[SIEBERT & GILLIAM] THE LOYALISTS IN P.E.I. 111 
received royal instructions concerning the grants which embodied 
very liberal terms for the settlers. ' 
Further than the encouragement thus offered, we have as an active 
cause of Loyalist settlement in Prince Edward Island, the collapse of 
Shelburne, “that great city that was to be,” founded after the American 
war by refugees in Nova Scotia.” Many of the disappointed settlers 
of Shelburne saw the proclamation of the governor of the island, and 
went there in the hope of retrieving their fortunes.* One of these, 
who arrived in 1784, afterwards informed a committee of the legislature 
that he had been induced to come by several proclamations posted 
about the streets of Shelburne offering lands to Loyalists on their 
arrival; and another tells of having been informed of the proclamation 
by an agent of Governor Patterson, who assured him une! he could 
easily get land as a settler. 
That these methods on the part of the authorities met with a meas- 
ure of success is shown by some important records of the time. On 
June 12, 1784, a muster of Loyalists was taken on the island, which 
gives the number of men as two hundred and two, with enough women, 
children and servants or slaves to make a total of three hundred and 
eighty persons.‘ During the summer and early autumn of the same 
year several groups of Loyalist families arrived from Shelburne: thus 
we find it noted that twenty-seven men, together with women and 
children, came in on July 26; twenty-six men, also with women and 
children, on September 13, fifty-five on September 19, and twelve on 
September 25.° These figures give an aggregate of one hundred and 
twenty men alone (the figures for an accurate count of the women and 
children not being at hand), who are recorded as arriving from Shel- 
burne during the interval of two months from July 26 to September 25, 
1784.° Counting in all the Loyalists who were duly reported in the 
records of the summer and fall of this year, 1784, we have a total say 
of six hundred, more or less, who had made their way to Prince Edward 

‘Quoted in the report of the committee appointed in 1833 to bring in a bill 
for the relief of the Loyalists. See Journal of the House of Assembly of Prince Edward 
Island, March, 1833. 
*See Crosskill: Prince Edward Island, the Garden Province of Canada, p. 18. 
# Interviews appended to report of the committee to whom was referred the 
Loyalist Petition. See Journal of the House of Assembly of Prince Edward Island 
for the year 1833. 
4 Brymner, Report on Canadian Archives, 1884, p. xli. 
° Letters and Records of C. Stewart. See Muster Rolls of Loyalists and Soldiers, 
1784, Vol. 376. 
$ Crosskill in his little handbook, Prince Edward Island, the Garden Province of 
Canada (1906), p. 18, has understated the number of arrivals from Shelburne, placing 
the figure at about one hundred. 
