the empire as rapid colonization increasingly disrupted their traditional economic activities. John McGregor, a former colonial merchant turned British trade negotiator and economist, asserted: "For many years after the first French adventurers resorted to Nova Scotia, the cultivation of the soil was neglected for hunting, fishing, and the fur trade". British imperialism had eclipsed "French adventurers" as surely as agricultural settlement would eclipse hunting.26
17 Incompatible with this reconceptualized imperialism, hunting was reconfigured as a negative category defined by its stark contrast to settler agriculture. Earlier criticism of hunting was sharpened and cultural representations all but disappeared as hunting became more a symbol of Native peoples’ failure to assimilate than an early stage of development. Native hunters now played stock roles as indigents and social outcasts who confirmed the economic and moral rectitude of development based on owner-occupier agriculture. They warned readers of the costs of straying from travellers’ advice about how to achieve it. Small wonder, then, that non-Native hunting was under-reported.
18 Despite such economic preoccupations, romantic notions of the sublime and picturesque increasingly informed travel literature beginning in the late-18th century, which only served to confirm hunting’s lowly status.27 Nature was re-imagined as more than a bundle of material resources awaiting human exploit, but travellers revered the rural and pastoral – the cultivated fields, gardens and domestic animals of agricultural settlement – rather than the "wild" or "primeval". Their approach was largely the aesthetics of improvement; space between European settlements was "a desert", "dry and barren wilderness" or, most evocatively, "waste, howling".28 For the missionary John West, the Vale of Sussex "presents to the eye some beautifully picturesque views" as streams "bend their course through some good and well cultivated farms", holding "out every encouragement to increased industry and improvement". West’s view was not obscured by knowledge that it reflected the dispossession of the Native communities he had come to New Brunswick to help: "[I]t was their rendezvous in starting or returning from the chase; but since the woods have been driven of animals, and the soil occupied or taken up by the settlers, they are seldom now seen".29 Romantic aesthetics joined utilitarian economics to excise hunting from view.
19 Romanticism also coloured expectations of those who "worshipped the Great Spirit and hunted the moose-deer" and whose "wise men spoke to them of the ‘happy hunting-grounds’". Despite coinciding with new humanitarian interest in the empire’s subject populations, such romantic promise led mostly to bitter disappointment. Captain William Scarth Moorsom blamed previous travel-writers, historians and American novelists such as James Fenimore Copper for inflating his expectations of "the native children of the forest": "How miserably are all these ideas levelled with the dust, at first sight of the abject beings" he saw loitering in Halifax. Another concluded that "the white man . . . has been in the forest, and the Indian is now a poor, mean spirited, contemptible creature".30 All joined the chorus of voices insisting that the empire’s Aboriginal populations were "dwindling" or "melting away".31 Such terms effaced Native resistance and implied the natural progression from forest to field posited by Adam Smith. Survival therefore entailed the economic activities and values travellers championed for emigrants as well. It was, West asserted, "location or extinction" – a conviction shared by colonial policy-makers. Romantic images of the "noble savage" only made their current "decayed" or "degraded condition" more shocking.32
20 Such acute distress was attributed to the "fact" that "the Indian" still subsisted "wholly upon the product of his gun and fishing-hook".33 Producing no "more than is sufficient for enabling them to maintain a scanty existence", Native peoples no longer contributed to imperial wealth. Thus, their declining population was "a matter of political gratulation rather than of regret".34 Pelts disappeared from lists of colonial exports or were noticed only to insist on their waning importance. Europeans were portrayed as bartering with Native peoples out of curiosity or pity more than trading with them for commercial advantage, while Native peoples were seen either to have withdrawn from markets or to misuse them to acquire only alcohol and frivolities.35
21 Even when Native peoples responded to travellers’ romantic expectations in market-oriented ways, negative views of hunting were reinforced. Basket-weaving and other decorative work by Native women to meet the non-Native demand for souvenirs only confirmed the inability of hunting to secure basic subsistence. When a Scottish labourer and an American work-party toured a Maliseet village near Fredericton, a youth entertained what was obviously not his first group of sightseers by aiming his bow and arrow "at a halfpenny; expecting, no doubt, that we would set up more for him. Every copper we set up, he succeeded to hit with his arrow, though at some distance, and then put it into his pocket. By his dexterity, he deprived us of all the coppers we carried".36 Native peoples generated exchange value by fulfilling visitors’ expectations of "real Indians", but rather than praiseworthy entrepreneurship, handicrafts and such performances were read as evidence of poverty and equated with begging. Prowess with bow and arrow also symbolized the refusal to exchange the tools of the chase for those of the farm. Nothing captures travellers’ disappointment more than the eclipse of the hunter-warrior by the juvenile busker instead of the sturdy yeoman. For earlier visitors, hunting had been useful, if problematic, economic behaviour. Now, it was an atavistic cultural trait in a region imperialism had remade to better suit emigrants than its Aboriginal population.
22 As such, criticism of hunting intensified and broadened as travellers contrasted it with settler agriculture to naturalize the association between hunting and poverty, serve as a lesson to emigrants and justify continued colonization.37 First, hunting perverted gender roles. Native males were rendered "lazy" while Native women were required to produce and sell handicrafts to supplement meager returns from hunting. After visiting a Native encampment, Lady Martin Hunter told a female correspondent that the sobriety and "hard labour" of Native women was "to the honor of our sex" in contrast to the males who were "above occupying themselves in anything but hunting and war".38 Committed to creating settler societies instead of extracting resources, a greater concern for gender roles was added to the ideological assault on hunting.
23 Second, whereas agriculture entailed stationary settlement, hunters were "migratory" or "roam through the country at pleasure". Such terms implied lack of purpose, mendicancy or something akin to the instincts of hunters’ prey and equated hunters with such social outcasts as "gypsies" and the "vagabond" who were divorced from, and thereby without claim to, specific geographies.39 Such terms also reminded readers that hunting was land extensive and drew on common resources rather than smaller, individually owned plots capable of more intensive exploitation. Third, travellers argued that whereas agriculture generated economic value from land through regular, purposeful labour, hunting merely accepted nature’s bounty – an unearned windfall. It evinced an "aversion to labour" and whatever skills or "instincts" it required, they were not among "the useful arts".40 Fourth, whereas the patience to labour intensively on farms was required to reap future rewards, successful hunting brought immediate gratification and thus encouraged improvidence and lack of foresight. The association between Native hunters and animal instinct was reinforced: "Like the bears and the moose-deer around them, they enjoy the present and make no calculations with respect to futurity". Poverty was not the result of a stingy physical environment or dispossession, but the "moral causes" of "improvidence and want of foresight".41 Hunting failed to inculcate appropriate economic norms. It "improved" neither land nor people.
24 Lastly, it followed that whereas "industrious" farmers were guaranteed property ownership and prosperity, hunting brought a subsistence that was precarious and "scanty" at best; otherwise hunting might have been a rational economic choice which would have decoupled material reward from industry and thrift.42 Yet the same environment that made the region suitable for agriculture meant that hunting might satisfy "natural" needs. Travellers insisted, therefore, that it could not meet the "artificial wants" and comforts which motived people to work beyond subsistence.43 Economic development was artificial. It could not be achieved by economic agents who, like animals, relied only on "nature" or "instinct" and who exerted themselves only to the point of preventing starvation.
25 Faced with declining access to fish and game, many Native families did take up agriculture – often in conjunction with other economic activities – as colonial governments began to reserve land for their use after the Napoleonic wars as part of a fitful policy of Native settlement. The few travellers who acknowledged that some Native households cultivated land insisted they remained poor because "their natural inheritance is not to be thrown off by mere dint of reasoning; and far more time is passed by these Indian farmers over the brook, or in ranging the woods, than in attending to the farm".44 Travellers routinely condemned occupational pluralism by Native and non-Native farmers, but by emphasizing the former"s "natural inheritance" or "natural propensities" to hunt, travellers re-inscribed the boundary between Aboriginal and European, hunting and agriculture, and "nature" and "culture".45 Yet frequently hampered by inadequate support, marginal land, squatters and diseases that decimated the crops of Native and non-Native farms alike, Native males often turned to hunting to compensate for the precariousness of colonial agriculture. There was no place in travel narratives for such a reversal of their development logic or for the Native agency it revealed.
26 Identifying them as subsistence hunters, travellers had no incentive to analyze evidence in their own accounts of Native peoples’ longstanding and ongoing orientation to markets. Their agricultural and other efforts were under- or misreported and their protests against declining resources ignored.46 As Moorsom concluded, "Born to range the woods, or skim along the surface, in quest of the prey each element affords, he looked but to the ‘evil of the day’, and his children will pine in wretchedness, his race become almost extinct, ere the red man learns submission to those restraints whose only alternative will be starvation".47 In the absence of "artificial" wants, only physical necessity motivated people to work. As in the first phase, hunting was seen as failing to instill the restraints required by economic development. In the second phase, however, no doubts remained as to the superiority – indeed absolute necessity – of those restraints. Hunting may have been instinctive to some and travellers seemed fearful lest it prove an attractive alternative to the social and labour discipline of settler agriculture, but they reassured themselves that it was irrational and ultimately suicidal. The nameless Native hunter whose function was to exalt, by his very distress, the agriculturalist, forewarned all who contemplated resisting such discipline. His negative example helped define and justify the economic subjectivity travellers sought in the region but knew was neither natural nor universal: the industry, perseverance and foresight to create new economic value by the systematic application of labour and skill to privately owned property.
27 Not surprisingly, then, travellers failed to note the extent of non-Native hunting. The fur trade was rarely mentioned, but export figures suggest its relative significance increased during the first half of the 19th century, probably due to hunting by the growing number of settlers.48 A traveller of modest means celebrated the relative absence of game laws that restricted hunting in Britain to the privileged, but only two former residents mentioned hunting by settlers for subsistence or commerce before 1820.49 Yet hunting on undeveloped land remained vital to the sizeable minority of the region’s rural households whose farms failed to produce subsistence. Indeed, Nova Scotia’s "poor" were exempt from legal restrictions on hunting imposed in 1816 and a 1842 petition to the assembly prayed for the protection of moose "on account of their value to the Indians & the poor settlers in various parts of the Province".50 The elimination of animals deemed "pests" or dangerous to humans and livestock, a third utilitarian form of hunting, was rarely noted by travellers although the payment of substantial bounties by the colonial state suggests its prevalence.51 Finally, no role was found in the Maritimes for the mythologized American frontiersman whose hunting prepared the landscape for more intensive settlement.52 Even as a prerequisite or subsidy to agricultural expansion, hunting found little space in Maritime travel accounts in the second phase.
28 Although the transition of hunting from necessity to amusement signaled "progress" to Smith and others, the same near silence held for its recreational forms. Only inadvertently did a few travellers reveal the existence of sport in the colonies.53 While Patrick Campbell’s Travels . . . in the Years 1791 and 1792 discussed sport in northern New Brunswick extensively and unpublished diaries reveal its persistence, published travel accounts during the second phase did not.54 John Gerrond’s Travels, published only two decades after Campbell’s, included an engraving of the author with hunting rifle and dog, but was advertised for its "several original hints to agriculture". Hunting had been among Gerrond’s "chief diversions" in Scotland, but two years in Nova Scotia helped convince him that "if there is such a thing as permanent happiness to be found here [on earth] at all, it must be with prudence, virtue, temperance, and sobriety" – qualities associated with agriculture and not hunting.55 Gerrond, apparently an avid sportsman, failed to mention the activity in connection with colonies that had become barometers for the efficacy of liberal economic norms. Such colonies, according to Lieutenant Edward Thomas Coke, needed "artificers and farmers, whose previous habits enabled them to put their own shoulders to the wheel", not "a mere gentleman who retained a fondness for hunting and shooting".56 Hunting, whether identified with rude "savages" or a leisured social class, contrasted with an ideology of work grounded in settler agriculture. Regardless of its purpose, hunting had little place in travellers’ descriptions of settlers precisely because it defined an economic subjectivity inappropriate to the region’s new place in the empire.
29 The result was an relentlessly negative view of hunting. Not only was its use of resources seen as incompatible with agriculture, but it offered a competing moral economy. By demeaning hunting, travellers reaffirmed the utility and virtue of settler agriculture to the point that hunters could no longer serve as an ethnographic vantage point from which to question economic development. Once references to the fur trade disappeared as well, nothing prevented a uniformly hostile verdict. Travellers promoted an agrarian future for the region that seemed as unproblematic as it was antithetical to hunting.
Romance
30 Despite such coherence, representations of hunting were quickly reworked and ambiguity returned as hunting became the focus of a subset of travel narratives. Captain Richard Levinge’s Echoes from the Backwoods; or Sketches of Transatlantic Life addressed sportsmen as well as emigrants, emphasized "backwoods" as well as settled countryside and entertained with "sketches" as well as instructed with advice.57 By 1870, at least four other British army officers had published book-length hunting narratives set in the Maritimes. They, and the elite American sportsmen who visited and wrote about the region in almost identical terms, formed only the most visible part of the fraternity of hunting and angling enthusiasts who sought each other’s company and advice, kept meticulous journals and sketch-books, and wrote for such periodicals as Field.58 Thus, Richard Dashwood said little about his regiment or garrison duty; instead, hunting and fishing "excursions" were periodically interrupted by the work that brought him to the region but was extraneous to what he had to say about it. Sailing out of Halifax, Dashwood "gazed at the forests, leaving behind the abode of the moose, the cariboo and the beaver" – now sites of longing instead of unrealized economic potential.59
31 Promises of sport helped reconcile British officers to being posted to Sydney as early as the 1780s; travel accounts, however, did not promote the region in such terms until the mid-1840s as the market for Anglo-American sporting narratives grew.60 If travellers in the second phase turned to the Maritimes as a potential home to rear new generations of yeoman farmers displaced by urban-industrial development in Britain, in the third phase sportsmen turned to the region as a place where those of higher social status could escape the negative effects of such development. Utilitarian hunting remained a foil for cherished values and thus debilitating for subordinate peoples and classes, but ritualized hunting was now celebrated by elite males who feared displacement in an increasingly material, mass society.
32 Thus, the focus of romanticism shifted from the pastoral to the "primeval" and "wild". The forests and rivers of northern New Brunswick and the interior of Nova Scotia became more emblematic of the region than its agricultural or commercial centres. For Robert Roosevelt, uncle of the future president and big-game hunter, "[t]en months of close confinement in the city, years amid the horrors of civilization, had well prepared us to appreciate a return to man’s natural state of savage life" on New Brunswick’s rivers. "[L]ong contact with vice and folly had made us eager to taste once more of truth and purity, the communion with nature uncorrupted and unsullied; to feel the air blow through the waving trees instead of down narrow streets; to hear the water rippling over its native bed, and not through Croton pipes; to see the sun shine from out of the blue sky, instead of being reflected amid murk and smoke from heated bricks". The "wilderness journey" of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, New Brunswick’s lieutenant-governor and an avid sportsman, likewise rejuvenated his health and spirit and revealed the "charm in forest life and its freedom". "The daily petition, too, for daily bread acquires new force", wrote Gordon, "when . . . for the day’s food one is in some measure dependent on the living creatures that may chance to cross one’s path". "Cities" connoted noise and confusion, the material and mundane, and markets, efficiency and utility; "wilderness" meant charm and beauty, freedom and happiness, and intrinsic value and ritual.61 As in the first phase, hunting was a return to "man’s natural state" that sustained values threatened by economic development.
33 But most forms of hunting actually polluted the "wilds" with the values of the "city". Such contamination joined already longstanding prejudices against market hunting. Hunting by Native peoples and settlers no longer went under-reported, but was still associated with the least industrious while sport, by definition, was not motivated by profit in "mere hides".62 In fact, sportsmen "wasted" considerable time and money displaying their independence and devaluing productive labour. Dashwood was disgusted by settlers who "would rather make one dollar than enjoy the sport" nearby: "These people can never understand one’s going to any trouble or expense for mere sport – the almighty dollar is always uppermost in their minds".63 Recently enjoined to labour more, settlers now stood condemned as materialists obsessed with utility.
34 Sport’s disutility was maximized by the methods that defined it. When hunting for protein or pelts, method mattered little; the easier and more efficient the better. Once its purpose shifted to instilling certain values, a set of rules or sportsmen’s code evolved to distinguish the "orthodox" from "arrant poaching" and the "gentleman" from other resource users.64 Ritualized hunting was made more difficult and less efficient. First, it had to incorporate sufficient danger, excitement and opportunity to appreciate "Nature" and to test the hunter’s physical and mental mettle. Sportsmen had to get close to and see their intended victim, rendering the traps and snares of the fur trade illicit. Second, the kill could not be too easy. If the prey was confined to small spaces in large numbers, was blinded or otherwise handicapped, had little chance of escape, or failed to mount significant resistance, it was not sport precisely because success was assured. As the act of hunting became more important than what it produced, the degree of effort and the odds of failure were heightened to emphasize the contrast with economic utility.65
35 Sportsmen also claimed independence from market values by insisting that their rudimentary outdoor camps and meals were infinitely superior to the best luxuries money could buy.66 The least useful parts of the sought-after male moose – its head and antlers – were also the most prized as symbolic trophies. Game left unconsumed during the hunt was not sold to recoup costs or to pay Native guides. It might be bartered in the interior for supplies, but more often was given away at lumbering camps in a gesture of paternal goodwill or shared with friends back in town to reinforce community among the like-minded. Both ensured that game remained unsullied by markets.67 Finally, markets were blamed for depleting animal stocks. Urban demand for game conspired with new railways to allow "the city pot-hunter to mauve about with his dogs and to transmit the subject of his butchery to the market easily, cheaply, speedily" regardless of the season. Selling meat or hides encouraged effective methods now classed as "slaughter" or "murder" rather than economic enterprise.68 Immediate use, symbol and gift exchange trumped market exchange. Markets created the wrong incentives for the wrong behaviour among the wrong sorts of hunters.
36 But hunting as mere recreation, even if non-utilitarian in motive, was also scorned. As a creature of improved transportation, increased leisure and income, and newly mass-produced consumer goods, the "cockney sportsmen" or "cockney tourist" transgressed the boundary between "city" and "wilds" as surely as those who hunted for profit. Sportsmen extolled the benefits of buffalo robes and homespun and the superiority of Native technologies such as moccasins, birch-bark canoes and packs over "the latest thing in knapsacks" or canoes that could "be paddled by any muff".69 Most preferred to tie their own flies over the "scamped rubbish" peddled by Halifax shopkeepers.70 Naturally, hunters who relied on such commercial goods stayed close to the city. Dashwood complained that "every man or boy, who can muster up a ‘shooting iron’, goes out to blaze away" at plover during its annual arrival near Halifax. No skill, risk, adventure or knowledge of either fowl or firearm was required. Economic development made recreational hunting too easy and too socially inclusive, bringing the "city", both literally and figuratively, into the "wilds". "It was a consolation" to Dashwood "to know that there are still plenty of wild rivers, inaccessible to the town loafer and cock-tail sportsman in a Rob Roy" canoe. In the hands of British officers, antimodernism denigrated the middle-class "tourists" who later sustained it.71
37 Ambivalence about modernity was not, however, a rejection of it. First, sportsmen were amateur natural scientists as well as romantic poets who appraised as well as appreciated "nature". Second, market mechanisms enabled much of the escape from markets. Sportsmen were consumers who purchased supplies at local stores or from Native craftspeople, employers who negotiated wages with their Native guides and other assistants, and clients who welcomed improved accommodations and transportation. They were also promoters whose publications attracted to the region more of the urban hunters they disdained.72 Third, sport was "a temporary retirement from the world"; despite the rhetoric of "return", sportsmen were on excursions – respites from, rather than alternatives to, the urban world they typically came from and to which they invariably returned.73 Finally, even "temporary retirement" was only appropriate for those not thereby distracted from vital productive labour. Lieutenant Campbell Hardy was especially scathing about settlers who hunted "from a mere wantonness when they ought to be attending to their unprogressing farms and clearings".74 Like sport itself, ambivalence about modernity was a luxury of the few predicated on the labour of the many.
38 Confined temporally and socially, there was no contradiction between such ambivalence and "improvement". British sportsmen offered emigrants advice, encouraged the settlement of areas they otherwise esteemed as hunting grounds and hailed railroads and mining as the most tangible signs of progress.75 The focus of their narratives lay elsewhere, but the development rhetoric of the second phase persisted. Markets and "improvement" were only denigrated when they threatened to engulf the values sport embodied. In fact, sportsmen consolidated the image of a rapidly developing region. Complaints about urban hunters, farmers able to hunt for amusement and declining game created a sense of a shifting development frontier that had driven ambitious sportsmen from Europe and the northeastern United States to the Maritimes and was now driving them even further afield.76
39 Contemplating that frontier, it was clear to Hardy that the moose "has fulfilled its mission" and now faced extinction. It "has afforded food and clothing to the primitive races. . . . It has enabled the early and adventurous settler to push back from the coast and open up new clearings in the depths of the forest". Now that hunting was no longer an economic necessity, conservation could replace the initial slaughter and "waste": "Game, both as a luxury and as a means of recreation, is a necessary adjunct to the establishment of a country tenanted by Anglo-Saxons. . . . Nature’s great stock-farm, though nearly worn out by the recklessness of the first-comers, will yet repay careful husbandry". Sportsmen and the game laws they advocated to restrict access to resources to recreational users who abided by the sportsmen’s code reflected a higher stage of development or husbandry, not its negation.77 Sportsmen alone followed Adam Smith in positing an unproblematic progression of hunting from economics to culture. Only a thoroughly modern, artificial world had the knowledge, values and legal mechanisms to protect "nature". Only a modern world required such an adjunct.
40 Images of Native guides embodied the same ambivalence about modernity and markets. Lieutenant Francis Duncan expected feathers and stoic reserve, but found trousers, chattiness and a "keen and unromantic relish [. . .] for coin". Shock at first sight was standard rhetoric, but the love of money that now struck Duncan and others reflected, as it had in the first phase, fear that market values were being universalized to all aspects of society.78 Sportsmen mourned the very decline of the "thorough Indian" that travellers had sought in the agrarian phase. The "Indian" had moved into the "the neighbourhood of civilization" with decidedly mixed results. Reversing hunting’s most enduring trope, Dashwood lamented that "young Indians are too idle to go into the woods".79 Only those "unspoiled" by modernity and its economic subjectivity could act as guide, camp-builder, cook, companion and sage. Only the "thorough Indian" guaranteed authenticity.
41 Thus, while marked by indolence, improvidence and intemperance in or near settlements, "the woods" redeemed the region’s Native population just as it preserved important non-market values. Captain Levinge reassured his readers that however much they abused alcohol "in a town, it is a point of honour with them when engaged to go on any expedition into the woods, not to touch spirits". Likewise, if bullied or otherwise mistreated, such was a Native guide’s "high sense of honour" and "independence of spirit" that no amount of money could induce him to accompany that hunter again. Honour and independence were also marks of a gentleman able to act from less base concerns than self-interest. As a Prince Edward Island emigration promoter explained: "In one respect the Indian is a true gentleman; he will not work if he can avoid it. He will hunt and shoot and fish, as much as you please, and spend the evening in drinking, telling stories, and cracking jokes, pretty much after the manner of other sportsmen". Here the agrarian voice that had dominated travel accounts in the second phase and valued the industry needed to "improve" the landscape and tame its inhabitants clashed with the aristocratic values of sportsmen intent on preserving the "wilds" as a counterweight to economic modernity.80
42 Sportsmen were more positive about the analogy between gentlemen and a few favoured guides if not with Native hunters in general and, unlike emigration promoters, viewed them more favourably than fellow Europeans of lesser social status. Hardy recommended one such guide, in part, for "his hatred of all white men, who are not of the class of his employers, particularly the settlers in the interior". When the guide cut settlers’ snares, Hardy saw acceptance of the sportsmen’s code rather than intense competition between Native and settler families for the resources to continue subsistence and commercial practices that sportsmen opposed. Money could not overcome the guide’s pride in the "woods", but in the Halifax market Hardy found him "eyes beaming with ferocious satisfaction as he pocketed the dollars by a ready sale" of game. He belonged in the "woods", not in markets that made him more savage-like. Improvidence also ensured his participation there resulted in poverty, not material advantage.81 The nobles of the forest shared much with the nobles of Europe.
43 Of course, the analogy had its limits. Guides’ particular characteristics were disparaged, traditional Native hunting practices were typically condemned as unorthodox or "wanton", and commentary about Native "indolence" and degradation persisted.82 Moreover, no matter how much they might be admired, Native guides remained servants paid to fulfill their employers’ expectations, to perform the more onerous or domestic aspects of the hunt and ultimately to know their place. More importantly, sportsmen alone could negotiate the boundary between "city" and "wilds". Returning to Fredericton Lieutenant Hardy and his party were "wild-looking" and disoriented by their "long absence from the abodes of civilization" but, "once more respectably dressed, shaven and washed", they reintegrated into the town’s elite. The "wilds" could not be washed from their Native guides who returned northward, as theirs was an incompatibility with, and not respite from, "civilization" and its market economy. The accidental death of a much-admired guide near Saint John led Dashwood to conclude that "out of the woods" even the best of Native society was doomed. No such fate awaited Arthur Gordon. Disembarking from the canoe, he "walked alone across the bare granite rocks . . . which also formed the dividing line between the wilderness and civilized life. . . . And here, with civilization and my ordinary duties again in view", he left behind "mocasined feet" and those imprisoned by the very "wilds" that redeemed them.83
44 The imperial dimension of such representations was unmistakable. At a time of continued urban-industrial development in Britain, where hunting by urban professionals and businessmen "contributed to a blurring of the cultural and social distinctions between the old elite and the new wealthy", the empire not only provided sites to preserve agrarian values for emigrants but also the aristocratic ideals of sportsmen.84 Moreover, hunting narratives cast officers of the British army – "the one visible connecting link between the colony and the mother country" – as gentlemen, leaders and adventure heros on the imperial frontier.85 According to an expatriate British sportsman living in the United States, love of sport had maintained the British elite’s "robustness, agility, and the capacity of enduring fatigue". Hunting by off-duty officers ensured that "when need is to rough it, no man roughs it better or more uncomplainingly, than your thorough-bred English gentleman" – certainly no common soldier or urban effete.86 Such flattering portrayals of imperial manhood offered British officers stature and purpose at a time of relative international peace and when free trade and responsible government were rewriting the imperial contract in favour of local and economic elites at the expense of metropolitan elites and their military-administrative representatives in the colonies.
45 Although representations of hunting had long been implicated in prescriptive gender norms, not until the third, romance phase were positive views of masculinity marshaled extensively. Sport required martial skills and "pluck" to face down danger, sweep away impediments and master risk, "nature" and subordinates. It exercised mind, body and spirit. According to Henry Herbert, field sports "prevent the demoralization of luxury, and over-civilization, the growth of effeminacy and sloth" at a time of "general decay of all that is manly or independent". Small wonder a sportsman in the "wilds" of New Brunswick was "one of the most splendid physical specimen of the genus homo" Arthur Gordon ever encountered.87
46 Stray comments hint at the importance of women’s absence. Religious conversation led Captain Maximilian Hammond to trade "all the amusements and sports incidental to military life" at Halifax for prayer, temperance, frugality, religious meetings and, of course, marriage; but sportsmen more typically defined their masculinity in contrast to that of other men rather than women, foregrounding differences of class and "race".88 By putting luxury and comfort before sport, "the dandies of our cities" or "feather-bed" sportsmen reflected all that was materialistic and unheroic about modern urban life. The "rougher" masculinity of rural settlers, Native hunters and lumbermen offered something of sport’s physicality, freedom and excitement, but it was work related and lacked the nobility of sentiment, rationality and self-control of ritualized hunting.89 Sportsmen were able to partake of aspects of the "savage" to compensate for over-civilization because they remained gentlemen abiding by the self-imposed limits of their code. Noble or not, their guides were "savages". Rural settlers were also singled out as "reckless and ignorant", uncouth, and blind to their own self-interest.90 Sportsmen, anxious about the cultural costs of economic development, nonetheless thought they better embodied its values of prudence and self-control than fellow European settlers.
47 While reinforcing this masculinity, the sportsmen’s code also offered a template for imperial governance. Interacting with Native guides modeled how to win the respect and willing cooperation of subject peoples and established imperial officers as their paternalistic guardians91 while dealing with unsportsman-like hunters modeled international diplomacy. Dashwood "sent an ultimatum" about the appropriate distance between fishing parties to American anglers who had refused "to come to any terms at all". British resolve and fair play "was soon the means of bringing the Yankees to their bearings" in contrast with what was widely perceived as Lord Ashburton’s shameful caving to American bravado in the New Brunswick-Maine boundary dispute as well as the Trent affair that had brought Dashwood’s regiment to North America in the first place.92 Finally, the lax enforcement of game laws that reflected the sportsmen’s code exposed the limits of colonial self-government. Responsible government, where "any settler is made a magistrate" and then ludicrously claimed the rank of "squire", turned every appointment into a "mere political job" irrespective of the ability, honesty and impartiality that typified the British officer and that was needed to uphold the law.93 Social leveling was no more palatable in politics than hunting. Even empires increasingly defined by mutual economic advantage required the non-economic values inculcated by sport.
Economic and Moral Lessons
48 More than an activity, hunting was fraught with economic and moral lessons. It ranked people into societies and classes by whether they hunted for subsistence, commerce or recreation. Thus, in all its forms, hunting was central to how travellers thought about economic development and the place of the Maritimes in the British empire. Representations of hunting could demonstrate the colonies’ value to Britain, delegitimize certain forms of production and therefore certain producers’ access to resources, or bolster the claims of particular classes to imperial leadership.
49 There was remarkable consistency across time and among travellers regardless of their particular subject-position or narrative intent. Hunting was associated with idleness and a "natural" freedom from "artificial" restraint incompatible with economic development. Such associations were so durable that they informed formal economic treatises such as John Rae’s 1834 Statement of some new principles on the subject of political economy, which was based on Rae’s experience in the Canadas, and such classics of 20th-century historiography as George Stanley’s 1936 The Birth of Western Canada.94 Yet earlier travellers to the Maritimes also reworked and reevaluated these themes. For instance, hunting’s association with the absence of "artificial" wants led to its condemnation in the first, mercantilist phase as unable to motivate sufficient production and consumption to maximize imperial trade. In the second, agrarian phase it led to hunting being condemned as a tempting distraction from the discipline of agricultural labour. In the third, romance phase the same association made the "thorough Indian" superior to the "half-civilized" and the sportsman superior to the "over-civilized". Representations of hunting were central to recasting the region’s role in the empire as commercial warehouse, agricultural frontier or sportsmen’s paradise.
50 As Mary Louise Pratt has emphasized, travellers were key agents of economic expansion, but the form of development promoted in the Maritimes did not remain constant and such support was not unalloyed.95 Hunting played a central role in defining and supporting but also in questioning different models of economic development. It figured prominently in the first phase of regional travel writing as a profitable, if problematic, economic practice. Considered as a cultural practice among the region’s Aboriginal population, it prompted reflections on the cultural and moral vices of commercial society. In the third phase, hunting as an economic practice among the lower classes was stigmatized, but the disutility of a cultural form among elite Anglo-American males helped to preserve values thought vulnerable in an increasingly commodified and mechanistic world.
51 Representations of hunting were not, in themselves, ambiguous in the second or agrarian phase, but such coherence reflected their contrast with owner-occupier agriculture, not Britain’s increasingly urban-industrial economy. The latter was blamed for displacing the very emigrants who were to colonize the region as independent petty producers – a status closed to them in Britain. If game laws in Britain were intended to ensure wage-dependence by restricting self-provisioning and a non-wage source of value, travellers campaigned against colonial hunting to prevent such dependence.96 Hunting was delegitimized to encourage rural producers to labour on their own stock, preventing the improvident behaviour travellers associated with hunting and feared would jeopardize producers’ independence. Thus, rather than moving directly from economic necessity to amusement as in Adam Smith’s model, representations of hunting in the Maritimes (and later in the Canadian west) played a third role as foil for the values of the evolving British settler societies.97 Moreover, in each role hunting revealed anxieties about economic development that belied Smith’s seemingly confident teleology. Such anxiety was informed by nostalgia for Britain’s imagined agrarian past and an implied critique of the urban-industrial growth that was destroying it. Thus, even when sportsmen celebrated one form of recreational hunting, it was as a cultural necessity that reflected their unease with economic developments that made hunting a mere diversion for some and a source of gain for others.
52 Nostalgia and critique were, however, limited. By dividing hunting into utilitarian and ritualistic forms, travellers juxtaposed markets and culture as competing sources of meaning. Ultimately, they preferred prosperity from markets and the region’s further integration into the British empire to material poverty even as they worried that such integration risked reducing potentially competing values drawn from classical philosophy, Christian morality and a broadly aristocratic sensibility to economic utility. Much might be lost by a too-thorough transformation of self and society in the single-minded pursuit of economic development. But travel narratives also reveal the dichotomy of markets and culture to be false. Markets were a function of culture and meaning as well as utility. What constituted work rather than idleness, skill rather than instinct and the social rather than the natural and which "race", social class or sex was best suited to particular tasks were all cultural questions to which the answers were neither static nor unambiguous. As long as hunting was juxtaposed to "civilization", it expressed economic fears as well as hope.
Notes