8 - Deforestation and the Spenserian Wood

Summary

Imagine a forest

A real forest.

W. S. Graham, ‘Imagine a Forest’

This chapter concentrates for the most part upon the forests of Ireland in the 1580s and 1590s, but it begins five thousand miles and three hundred years away, on the island of Mauritius at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1883, Sir John Pope Hennessy arrived as the new governor of Mauritius, towards the end of a long career in the Colonial Service that had seen him sent to outposts in the Caribbean, Africa and East Asia. Several of these postings had ended in a degree of disgrace and confusion; Pope Hennessy's desire to reform colonial laws and his inclination to favour native populations as highly as English planters had earned him the animosity of a number of colonial councils, and had led to outbreaks of rioting in many of the colonies. Pope Hennessy conforms very well to our perhaps peculiar image of the benevolent Victorian colonialist. After only a year as governor of Mauritius, he could boast that he had reformed a brutal prison system, made great improvements to sanitation, brought an end to systems of racial segregation that had forbidden Mauritians from taking part in their own government, and had also altered Mauritian forestry law in a number of important ways. He had reformed the policy of imposing severe penalties on natives for destroying trees, which in practice had meant that they were imprisoned for so little as taking dead twigs from the forest floor to use as toothpicks.