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BOOK REVIEWS David B. Quinn. European Approaches to North analyse social and demographic trends and so America, 1450-1640. Variorum Collected Studies; have been unfashionable for more than a decade" Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Variorum Press, (221). It is, however, useful for historians and 1998. x + 342 pp., illustrations, maps, charts, others interested in the past to know what hap• index. US $101.95, cloth; ISBN 0-86078-769-9. pened, or at least what is likely to have happened. Quinn may be no exponent of the latest Paris fad This most recent collection of David Quinn's but he remains a scholar whose interpretation of essays on the early European exploration and events inevitably commands respect, precisely settlement of North America follows his Explor• because he is always more interested in making ers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625 (London, sense of the document than in validating a theo• 1990). Like its useful predecessor, European retical preconception. Approaches brings together Quinn's contributions What of the longer essays in this volume, in to several disparate publications. Although most which Quinn cautiously dons the unfamiliar of the essays in the present volume have appeared analytic robe? "Englishmen and Others" is a blunt in scholarly journals or conference proceedings and therefore interesting assessment of how since the late 1980s, that previous exposure does Quinn's compatriots viewed themselves and other not detract from the usefulness of this book. The Europeans on the eve of colonization. The final topics range from imagined Atlantic islands, to essay, "Settlement Patterns in Early Modern perceptions of American ecology, the French fur Colonization," is an analysis of the state of early trade, the settlement of Bermuda, editing Hakluyt, European colonization by 1700. Here, as else• and so on. All are in the Quinn style: methodical, where, Quinn provides a corrective to textbook thoughtful, and authoritative without condescen• positivism by providing a clear sense of the sion. Three of the longer essays are published continued fragility of contemporary European here for the first time, and in these Quinn takes on settlement abroad. These are thought-provoking more general sixteenth- and early seventeenth- essays and welcome from a scholar so widely century themes: the literature of travel and dis• read. The newly-published essays are not, how• covery, the English abroad, and early settlement ever, properly edited, resulting in repeated text patterns. These are, in a sense, views from the (157), redundant or obscure notes (166-167) and summit of a long life of scholarship and as such other minor infelicities in style or notation (319). merit a different kind of attention than we might As usual with Ashgate Variorum editions, accord, for example, a discussion of the early the book is a series of photo-reproduced texts, but cartography of Maine or an essay on the Rotz these are generally legible and the whole volume Atlas of 1542. has been given consecutive pagination, thus Those familiar with Quinn's work would making practical the short index of personal and likely agree that his is an empirical muse. Be• place names. Several of the cartographic essays cause he approaches early European expansion are illustrated and although a gray-scale fog has through meticulous examination of the extant descended on some of the charts, most are clear evidence, he incidentally generates valuable enough for the purposes at hand. Given the au• bibliographic essays - "The Literature of Travel thor, the range of material covered, and the syn• and Discovery, 1560-1600" in the present volume optic ambitions of the longer essays, this is a being an excellent example. Quinn will some• volume that in the best of worlds would belong in times find a document here or an implication any collection devoted to early European mari• there, heretofore overlooked, and often proposes time enterprise in the Americas. The very steep ways in which more might be squeezed from cost of this reprint will unfortunately limit its familiar evidence, modestly framing such insights circulation and therefore prevent it from getting as interpretative possibilities rather than as man• its proper recognition. datory reinterpretations. As he admitted in 1987, he is noted "for writing and speaking more about Peter E. Pope what happened rather than why, for failure to St. John's, Newfoundland 83 84 The Northern Mariner Kevin C. Robbins. City on the Ocean Sea: La funds for Protestant armies resisting Louis XIII in Rochelle, 1530-1650. Urban Society, Religion, the southwestern provinces. Tharay even repre• and Politics on the French Atlantic Frontier. sented the bourgeoisie of La Rochelle in Paris at Leiden, New York and Kôln: Brill, 1997. xvii + the famous meeting of the Estates General in 464 pp., maps, figures, tables, appendices, select 1614-1615, to which the town sent no Roman bibliography, indices. /270, US $159, cloth; Catholic clergy because it had driven them away. ISBN 90-04-10880-7. So intolerable to the French monarchy were such municipal independence and religious heresy that Rich in records, every old French town waits like Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu travelled to a box of chocolates for young historians to come give personal direction to the fateful siege of and gorge themselves. Kevin Robbins was al• 1627-1628. And it was there, in the military ready deep in the notarial and parish records when camp, that they founded the Company of New I first met him at La Rochelle in July 1992 and France, with headquarters at La Rochelle, to take this book is the PhD thesis he was then writing. control of Canada. Though many valuable old papers were lost or Robbin's study has a special importance in destroyed when the armies of Louis XIII and Canada because Québec historians, led by Marcel Cardinal Richelieu besieged and crushed La Trudel and Lucien Campeau, have stubbornly Rochelle in 1627-1628, that event and a previous ignored the religious element in the story of La royal siege in 1573 make the town particularly Rochelle's special link with New France. Most interesting. It was the most independent strong• English Canadian historians go along with this hold of Protestant heresy in France, fortified as it because they do not know any better. Is it too was in swampy terrain on the Atlantic coast well painful, even as late as the year 2000, to admit away from Paris and linked by its seaborne trade that Québec was part of the French monarchy's with Protestant Holland and England. system of imperial religious oppression? The structure and politics of municipal If the twisted Canadian version of events government are what interest Robbins and there is survives the publication of Robbins' findings, it originality in his modern study of the town's will be because this book is so hard to read. For history between the two sieges. No one had all its elegant typeface, excellent maps, and worked carefully through that half-century since scholarly footnotes, it is essentially a raw, Louis-Estienne Arcère published his Histoire de unedited thesis. Latinisms and clumsy phrasing la ville de La Rochelle et du pays d'Aulnais (2 abound on every page. Wills are "redacted," vols., La Rochelle, 1756-1757), although recent events are "imbricated;" the reader wilts in thick• doctoral theses by Katherine Faust, Judith Meyer, ets of adjectives and the "synergy" of "socio• David Parker, and Louis Pérouas have dealt with political" "confessionalization." There is a lot of the earlier and later periods. Robbins leaned on good stuff in this book but you have to fight for it. these theses wherever possible but for most of this Bon courage] book he was very much on his own in difficult manuscript sources. J.F. Bosher According to Robbins, an oligarchy of rich Ottawa, Ontario merchants and Calvinist clergy ruled the town from the middle of the sixteenth century, but was gradually challenged and then toppled by a resent• James Henderson. Sent Forth a Dove: Discovery ful "bourgeoisie" in league with artisans and of the Duyfken. Nedlands: University of Western shopkeepers. Things reached a crisis when an Australia Press, 1999. xiv + 218 pp., maps, photo• armed uprising on 9-12 August 1614 brought to graphs (b+w, colour), illustrations, appendices, power a permanent advisory Council of Forty- notes, index. AUS $45, cloth; ISBN 1-876268-24- Eight from the town's eight militia companies. By 7; AUS $34.95, paper; 1-876268-25-5. close examination of these events Robbins has succeeded in naming the leaders, tracing their On 18 November 1606, a small Dutch vessel affiliations, and establishing who they were in the sailed from the Dutch East India Company post at social scene. The most prominent was Jean Bantam, in the East Indies, for a voyage of dis• Tharay, who became powerful enough to organize covery to the east. Named Duyfken, or "Little piratical attacks on royalist shipping and to raise Dove," it was a relatively small "pinnace" of sixty Book Reviews 85 tons which had been used by the Dutch as a the Bounty slid down the ways in Lunenburg, NS, despatch vessel and minor warship in support of over a dozen serious replicas of historic vessels, their exploitation of the Spice Islands and East ranging from the Hudson Bay Company's Indian trade in general. Under the command of Nonsuch to Hudson's own Halve Maen, have Captain Willem Jansz, its task was to search out been launched, of which Australia's replica of the island already known as New Guinea. In the Cook's Endeavour is arguably the finest. Drawing event, the remarkably well documented and on the sentiment and skills of the community charted voyage brought a European vessel to the which had built Endeavour, Henderson, his first probable contact with the mainland of Aus• companions, and a resulting Foundation put tralia, at the mouth of the Pennefather River on together a remarkable campaign to raise funds for the western side of the Cape York Peninsula.