Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Travellers. Canada to 1900: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English from 1577 by Elizabeth Waterston, et al.

1991; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1991.0021

1913-4835

Leslie Monkman,

Canadian Identity and History

Elizabeth Waterston et ah, The Travellers. Canada to 1900: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English from 1577 (Guelph: Media Dis­ tribution, University of Guelph, 1989). viii, 321. $49.00 cloth. Illustrated. The Travellers has its origins in Elizabeth Waterston’s research for the land­ mark chapters on travel literature first published in the Literary History of Canada in 1965. In a chronological survey of books published in English be­ tween the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, her most recent study presents an annotated bibliography of more than seven hundred exploration narra­ tives, personal journals, and travel accounts focussing on Canada “in the sense of covering more than one region of the country as it was constituted in the time of the particular traveller” (i). Seventy volumes published after 1900 appear as a supplement so that titles dealing with Canada in an earlier period but not published until this century can be included. A lengthy, if inevitably selective, bibliography of secondary materials completes the book. In the early 1970s, Professor Waterston’s research led to the completion of detailed data sheets on individual travel books with an eye to the creation of a full data base. With subsequent assistance from Ian Easterbrook, Bernard Katz, and Kathleen Scott, The Travellers is the fulfillment of that goal and is available as a limited edition monograph of five hundred copies, as an IN­ MAGIC database, and through the automated catalogue of the University of Guelph library. Although information in the database includes all available information on each author’s nationality and profession as well as comments by other bibliographers such as Marie Tremaine and R.G. Moyles, annota­ tions in The Travellers stress basic bibliographical information supplemented by comments on the scope and tone of each cited volume. Annotations range in length from a couple of lines to half a page, and if many include the barest of evaluative comments along the lines of “vivid account” and “detailed report,” others reflect the authority developed by Professor Waterston over the past thirty years in her study of this material. Thus, she can pinpoint the influence of Charlevoix, Hennepin, and Lahontan on Jonathan Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North America or can cite Francis Hall’s Travels in Canada and in the United States in 1816 and 1817 (1818) for having “best exploited interest in the French presence in Canada” (30) in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Other comments may be briefer but no less encompassing: John McDonald’s Emi­ gration to Canada (1822) is the “saddest of the anti-emigration books” (38); Paul Kane is “emphatically the most interesting writer of the 1850s” (111), and Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) fixes “the redirection of travel accounts from scenery to people” and brings “the narrator successfully to the forefront of the travel book” (63). 363 In addition to an author/title index, The Travellers includes a lengthy sub­ ject index of more than a thousand categories with entries by region, placename , ethnic group, institution, and theme. Twenty-eight sub-headings un­ der “transport” lead readers from multiple entries for caleche and cariole, through horse-drawn bus and phaeton, to toboggan and tugboat. Kingston is served by more than a hundred citations with seven more for a sub-category on penitentiaries. Crime is sub-divided into arson, desertion, murder, and smuggling; bears get six citations with sub-categories for grizzlies and po­ lar bears. Students of Canadian literature will be led to an account of a visit with Susanna Moodie in James Ritchie’s To Canada with Emigrants (1885), while Robert Slaney’s Short Journal of a Visit to Canada (1861) and Burrows Sleigh’s Pine Forests and Hacmatack Clearings recount similar encounters with Judge Haliburton. Beginning with the earliest accounts of Frobisher’s second voyage pub­ lished in 1577 and 1578, The Travellers also expands its parameters to in­ clude well-known works such as Haliburton’s General Description of Nova Scotia (1823) and Moodie’s Roughing It In the Bush (1852); however, with almost three times as many entries for this period as the section on “Travel and Description” in R.E...