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Quinn, the Hakluyt Society, and Map Friends (1909-2002)
Mrs Sarah Tyacke
Quinn and the British Museum 1939 -
David Quinn always said that he delivered his first Hakluyt Society volume to the then secretary, Edward Lynam in the British Museum on the day the German-Russian pact of non-aggression was signed. This was the 24 August 1939. Phil Harris in his History of the British Museum Library (London, 1998) describes how the Director of the British Museum assembled all available members of staff and packing and despatch commenced at 7.30 am. At the end of the day ten tons of manuscripts had been sent off to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.
Quinn entered the grand gates of the British Museum in the middle of this great evacuation which went on for another week before war was declared on 3 September 1939. He made his way through the brown vans of the Great Western Railway in the forecourt and went into the Round Reading Room where he left the completed text of The Voyages and Colonising Enterprise of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (second series no. 83 and 84) with the superintendent in the centre of the Round Reading Room. These precious manuscripts were to be given directly into the hands of Edward Lynam, Superintendent of the Map Room, as he could not get through to the Map Room. Lynam was secretary to the Society from 1931 to 1945 and then President. These were to be the two volumes for 1938 and 1939. Quinn was then thirty and this was his first book for the Society.
This is a somewhat dramatic illustration of Quinn’s long association with the Society and with the map fraternity based in the British Museum/British Library. Some may also think it says much about the absolute centrality of research into historical manuscripts and archives and writing to Quinn’s life - that it was the book that, irrespective of the coming war, had to get through to Edward Lynam on that day. Apart from Edward Lynam (whose bicycle lamp for sentimental reasons used to grace my own book shelves in the BM) Quinn worked in particular with Peter Skelton, Lynam’s successor, Paul Hulton of Prints and Drawings - on the John White drawings - and, of course, Helen Wallis, also of the Map Room. For myself he was ever helpful with his encyclopaedic memory, and he and I worked together for the Society as President and an Honorary Secretary between 1982/3-7. I was secretary jointly with Terence Armstrong at that time and between us and Alexa Barrow we kept the Society going and the books coming out - or I like to think so.
Skelton and Quinn
Peter Skelton was Honorary Secretary of the Society for twenty years from 1946. As you might expect, Skelton was an innovative secretary and moved the Society’s publishers to Cambridge University Press where he brought out The Roanoke Voyages for Quinn in 1955. He and Quinn also brought out the facsimile edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations in 1965.As was customary then, and now, willing hands were enlisted to get other more intractable volumes out. Quinn found himself helping out in 1960 with the James A. Williamson’s edition of Cabot’s Voyages, contributing some additional texts while Skelton did the relevant cartography, an alliance which continued from Skelton’s time through to Helen Wallis’s time in the map worlds.
Quinn and the Society
On Peter Skelton’s death in 1970, David took over the editing of the Hakluyt Handbook and eventually, as is the way with such collaborative works, the volumes emerged four years later, in 1974. It included Skelton’s map contribution and also Helen Wallis’s additional contribution on the Edward Wright map of 1599 and her contribution on the discovery of the Pacific. Quinn himself wrote about Hakluyt’s own reputation from contemporaries to the present day and in this essay we can see what Quinn himself thought was still needed: He referred to Richard Hakluyt’s A particular discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde comodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted … written in the yere 1584. More commonly known as ‘Western Planting. Here Quinn said the Hakluyt Society had missed an opportunity in its long life to publish the most important Hakluyt work, which still remained in manuscript. It fell to me and to Paul Hair as President to finally issue David and Alison Quinn’s facsimile edition of this work twenty years’ later in 1993 - a normal time span some might say for the grander publications of the Society but none the worse for that.
At that time David and Alison also gathered together for the Society all the material they could find for the obscure history of the twenty-five or so trips to the north Virginian coasts in the first decade of the seventeenth century: The English New England Voyages 1602-8 which eventually came out in 1983 in David’s own Presidency. Perseverance, loyalty (and, of course, scholarship) are without doubt the mainstay of the Society and David Quinn epitomized these qualities in all his publications.
On a more personal note, David and Alison used to stay with us sometimes after Council and AGM meetings, including the night of the great storm in October 1987, not that that prevented the normal procedures: the talk would to be about history, old colleagues whom my husband Nicholas knew too, and David’s early years. I especially remember his recollections of life under the ‘Black and Tans’ as a boy in Clara, County Offaly, and the day they came through the village and debated whether to throw a grenade into his home or into the village hall. Luckily for him and us they chose the village hall. How as a young boy he would walk to the nearest town to buy books with money he had saved, and how when he got into a really good school, the Belfast Academical Institution and then got to Queen’s University he met amongst others Theo Moody and R. B. McDowell who, in his 90s is still an active denizen of the IHR known to many of us here. The whisky - in moderation - flowed and the discussions of history and historians prevailed. The same was as true after his 90th birthday party when he kept us, one of his grandsons, and Robert Baldwin up - pleased to have such a participative late-night group.
As for the Society itself, David Quinn was a conscientious President. He used to say that he managed everything by taking a nap when he got in from teaching so that he was fresh for his research and writing in the evenings. This was just as well as the Society had a lot on its plate at that time. Some will remember the first proposal for an edition of Malaspina’s voyages which failed to come to fruition, in spite of great efforts by the proposers. The Society could not afford the publication. Twenty years later we now have the first volume, under new management. There was also the first attempt at Captain Charles Sturt, which foundered then (but, luckily, not now, and Sturt’s account should appear shortly), and the sad retirement of Sir Gilbert Laithewaite as a trustee, the last of the old school diplomats on Council, ‘men of affairs’ as the late Eila Campbell put it. There was also an overhaul of the Society’s financial affairs over which David presided in a most diplomatic way - tea in the grand old office of the Principal Keeper of Printed Books at the British Library - as well as the long-running saga of the Kraus reprints. Alexa Barrow knows where the bodies are buried!
Quinn and more map friends
As others have already said, David was the great hunter and publisher of manuscripts in the field. In this context, I am reminded of the publication of the Jean Rotz atlas (1546) in 1981 which Helen Wallis edited, with a host of collaborators, for the Roxburgh Club, including David Quinn, at the behest of Viscount Eccles. Eccles, you may remember, had been the education minister in the Macmillan Government (his nickname was ‘Smarty-boots’) and then Chairman of the British Museum Trustees and then the first Chairman of the British Library Board. David, Alison, and Helen went to stay at Eccles’s farm at Chute, where the conversation occasionally strayed, perhaps unwisely, beyond scholarship. I was reliably informed at the time that, unusually for David Eccles, he received some spirited views, which ran contrary to his own conservative stance, from Alison and David. I wish I had been there to see the encounter first hand.
David’s work with map people was thus very longstanding and continued throughout his life, probably because he had a real interest in geography and maps from at least his university days. Of particular interest to me was his work on the manuscript of The Last Voyage of Thomas Cavendish 1591-92, published in 1975. The manuscript text is in the collection of Paul Mellon. Quinn included a cartographic appendix on the two associated Pacific charts, which is where in the genealogy of Quinn map friends I come in. I attempted to help with this. There are two charts, one in Florence and one in the Algemeen Rijksarchief in the Hague, both of which illuminate Cavendish’s circumnavigation of the globe - and they continue to perplex. The Florence map almost certainly comes from the Robert Dudley collection for Grand Duke Cosimo III de Medici for whom Dudley worked. Robert Dudley was the husband of Cavendish’s natural sister Anne, and on Cavendish’s death administered his will. By this means he may have acquired at least one of the charts. He formed his own chart collection to publish his own atlas of sea charts, the Arcano del mare which came out many years later in 1646. The chart bears the letters ‘R B’ and I couldn’t identify this ‘R B’ then for David Quinn and still cannot! Quinn explained a lot but often posed difficult questions for us to solve.
He was always very encouraging: aged ninety-one in the year 2000, he very kindly wrote to me, in his almost indecipherable hand, that he was delighted to have my chart-making piece for the History of Cartography, volume III. As usual he then added to my work by reminding me that he had ‘about 1935 found the [chart] showing the outline of the west European coasts as part of the cover of the earliest Portsmouth [Society] record volume. Evidently it was reused parchment.’ He had it copied and let Professor E.G. R. Taylor have it. He further wrote me that ‘EGR was only interested in it as to whether it had names on it and not as a cartographic record itself.’ He then told me to go to Cadiz to find more charts!
I fancy, like so many of his map friends, I shall be following up David’s leads for many years to come and keeping his Society volumes close to hand. |
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