Captains, Mansions and Millionaires: The Remarkable Story of Maitland, Nova Scotia

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Sir Wilfred
Grenfell College, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

This community history might appeal to local citizens, but it is too
poorly researched, organized, and written to be recommended to a wider
readership. The author is clearly fascinated by the way in which
Maitland and adjacent settlements on the Cobequid Basin off the Bay of
Fundy developed a thriving shipbuilding and shipping economy during the
19th century; yet his research is superficial, and the discussion rarely
rises above the descriptive and the episodic. Hawkins rarely attempts to
identify the factors that allowed shipbuilding to develop or prosper,
nor does he explain why Maitland eventually slipped into decline.
Profiles of a few of the more exceptional shipbuilders and sailing
masters are provided, but the ordinary folk who lived and died in
Maitland almost never make an appearance. In slightly more than two
dozen chapters, we meet a variety of cultures: Acadian (but not
Mi’kmaq), New England Planter, Loyalist. There’s also a brief
discussion of the changing local economy: the nature of early
agriculture, the development of the gypsum trade, and the rise of
shipbuilding and shipping. None of these themes is well developed
though, largely because Hawkins relies too much on newspaper clippings
and on out-of-date or derivative studies; conspicuously missing are the
essential works that would have provided the book with the historical
context it so desperately needs. Superficial research results in far too
many two- and three-sentence paragraphs that are poorly developed, that
indulge in cultural stereotypes, and that, at worst, are inaccurate. Are
we truly expected to believe that Miss Eliza Frame taught “world
navigation” to “husky, bearded students” who “would have
travelled to the roughest ports in the world”? Or that the people of
Maitland were unlikely to have participated in smuggling, “given the
strong religious convictions and church connections of that time”? The
story of Maitland undoubtedly deserves to be told, but the telling will
have to wait for a better book than this.