SOME REMARKS ON BRITISH FOREST HISTORY. 1 95 



royal navy : in private yards the quantity of imported timber 

 far exceeded the native timber used. " Forasmuch as from the 

 want of Plank of our own Growth, and consequently the highness 

 of Price of what we have : the Shipwrights of this Kingdom 

 (even in our Out-Ports, as well as in the River of Thames) have 

 been for many years past, driven to resort to supplys from 

 Abroad, and are so at this day, to the Occasioning their spending 

 of One Hundred Loads of Foreign, for every Twenty of English. 

 Besides, were our own Stock more ; the exclusion of Foreign 

 Goods would soon render the Charge of Building insupportable, 

 by raising the Price of the Commodity to double what it is, and 

 more, at the pleasure of the Seller." While for smaller ships 

 English plank was found to be more durable, for ships of 

 300 tons burden and upwards, foreign plank was better. 

 English plank suffered from "general Waniness, want of Breadth 

 at the Top-end, and ill method of Conversion " : twenty loads of 

 foreign plank went further in working upon a ship's side or deck 

 than a hundred loads of like length of English " after its Wanes 

 and other Defects shall be cut away," and its small dimensions 

 meant greatly increased work.^ Coming from the source it 

 does, this evidence is conclusive for the seventeenth century. 



In the later decades of the seventeenth century the taste for 

 planting had set in in England and Scotland. We still read 

 that "to tell some men of planting of Woods is very needless; 

 for there are too many men more inclined to stock up than to 

 plant them " ; the writer goes on, however, " but I suppose the 

 greater sort of Men, and I am sure the best sort, are more 

 inclined to preserve and plant, than to destroy and stock them 

 up." - It was to this best sort that John Evelyn made his appeal : 

 and the dedication in the later editions of Sylva boasts of the 

 success of the appeal. Not, of course, that the lamentations 

 over the destruction of woods and the neglect of replanting had 

 ever exactly represented sober facts: but before 1700 planting 

 and the improvement of estates had became a polite amusement.^ 

 Evelyn was an amateur. He looked upon the "devastation" 

 caused by the " increase of shipping, the multiplication of glass- 

 works, iron furnaces and the like, the disproportionate spreading 



^ Pepys, Memoii-es of the Royal Navy, 1679-1688 (1906 ed.), pp. 35 ft'. 



'^ Cook, The Manner of Raising, Ordering and hnproving Forest and Fruit 

 Trees {1676), p. 89. 



•' Earl of Haddington, Treatise on the Manner 0/ raising Forest Trees (1761), 

 pp. I, 2 : Sylva (1679), pp. 104 ff. 



