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David Beers Quinn: A Tribute on behalf of the Archival Task Force of the Meta Incognita Project
Sir Ian Gourlay
On this special memorial occasion when so many have come together here to salute the life and work of a renowned teacher and man of extraordinary learning, it may be hard for you to believe - something even worth your telling to the Marines - that someone like me should be making an address to you, an audience of men and women of academic distinction, and members of this globally acclaimed and historic Hakluyt Society. Hard to believe because, as you will probably already have guessed, I can lay no personal claim to academic excellence of any sort! Indeed, there is worse to come. You need to know that you are being addressed by the sort of history student of whom an exasperated teacher once wrote, ‘The best that can be said of this boy is that there are gaps in his ignorance’.
Why then should I presume to speak to you at all? Well, I could say it is because as a former military person, I can quickly recognize a direct order when I hear one, however gracefully worded! But more seriously it is because I, as the one-time lay chairman of ARTAF, a small UK-based archival research task force which boasted David Quinn among its founder members, count it a real privilege to be offered the chance to make a contribution, on behalf of my task force colleagues, to today's broad tribute to David, by expressing the indebtedness we all felt to him for the professional impact he made on the team's work and for the inspiration and delight he so consistently and happily afforded us by his presence.
The Meta Incognita Project
Let me first set the scene to explain David's involvement with ARTAF and its parent project. It was in 1990 that the Canadian Museum of Civilization set up the Meta Incognita Project to investigate and preserve the arctic sites in and around Baffin Island linked to the expeditions of Martin Frobisher of 1576, 1577 and 1578. Meta Incognita means the Unknown Shore and was the name given by Queen Elizabeth I to the arctic area in which the search started for the elusive North West Passage. The Project Steering Committee was headed by one of Canada's most renowned scholars, Thomas H. B. Symons, Founding President and Vanier Professor Emeritus of Trent University. From the outset he recognized the need for extensive archival research in Britain, and in 1992 ARTAF held its Inaugural Meeting at the Royal Geographical Society in London ‘to complement the archaeological, oral history, and other work done on site in Canada’. In the next five years some forty meetings were held and a score of written Research Reports were submitted to the Project Steering Committee, culminating in the_ publication in 1999 by the Canadian Museum of Civilization of two handsome award-winning volumes entitled Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery. Today the Steering Committee continues to work on finalizing publication of a complementary third volume centred on the findings of archaeological research on site in Canada.
Quinn's contribution
In I992 David, then in his 80's, was among the very first to sign up for ARTAF alongside Helen Wallis (so sadly no longer with us) and Ann Shirley, both eminent in their own respective fields of polar history and history of cartography and exploration. Ann has described David as ‘vastly learned’ and as one who ‘wore his learning lightly’. Professor Symons recently described his research and writings as having ‘illuminated every corner of the first Elizabethan Age ... and brought immense knowledge and critical insight to the work of the Meta Incognita team’. Not surprisingly, given his encyclopedic and indeed matchless knowledge of early exploration of North America, he was to make a sustained and critical contribution to the whole Project. We felt enormously privileged to have him with us in ARTAF; as he perceptively steered our research into productive areas. Over the years, there was never a topic of any consequence which was not referred to him for comment or advice.
As news of the Project spread, so new archival researchers started to join ARTAF one by one, not only from the UK but from Canada and the United States. (they came with specialist knowledge in subjects ranging from cartography, mines and metallurgy, to Elizabethan ship-building and navigation and sixteenth-century medicine and nutrition - and yes, we even boasted our own ship's doctor, Surgeon Vice Admiral Sir James Watt! (they worked as unpaid volunteers, all of them in turn utterly taken by the fascinating story which was emerging from the archives, a tale which started with Frobisher's brave but fruitless search for the North West passage and which later became a blatant and equally fruitless chase for gold, with a supportive Queen Elizabeth urging everyone on and a watchful and inimical King of Spain receiving progress reports from various sources, including a spy embarked in one of Frobisher's ships.
David's contribution to all this was not just scholastic. He was the star personality in what was a small band of complementing archival researchers linked in growing friendship by a common interest, breaking new ground as they went and united in the belief that they were doing something of lasting worth They worked selflessly and hard, and David, the self-described ‘historical workhorse’ led by example. What impressed me so much as the group's lay leader, was the way the members hastened to share their discoveries and went out of their way to help one another This was truly an interdisciplinary team effort and gave me an unforgettable glimpse of how people of different persuasions, nationalities, ages and backgrounds can bond and work for the common good in close harmony together. As for David, one team member Kirsten Seaver, American historian and author with Norse origins, remarked that ‘he gave of himself generously, both when we met as a group, and when anyone of us went to him individually for advice’. She once confided in me that she always arrived early for ARTAF meetings at the RGS, ‘as I knew that David always arrived even earlier than I did, and I could then be sure of having a good chat with him'.
I owe to historian and ARTAF friend Robert Baldwin the reminder to me of David’s ‘delight in and inspiration of so many younger historians’, while Jim McDermott, author of the highly acclaimed biography Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer, echoes these sentiments, remarking that ‘his great virtue of both encouraging and enthusing others in their own work (was) a quality as important as his own contribution to the field itself’. Always even-handed in his comments, I recall David once questioning some point in a draft paper by our ‘spy expert’ Canadian Dr Bernard Allaire. ending with the words, ‘but the scholarship is impeccable’. I am sure that Bernard must have gone off purring. What an encouragement and from such a source! Come to think of it, what has any one of us here achieved in any field without encouragement from those we followed and looked up to?
As for my own testimony, you can imagine that I had to climb a steepish curve of learning over the years in an unfamiliar environment. David was never slow to put me right. He did so always with a kind and gentle sense of humour. Look how charmingly I was taught to spell ‘archaeology’. Should it boast two ‘a’s or just one I wondered. ‘Well’, the Professor counselled me, ‘You are safer with the two ‘a’s’, and went on with that twinkle of his in his eye, ‘It isn't just the English, you know who do it. The better Americans even do it.’
Oh yes! I stand at the salute before him. I had never thought to encounter figure of such academic distinction, great erudition, and sheer power of recall! Indeed, all of us in ARTAF looking back salute his example and cherish his memory. Not least do we, his colleagues and friends, remember his energy, loyalty, resilience, determination and courage too, as down those long years he travelled regularly from Liverpool to London and back for our six-weekly meetings. Even as late as 1997 he was not deterred from crossing the Atlantic despite his frailty of sight and limb, so as to attend and address the memorable Meta Incognita Symposium in Peterborough, Canada and to celebrate his eighty-eighth birthday to boot! There is no one better to voice ARTAF’s filial tribute to David and speak on behalf of the Meta Incognita Project as a whole than Professor Tom Symons, and he is delighted for me to pass on these words of his to you at this special gathering of the Hakluyt Society: ‘David Quinn was both mentor and doyen of this great research enterprise, and brought to it, as well, qualities of kindness and civility which contributed to the remarkable good humour and conviviality that prevailed throughout long and often arduous years of cooperative research. He has left many fine monuments. His contribution to the success of the Meta Incognita Project is surely one of them.’ |
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