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Quinn and Canada
Professor Barry Gough
David Quinn was in a way Hakluyt’s Hakluyt, by which I mean that he knew all the sources that Richard Hakluyt had used; and he went beyond them in his several commentaries, noting omissions and assessing editions and various states of documents. His boundless record of scholarship will stand the tests of all time, and in my way of thinking he ranks with Charles Boxer and Gerald Graham, his near contemporaries, as a prime scholar of oceanic enterprise. These three came in the next wave after A. P. Newton, Vincent Harlow and James Williamson, and continued the mastery of sources that had been the hallmark of those studying British and Irish oceanic enterprise. One need only look at Quinn’s footnotes to realize the breadth of his travels in search of sources, and in many ways he was himself a Columbus, or better yet, a Cabot. His interest in voyaging and following the tracks of Hakluyt were undoubtedly global. But it is to his Canadian contributions that special word can be made.
Canada’s history, though an appendage of that of North America, lies deep in European experience, deeper and longer than that of the United States. For it was in France’s Acadia and Quebec that Canada’s first imperial impulses came during the early modern era. Quinn studied the Norse voyages, those that predate Columbus by four centuries, and he was dead set on putting the Columbian primacy in its proper place: rather low in the long record of oceanic endeavour. He had studied Columbus’s pre-1492 voyages towards Iceland, and was as convincing on that subject as any other that he tackled. He was able to deal with a subject and its documentation without a tendency to assassinate or debase. His objectivity was laudable, and he was always wise in his judgments and assessments.
Canada’s history is still the great untold story of human activity, virtually unknown to foreigners and outsiders. Quinn’s contributions in the scholarly line to diminishing this chronic external neglect will always be of precious value to those who know the literature. He wrote about French activities in what became the Maritime provinces. He wrote about a ‘false start’ of English enterprise in the River St Lawrence. He documented aboriginal place names in Canada, and wrote about them in the French language. He encouraged the study of Martin Frobisher’s Arctic, gold-seeking voyages, and was of mighty help to Professor Tom Symons in the three-volume assessment of Elizabethan enterprise to Baffin Island and Frobisher Bay (now Nunavut). He was certain, as he told me, that Sir Francis Drake had never reached as far north as the fog-bound coast of Vancouver Island, and he held to the view that Drakes Bay and Drake’s Estero, as advanced by the Drake Navigators Guild, was the most likely careenage of the Golden Hind in 1579. For those of us writing the history of Canada’s great waters, both salt and fresh, Quinn left powerful paths in the sea. He added much new material and wrote several articles and chapters on seafaring during essentially the Elizabethan era. He gave added encouragement to those of us who, against odds and the usual propensity to cover old ground, were carving out quite new niches of research. He was a scholar’s scholar, a Hakluyt’s Hakluyt. He was true to the master’s calling: ‘I have brought to light the best & most perfect relations of such as were chief actors in the particular discoveries and searches of the same, giving unto every man his right, and leaving every one to maintain his own credit. And there we rightly leave David Beers Quinn, in the fine company of his calling’. |
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