Selma Barkham
Selma de Lotbinière Barkham, OC, ONL (née Huxley; March 8, 1927 – May 3, 2020), was a British-Canadian historian and geographer of international standing in the fields of the maritime history of Canada and of the Basque Country.
In 1950 she decided to spend some time visiting relatives in Canada where she settled in Montreal, working for the Yellow Pages, as a teacher and finally as the Librarian of the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of McGill.
In the summer of 1950, he had left England on motorcycle, with a fellow student of the University of London, John Stoddart, to study the rural architecture of Andalucía in southern Spain.
In 1954, the newly married couple moved to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, where Barkham set up an architecture practice and they started a family (Children: Thomas, Oriana, Michael and Serena).
She developed a plan to research, in archives of Spain and France, Basque fisheries in Canada in the 16th and 17th centuries, thereby combining her personal and intellectual interests.
She received a thousand dollars from an anonymous Canadian donor, which allowed her to pay the rent, and she began making her first finds of importance in archives.
Little by little she discovered thousands of manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries, mostly in old Spanish, relating to the Basque fisheries in Terra Nova: including insurance policies, lawsuits, wills, charter-parties, crew agreements and lists of provisions and equipment.
Furthering her analysis of these documents, she was able to reconstruct most aspects of those Basque fisheries particularly in the 16th century: their scale and evolution, the organization and financing of the expeditions, types of ships, composition of crews, routes and destinations, fishing and whaling seasons, shipwrecks, the sailors' life, work and death, their food and clothing, contact with Amerindians, markets, etc.
Regarding the destination of the ships until the end of that century the manuscripts showed Barkham that, in contrast to the cod fishing vessels, the whalers went to about twelve ports of an area of Terra Nova that the Basques called the "Gran Baya".
In relation to the whaling activity she concluded that the "Gran Baya" corresponded to the present-day Strait of Belle Isle, which separates Newfoundland from Labrador, and that the old whaling ports, mentioned in the archival documents, were situated along the north shore of the Strait of Belle Isle, or the south coast of Labrador and a small section of the Quebec coast.
Backed by her research so far, she organized an archaeological survey expedition to southern Labrador in the summer of 1977, with a grant from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
[2] She explored several harbours along the coast and discovered archaeological remains of Basque whaling bases, including at Red Bay, thereby confirming her historical work in Europe.
Among the manuscripts found by the researcher are some that refer to the sinking of several 16th-century Basque whaling galleons in specific ports of the "Gran Baya", whose modern names she had identified on the Labrador coast: one from Pasaia (1563) in Los Hornos (Pinware Bay), the Madalena from Mutriku (1565) and the María from San Sebastián (1572) in Chateo (Chateau Bay/Henley Harbour), and the San Juan from Pasaia (1565) and the Madalena from Bordeaux (1574/75) in Buttes (Red Bay).
[4][5] From then on, Barkham continued her historico-geographical work parallel to the land and underwater excavations, under Tuck and Grenier respectively, at Red Bay which was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1979.
The press release notifying her appointment to the Order of Canada (1981) refers to the fact that, besides her discoveries in Labrador, she "uncovered a period (1540-1600) in Canadian history about which almost nothing was known".
In 2009, she was elected Fellow of the international organization Wings WorldQuest, which "recognizes and supports visionary women who are advancing scientific inquiry and environmental conservation".
