History
Jacques Cartier claimed Prince Edward Island for France on the first of his voyages across the Atlantic, naming it the Ile-St-Jean in 1534. However, the French and the Acadian farmers he brought with him from the Bay of Fundy made little impact on the island until they were reinforced in 1720 by three hundred French colonists, who founded a tiny capital at Port La Joye , near the site of present-day Charlottetown. In 1754, there were about three thousand settlers, but their numbers doubled the following year with the arrival of refugees from the deportations , a sudden influx with which the island was unable to cope. After the capture of Louisbourg in 1758, the British army turned its attention to Ile-St-Jean and its starving, dispirited population. Lord Rollo, the local British commander, rounded up and shipped out all but three hundred of the Acadians and the colony was subsequently renamed the Island of St John in 1763, and Prince Edward Island in 1799. After the expulsion of the Acadians, the island was parcelled out to wealthy Englishmen on condition that they organized settlement, but few did. Consequently, when the island's population climbed from around seven thousand to eighty thousand in the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the colonists were tenant farmers or squatters, victims of an absentee landowning system that was patently unjust and inefficient. Although most of these immigrants were drawn from the poor of the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, the new citizens had come here in the hope of owning land. Their ceaseless petitioning eventually resulted in the compulsory Land Purchase Act of 1875, and within a decade PEI became a land of freeholders. With the agricultural, fishing, shipbuilding and logging industries buoyant, the late 1870s marked the high point of the island's fortunes, but this prosperity was short-lived. The Canadian government's protectionist National Policy discriminated in favour of the manufactured goods of Ontario and Quebec and the result was a long-lasting recession that helped precipitate a large-scale emigration, which left PEI a forgotten backwater, derisively nicknamed Spud Island . Depopulation remains a problem to this day, though the successful exploitation of the island's tourist potential has brought much relief, as has the modernization of its agriculture and fishery. Many islanders also argued that the construction of a bridge between PEI and the mainland would provide a further economic boost, whilst their opponents asserted that the island would be swamped by outsiders, its farms bought up as second homes and its closely knit communities overwhelmed. Those in favour of the bridge won the day (if not the argument) and the Confederation Bridge was completed in 1997; locals await the long-term consequences with mixed feelings.
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