Glyndwr Williams, invariably ‘Glyn’, past associate editor and joint editor of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and perhaps best characterised as an historian of world-wide European exploration – in the widest sense of that word – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, died on 23 January 2022, just short of his ninetieth birthday.
Glyn's close involvement with this Journal began when, shortly before his grievously early death in 1976, Trevor Reese, its founding editor, recruited Glyn and me to be his associate editors. We succeeded as joint editors on Trevor’s death and remained in office until 1981, joined in 1979 by Andrew and Bernard Porter. By 1976 the Journal, whose first number appeared in 1972, was well established. It was brought out by Frank Cass, who had created his own publishing house, specialising in academic journals and in reprinting significant out of print books, many of them of relevance to the history of empire. The Journal appeared three times a year, not always, it must be said, on time in its early years. Each number contained substantial articles and a profusion of book reviews together with frequent review articles covering several titles. In our time we were responsible for two special issues, both of which were later published separately in book form: one in tribute to Nicholas Mansergh, which was edited by Norman Hillmer and Philip Wigley, and one, appearing in 1980, which we commissioned and edited ourselves. This was entitled ‘The British Atlantic Empire before the American Revolution’ and attracted a star-studded cast of authors, whose contributions are still frequently cited.
Glyn's parents were Welsh with a strong Methodist faith. They moved from the Rhondda Valley to Yeovil in Somerset where Glyn was born in 1932. His father was a manual worker in the leather industry. Glyn’s parents were passionate about education. While acknowledging that he was lucky in his schools, and his teachers, Glyn always said that his education began at home. Glyn’s Somerset upbringing was reflected, among other things, in a slight but unmistakable West Country inflection to his speech and a deep loyalty to the Somerset county cricket club.
Apart from visiting posts at universities overseas, the whole of Glyn’s academic life was spent within the frame of London University. He did his first degree at the London School of Economics, his Ph.D., completed in 1959, was undertaken at King's under the supervision of the then Rhodes Professor, Gerald Graham, and from 1959 until his retirement in 1997 he was employed at Queen Mary College, as it was then known, rising from Assistant Lecturer to Professor and ultimately to be Head of Department. As a convenor for many years and an invariably regular attender for even longer, he was a pillar of the Imperial History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.
What were to be the characteristic features that marked Glyn’s academic career appeared early. He quickly showed himself to be a prolific author. Eleven of the items in the list of his publications included in Pacific Empires, the essays in his honour, edited by Alan Frost and Jane Samson, that appeared in 1999, had been published in the 1960s. The full list covers five pages and a string of further works was to follow in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Glyn's last major book, Naturalists at Sea from Dampier to Darwin, was published in 2018.
As well as writing books, Glyn was a very assiduous editor of texts, above all for the Hakluyt Society, the body which had been publishing records of exploration since 1846. Glyn was a central figure in the Society's activities for many years, serving as its President from 1978 to 1982. He was joint editor in two of its major publishing projects. He also edited texts for the Hudson’s Bay Record Society and the Navy Records Society.
Everything that Glyn published was marked by the very high quality of its writing. He wrote with vigour and with a great clarity of exposition, which made him eminently readable. He was responsible for two books aimed specifically at students: The Expansion of Europe in the Eighteenth Century and, with his Queen Mary colleague John Ramsden, Ruling Britannia: A Political History of Britain 1688–1988. Evidently convinced that there was a large lay audience interested in the sea and in exploration, Glyn intended his work to reach such readers as well as scholarly ones without any lowering of academic standards. He succeeded in doing so in a series of attractively produced books. His writing embodied the tradition of Queen Mary College to make higher education available from its site, away from Bloomsbury on the Mile End Road, to a diverse spectrum of Londoners.
Glyn's thesis, which became his first book in 1962, was on the British search in the eighteenth century for a Northwest Passage between Europe and Asia. The Arctic and European efforts to penetrate it by sea together with expeditions sent overland into the Canadian north were subjects to which Glyn was to recur again and again. In 2002, forty years after his first book on the Northwest Passage, he brought out Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason. In 2009 he covered the story from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth in Arctic: Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. Glyn also edited three volumes of letters or journals together with a Miscellany of studies about the Canadian north for the Hudson's Bay Record Society. He and William Barr of the University of Saskatchewan were joint editors of two volumes of Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage published by the Hakluyt Society in 1994 and 1995.
Explorers, most obviously James Cook on his third voyage, approached the Arctic from the Pacific as well as from the Atlantic, and quite soon in his career, the Pacific became Glyn’s main interest. When he put together a collection of his articles and essays to be reprinted in a single volume in 2005, it was devoted to the Pacific with the title Buccaneers, Explorers and Settlers: British Enterprise and Encounters in the Pacific, 1670-1800. This title gives a fair indication of the scope of Glyn's concerns. He studied the activities of those who initially sailed into the Pacific to plunder Spanish wealth, the later officially sponsored voyages to explore and to establish a British presence there and the early history of the settlement of New South Wales. The ‘encounters’ that came more and more to absorb his interest were those between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the Pacific.
It seems that Glyn's interest in the Pacific was first stimulated by working on what was the greatest of all buccaneering efforts aimed against the Spanish: the circumnavigation of the world by a British naval force under George Anson from 1740 to 1744. In 1967 Glyn published Documents relating to Anson's Voyage Round the World for the Navy Records Society The Anson expedition, which he saw as holding ‘a unique and terrible place in British maritime history’, remained a topic that had a strong hold on him. He later edited a volume containing two contemporary accounts of the voyage as A Voyage Round the World by George Anson and in 1999 he used many previously unstudied manuscript sources in his The Prize of All the Oceans; the Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Voyage Round the World. His The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters 1570–1750 examined the full range of early English efforts to penetrate the Pacific.
What was probably Glyn's greatest contribution to the historiography of state sponsored Pacific exploration was his work jointly for the Hakluyt Sociey and the Museo Naval of Madrid, undertaken with three collaborators, to produce a three-volume translation into English from the Spanish original of The Malaspina Expedition, 1789–1794: Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina. This was published between 2001 and 2004. Glyn also wrote extensively about the life of the greatest of the Anglophone Pacific explorers, James Cook. The publication of Cook's Journals in three volumes by John Beaglehole between 1955 and 1967 had provided abundant material for conflicting interpretations of a person traditionally assumed not only to be a great navigator but also to be a human being of the highest order. To some later scholars, both Cook himself and his achievement have begun to look distinctly equivocal. Glyn edited a set of essays examining these controversies, called Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, which appeared in 2004. Appearing in 2008, his The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade guides the reader through interpretations of the most contentious of all issues concerning Cook, the manner of his death.
The vigour of controversy about Cook is indicative of the exuberance of writing on Pacific history in recent decades. It is no longer simply the record of European initiatives, rather it is being depicted as the outcome of ‘encounters’ between the European intruders and the indigenous people living around the great ocean. They now appear not as passively waiting to be ‘discovered’, but as participants in the process of European penetration as well as being profoundly affected by it. The European side of these encounters also now seems to be a great deal more complex than was once supposed. Rather than being detached scientific observers, describers of a new world of nature and of hitherto unknown peoples, Europeans are depicted as coming to the Pacific with preconceptions and intellectual agendas of their own, which were often challenged by what they encountered. The European side of encounters with non-European peoples had long intrigued Glyn. In a review article for this Journal in 1978, entitled “Savages Noble and Ignoble”, European Attitudes Towards the Wider World Before 1800’, he wrote that recent studies of such encounters were telling ‘us as much about both the observed and the observer, they link different cultures and in doing so enrich our understanding of Europe’s recent past’.
Glyn had plans for a book to explore this theme further, and having a collegial temperament and a high capacity to work closely and fruitfully with other people, as he did with William Barr on the Canadian north and above all with Alan Frost on early British Australia, he sought a collaborator. He chose me for that role in what was to emerge in 1982 as The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment. We divided the world between us. I contributed chapters on Asia, mainly on the Ottoman Empire, India and China; Glyn wrote about North America, West Africa and the Pacific. Our relationship was an entirely easy one, which I greatly enjoyed. This book is very much the product of its time. It appeared after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, but before the great wave of studies, particularly emanating from departments of English, which subjected European representations of the non-European ‘other’ to very close and highly sophisticated analysis. Our anodyne conclusion that ‘The processes of ordering the world both in the minds and by the actions of Englishmen were not necessarily connected … But in most cases the two activities clearly did have connections with one another’ no doubt now seems naïve in the extreme.
Reflecting on his life, Glyn told his family of the pleasure that he had himself derived from having been able to travel the world in the wake of the explorers he had written about.
I sailed across the turbulent waters of Cook Strait in a 40-footer into ‘the very snug cove’ in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, entered by Captain Cook in 1769, and still inaccessible by road. So too is the bay thousands of miles away where nine years later Cook was killed in Hawaii. There I swam ashore to the dark, gritty beach where Cook, four marines and many Hawaiians were slaughtered. In Australia near the mouth of the Endeavour River on the Queensland coast where Cook had beached his sinking ship after it was impaled on the Great Barrier Reef, I climbed the hill from which Cook had viewed the ‘melancholy prospect of shoals innumerable’ between him and the open sea.
Still in tropical seas, on the water's edge in Jamaica I helped a diver sort his haul from the sunken pirate city of Port Royal – hundreds of clay pipes and empty wine bottles. In the waters of the far north, I scrambled up the blue ice of the Malaspina glacier in Alaska, following the tracks of the commander of a Spanish expedition whose journal after 200 years of neglect I helped to get published in English. I watched from St John's, Newfoundland, as icebergs from Baffin Bay grounded in the harbour, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I wandered among hundreds of graves of victims from the Titanic sinking. But my most important journey was to the sub-Arctic shores of Hudson Bay where with my colleague Bill Barr I investigated the wintering places of two expeditions searching for the age-old Northwest Passage.
Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Dr Sarah Palmer and Professor Alan Frost for their kind assistance.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).