The colonists cut white pine at an extraordinary and unsustainable rate. The town of New London (formerly Pequot), Connecticut, was founded in 1646; only thirteen years later, it passed a law limiting deforestation of local pines. By the 1690s, a British customs agent remarked that trees big enough for ship masts were becoming rare along the New England coast. Logging teams went farther and farther inland to satisfy this hunger, but because they lacked modern technology for loading and shipping logs, each mile inland required painstaking labor to clear a transport path to the nearest port.
Across the ocean, royal officials took notice of the thinning colonial woods. Clearly, the Crown would have to step in to impose some kind of regulation, or there would soon not be enough big trees to maintain the Royal Navy in its seemingly unending wars.
The 1691 Massachusetts Charter officially founded Massachusetts Bay as a province of the British Empire. Part of that document, issued by King William III and Queen Mary II, included the first royal decree on the white pine. Anywhere in the province, the charter said, any tree over twenty-four inches in diameter was the property of the crown and the Royal Navy. A fine of 100 pounds was set for the cutting of any such tree without permission from the monarchy.
The colonists were undeterred by the edict. In 1698, twenty thousand white pine boards traveled south from the city of Springfield in central Massachusetts to Hartford, Connecticut, in an example of the free-for-all harvesting taking place across the species’ geographic range. The British passed three more laws, known as the White Pine Acts, in 1711, 1722, and 1729 to widen and strengthen their restrictions. They created a new office, the Surveyor General of His Majesty’s Woods in America, to enforce the Acts and endeavor to keep the supply of mast wood for themselves.
They didn’t, however, account for the resolve of newly powerful New England families—such as the Wentworths—who had built their homes and, moreover, their fortunes on the white pine. These families would not be threatened by the declarations of a far-away king. As happened throughout the colonies on a range of issues, the rift between the Empire and its subjects only deepened throughout the early eighteenth century.