NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK 
413 
must always be accepted with caution, but they are not without 
their value. The account reads thus : 
It was an excessively hot summer, and fires were burning ini numerous 
places upon the Miramichi and Sit. John rivers and their tributaries 
on the 7th of October, it began to blow from (the isouthwest, and the fire 
to spread over the country in the same direction. The wind increased 
gradually to a hurricane, and the fire advanced with proportionate rapidity. 
At one o’clock ini the afternoon it was still seventy miles up the river; and 
in the evening it was at Douglastown. It travelled e'ghty-five miles in 
nine hours, iso that scarcely on a fleet horse jcould a man have escaped 
from it. . . . the most striking thing that he mentioned were, that the 
flame as it advanced, was twenty-five miles) lin breadth ; that, coming from 
the west, it rushed past the towns of Newcastle and Douglastown,' leaving 
a green margin of some miles in breadth between its southern edge and 
the river; and that when,, in its easterly course, it reached Burnt-church 
River, the wind lulled, (turned around and drove the fire up the river 
again. It then came back along the green fringe it had left as it descended, 
and by the way licked up the towns of Douglastown and Newcastle 
The town of Chatham on the opposite side of the river, in a great measure 
escaped, but the Nassua [misprint for Nappan] settlement, six miles behind 
was burned to the ground. (Page 35). 
Still another account, resting apparently upon recollections of 
Sir Howard Douglas, who visited Miramichi a few days after 
the great fire, is contained in Fullom’s Life of Sir Howard 
Douglas (London, 1863). This work gives also a full account 
of the fires at and near Fredericton, and estimates the extent of 
the conflagration as 6,000 square miles. 
So much for the accounts proceeding from eye-witnesses or 
others in a position to know the limits of the fire. Later accounts, 
if compiled with a genuine regard for the truth, have a’so their 
value. Thus the valuable book, Notitia of New Brunswick , pub- 
lished in St. John in 1838 (page 126), makes the fire cover an 
extent of '‘one hundred miles along the Miramichi, by eighty-five 
in breadth, covering a surface of nearly 8,000 square miles. This 
work tells also of the fire at Fredericton, and of others on the 
Oromocto and on the Tobique. Gesner, the geologist, who had 
travelled over much of this country, makes the extent of the 
fire from the Nashwaak to the Bartibog, a distance of more than 
one hundred miles, and even makes it continuous with a fire on 
