Ashore and Afloat: The British Navy and the Halifax Naval Yard Before 1820

Olaf Uwe Janzen is a professor of history at Memorial University,
reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and the editor of Northern Seas.

Halifax was established in 1749 to counter the French fortified town of
Louisbourg. By then, the British were developing a strategy of using the
Royal Navy to project and assert power in the North Atlantic. But
“[w]arships,” as author Julian Gwyn explains in the preface, “like
land-based fortresses ... need to be maintained and supplied,” and so
it was that Halifax acquired not only fortifications for its own defence
but also the facilities needed to service warships active in North
American waters.

Gwyn has written extensively on both 18th-century North American naval
history and the economic history of Nova Scotia, but without his earlier
works—Frigates and Foremasts: The North American Squadron in Nova
Scotia Waters 1745–1815 and Excessive Expectations: Maritime Commerce
and the Economic Development of Nova Scotia, 1740–1870—at hand, his
analysis here will seem wanting. Too often, Gwyn overwhelms readers with
detailed description that lacks analytical connection with the yard’s
activities. Thus, he describes several cases of fraud, but we do not
learn whether these cases impaired the yard’s efforts to support the
navy’s activities. Chapter 6 says much about the yard’s
administrators, but little about the ways in which their personalities
and characteristics affected the yard’s performance in support of
specific naval operations. Chapter 7 says a great deal about the way in
which money was spent in, by, and for the yard (from paint for buildings
to oars for boats to vegetables and coal to resupply ships), but there
is no clear sense of the degree to which this shaped the local
economy—indeed, at one point Gwyn simply directs us to one of his
other books. Conversely, as he concludes each chapter, Gwyn often
springs intriguing arguments on us for which we are unprepared because
the necessary evidence has not been presented in the chapter. Thus,
Chapter 5, “Artificers and Labourers,” offers conclusions about race
(blacks) and culture (Acadians) that were never discussed within the
chapter.

In short, impressive as it is in detail, Ashore and Afloat does not
deliver the analysis one expects.