Barry M. Gough

Barry M. Gough
Barry Morton Gough is a global maritime and naval historian.
Education
Gough was educated at Victoria High School and was a 1957 graduate of Victoria College, which preceded University of Victoria. He completed his bachelor of education degree at University of British Columbia and master's studies at University of Montana, then earning his PhD at King's College London. His doctoral research on seapower and geopolitics across the Pacific Rim became the inaugural publication in 1971 of the University of British Columbia Press: The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810–1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy. Former Dominion Archivist W. Kaye Lamb remarked that "author and publisher alike have set a high standard for the publications of the new Press." An expanded edition was later published by Heritage House as Britannia's Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812–1914.
Years after the earned doctorate, Gough was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of London in 1991 for distinguished contributions to Imperial and Commonwealth history. In June 2021, University of Victoria conferred on him another doctorate, an Honorary Doctor of Laws.
Teaching and consulting
Initially returning to Victoria High School as teaching staff, Gough became Lecturer at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, and co-director of the Centre for Pacific Northwest Studies. From 1972 to 2004 in the history faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, he was named associate professor, then Professor and University Research Professor. He was founding coordinator of Canadian Studies at Laurier and served as coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies and Assistant Dean of Arts. The material in a series of public lectures he organized was published with his introduction as In Search of the Visible Past.
Gough was asked to prepare a historical legal claims dossier for the Tribal Council of the Nuu Chah Nulth in the Meares Island case (Moses Martin et al. v H.M. the Queen) in 1985 and later, on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice, to prepare materials on the Alaska inland waters case, Alaska v the United States of America (2005).
His Great Lakes shipwrecks research led to involvement with HMCS Haida and him becoming the ship's official historian. Gough was advisory editor to Macmillan Publishing for World Explorers and Discoverers (1992) and was editor-in-chief of the magazine American Neptune based at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts (1997–2003).
At his retirement from WLU after thirty-three years, Gough was appointed Professor Emeritus.
Affiliations and affinities
Gough is a former president of the British Columbia Historical Federation and after his term was named BCHF honorary president.
He worked with the Vancouver Maritime Museum as curator for the Vancouver 125 exhibition, "Captain George Vancouver" (2011), and was advisor to the Maritime Museum of BC, Victoria, on projects such as "War of 1812 in the Pacific" (2012). Continuing as historical consultant to CFB Naval and Military Museum, Esquimalt, B.C., he was in 2017 curator of the Canada 150 Public History Project, "The Royal Canadian Navy and the Pacific Gateway to Wider Seas." A corresponding video production was released the following year as Our Seas Our Coasts Our Navy.
Awards and medals
Barry Gough and his writings have received honours, awards and prizes in the United States, the U.K., Spain and Canada.
The British Maritime Foundation announced in November 2015 that Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon won the Mountbatten Literary Award 2015 for best literary contribution to the understanding of the importance of the seas.
The highest award bestowed by the Washington State Historical Society, the Robert Gray Medal for lifetime achievement, was given to Gough in September 2016.
The Naval Association of Canada presented Gough with the 2019 Admirals’ Medal, bestowed upon individual Canadians in recognition of his lifetime achievement as a global maritime and naval historian "through some thirty major volumes and numerous articles, ... a body of work which has earned him international acclaim as a Canadian scholar of the highest order."
A life member of the Society for the History of Discoveries, Gough was in November 2019 named a Fellow of the Society "for his many outstanding publications in Canadian and British imperial and naval history; for his fine record of teaching and mentoring students, particularly at Wilfrid Laurier University; and for his contributions to the scholarly community of imperial, international and maritime historians."
Gough has received the Psi Upsilon Distinguished Service Alumnus Award, the Wilfrid Laurier University Alumni Hoffmann-Little Award for Outstanding Teaching, and the Distinguished Alumni award in 2019 from the University of Victoria.
For civic contributions in both Ontario and British Columbia, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal.
In November 2014, Gough received the Maritime Museum of B.C.'s 2014 SS Beaver Medal for Maritime Excellence.
Prizes have included the medals, awards and honourable mentions from a number of organizations: the North American Society for Oceanic History, the Writers Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize.
The Keith Matthews Award recognizes outstanding publications in the field of nautical research. When Possessing Meares Island won it in 2022, it was the fourth time Gough's books had won. The society's inaugural award had been given in 1985 to Gunboat Frontier. In 2011 the award went to Historical Dreadnoughts and in 2018 to Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty. CNRS had awarded him honourable mention in 1993 for The Northwest Coast, in 2008 for Fortune's a River and in 2015 for Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon.
Published works
Gough's dissertation, the basis of his first book, argued that British Columbia owed its existence to British sea power, that the Hudson's Bay Company was not the only agent in the commercial and political project of creating British Columbia's boundaries. His investigations of early navigation in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Strait of Georgia resulted in publication of Charles Duncan's long-neglected plan and elevation of Cape Flattery and Fuca's Pillar, charted by Duncan in August 1788 and first published in 1790. "I've always felt the seas were blindsided in the writing of Canadian history, and I have made it my own particular calling to turn that around," Gough said in 1994.
Gough's 1997 account of Sir Alexander Mackenzie's overland explorations to the Arctic and Pacific coasts, First Across the Continent, continues as a central contribution to the study of North American exploration in the 18th and 19th centuries. The explorer's journey across the Great Divide to the Pacific, following indigenous pathways and guided by their knowledge and European navigational science, is also examined at some length in Canada's History magazine.
In The Elusive Mr. Pond, Gough studied the soldier, fur trader and explorer Peter Pond, historically important in pushing northwest into the Mackenzie River basin and establishing the North West Company.
Pax Britannica in 2014 explored the intersection of British naval reach and the guarding of imperial commerce during the post-Napoleonic century.
Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty (2017) received early acclaim as an inquiry into the role of personality in the making of history: the administration of the Royal Navy in the Great War by First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John ("Jacky") Fisher and his young political master, First Lord Winston Churchill.
In The Times Literary Supplement, Jan Morris wrote: "This enthralling book by an eminent Canadian naval historian is a work of profound scholarship and interpretation…. Barry Gough has himself heightened the book's sense of personal drama by surrounding his central characters with powerful expositions of the state of the world around them." James Wood in The Ormsby Review leads with the Morris comments, then attends to Gough's accounts of the struggles within the Admiralty and British Cabinet in formulating strategy and policy for war and the "bitter complications" of Churchill's and Fisher's fall from power. He wraps up with the essentials "the daemonic duo" did accomplish. The Australian Naval Institute forum noted an approach in which the author "distilled and weighed the rancour, political intrigue, strategic and operational challenges and the (mostly) dismal record of the war at sea up to Jutland. The well-known politicians and admirals return to life with all their proclivities – admirable and less so." British politician and military historian Keith Simpson called it "a fascinating study." A reviewer in Finest Hour: The Journal of Winston Churchill and his Times, saying the dual biography was long past due, noted the primary sources and valuable insights into the fraught partnership and complexities of the issues confronting Fisher and Churchill. The bulletin of The Churchill Project at Hillsdale College called it "a highly readable landmark study" and "a hugely important book...sure to join the shelf of vital Churchill studies." One military-website commentator, observing that Gough writes "history as literature," says this "places Dr. Gough in a distinguished company of historians who are also great and readable writers. Sir Steven Runciman, Barbara Tuchman and Sir Winston Churchill come to mind." He adds this is "likely to remain the definitive work on this subject for years to come."
The following year, research in Spanish and English archival sources became the 2018 book by Gough and Charles Borras, The War Against the Pirates: British and American Suppression of Caribbean Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century, which examines the roots of piracy in those seas and how its suppression laid the foundation for the decline of the Spanish empire in the Americas.
The third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Canada, edited by Stephen Azzi and Barry M. Gough, was published in April 2021. This carries forward Gough's work on the 1999 original edition and 2010 second edition.
Gough's account of the evolving Meares Island situation and of his research participation with it won the Keith Matthews Award for Best Book at the 2022 AGM of the Canadian Nautical Research Society. The CNRS citation notes that the book links "early maritime history, Indigenous land rights, and modern environmental advocacy in the Clayoquot Sound region" and "connects 18th century Indigenous-colonial trade relations to more recent historical upheavals and bridges the gap between centuries…."
Possessing Meares Island won the 2021 Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing, announced at the 2022 conference of the British Columbia Historical Federation.
The North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) announced in June 2022 that for the Meares Island account, Gough had been awarded the year's John Lyman Award in Canadian Naval and Maritime History.
Dave Obee, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Times Colonist, described the Meares Island book as "a superb examination of a rather small location that is highly significant to British Columbia as a whole." Calling it engaging and highly readable, Obee commented that the book has brought together Indigenous history, maritime history, land rights and environmental issues, and that it would be hard to consider any one element without the others.
William S. Dudley of Maryland wrote that Gough brings the reader "face to face with historical origins of modern environmental problems, involving the rights of Indigenous inhabitants of ancient lands as opposed to interests of private corporations, provinces, and the nation of Canada." Dudley added the author shows how the understanding of the word "possessing" changed "depending on which culture and at what period of time. It is also a concept that can exist simultaneously in the minds of concerned people, whether they are Indigenous, white traders, modern logging corporations, environmentalists, historians, or tourists."
Aimee Greenaway of British Columbia History magazine interviewed Gough about the initial legal researches and how the manuscript later evolved. Writing about some of the significant people in Clayoquot Sound's long history, the historian explains how he was working with "a complicated story," one of the "multi-layered, multi-disciplinary situations" from roots back hundreds of years that affect present-day developments.
Reviewer Jason Colby commented that in "tracking the consistent Indigenous presence on and control of Meares Island, Gough "does an exemplary job of showing how the case both reflected and contributed to changing the balance between federal and provincial views of native rights in Canada."
Possessing Meares Island was a finalist for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, the 2022 BC Book Awards' George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, the J.W. Dafoe Foundation's John W. Dafoe Book Prize and the 2022 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
Selected bibliography
The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810–1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy. UBC Press, 1971. . Rev. edition, 2016.
Canada. Modern Nations in Historical Perspective Series. Prentice Hall, 1975. .
New Dimensions in Ethnohistory: Papers of the Second Laurier Conference on Ethnohistory and Ethnology. Huron College, University of Western Ontario, 1983. Co-edited with Laird Christie. Canadian Ethnology Service, Mercury Series Paper 120. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1991. .
The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade and Discoveries to 1812. UBC Press, 1992. . UBC Press 1980 first edition published as Distant Dominion.
British Merchantile Interests in the Making of the Peace of Paris, 1763: Trade, War and Empire. Studies in British History. Edwin Mellen Press, 1992.
The Falkland Islands/Malvinas: The Contest for Empire in the South Atlantic. London: Continuum, 1992/Athlone Press, 1992. .
; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. .
"Possessing Meares Island," The Journal of Canadian Studies 33, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 177–85.
Geography and Exploration: Biographical Portraits. Vol. 4, Scribner Science Reference Series. Princeton, N.J.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. .
Britain, Canada and the North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and Dominion, 1778-1914. Ashgate Variorum, 2004. .
Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America. Harbour Publishing, 2007. .
HMCS Haida: Anatomy of a Destroyer. Vanwell Publishing/Looking Back Press, 2009.
Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder, Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History. Seaforth/Pen & Sword, 2010. .
Juan de Fuca's Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2012. .
From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War. Heritage House Publishing, 2014. .
The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, Fur Trader and Explorer Who Opened the Northwest. Douglas & McIntyre, 2014. .
Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. .
Britannia's Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812–1914. Heritage House Publishing, 2016. .
"The Caneing in Conduit Street," Trafalgar Chronicle: Journal of the 1805 Club 25 (2015), 201–12.
That Hamilton Woman: Emma and Nelson. Seaforth Publishing, 2016 , in conjunction with the exhibition Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity, 3 Nov 2016 – 17 Apr 2017, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; and Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016. .
Barry Gough and Charles Borras. The War Against the Pirates: British and American Suppression of Caribbean Piracy in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. ; eBook
2nd ed., Scarecrow Press, October 2010. 3rd ed., Stephen Azzi and Barry M. Gough, eds. Rowman & Littlefield, April 2021. , eBook.
Possessing Meares Island: A Historian's Journey into the Past of Clayoquot Sound. Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2021. (hc), (EPUB).
See also
Churchill College, Cambridge
References
1938 births
Living people
20th-century Canadian historians
Canadian naval historians
Canadian maritime historians
Canadian male non-fiction writers
War of 1812
Historians of Canada
Academic staff of the Royal Military College of Canada
Writers from Victoria, British Columbia
University of British Columbia alumni
University of Montana alumni
Alumni of King's College London
Fellows of King's College London
21st-century Canadian historians