The Forest and Man 39 



the various grants and charters. The colonial 

 authorities in Massachusetts held that whenever 

 a tract of land was established into a new town- 

 ship, the royal reservations lapsed, and the people 

 of the new town could cut all the timber they 

 wanted. The Surveyor-General construed the law 

 differently. In the Maine district, especially, every 

 new town meant a new sawmill, to the disgust of 

 the Surveyor-General, who soon came to put all 

 kinds of obstacles in the way of new settlements, 

 and so added to his unpopularity. 



The making of tar and pitch never amounted to 

 much in New England or the middle colonies, not- 

 withstanding the efforts of government to stimu- 

 late this industry. One of the most conspicuous 

 failures in this line was the attempt to utilize the 

 German Palatines in a scheme for the wholesale 

 production of tar in New York. The experiment 

 failed, principally for the reason that the contrac- 

 tors tried to treat the immigrants like serfs. That 

 was not what they had come to this country for, 

 and most of them left, to find independent homes 

 in the Mohawk Valley and Pennsylvania. 



While the mother country never obtained very 

 much benefit from the American woods as far as 

 the production of lumber and naval stores is con- 

 cerned, it was very different with another product 

 of the forests, — peltry and furs. While lumber was 

 too bulky and too expensive in transportation to 

 compete successfully in European markets with 

 that of the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, furs 



