Barry M. Gough

Barry Morton Gough is a global maritime and naval historian, a working historian recognized for his considerable body of work and for his influence in the wider good of the profession. Gough has made in the British Columbia and western North American context a number of monographic contributions to ethnohistory, cross-cultural relations, patterns of missionary acceptance among Northwest Coast peoples, frontier–borderland studies and environmental history. With the perspective of British sea power worldwide, he has worked to explore the maritime dimensions of British Columbia history and to recast and reaffirm the imperial foundations of Canadian history.

Education
Gough was educated at Victoria High School and Victoria College, completing his undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia and master's studies at the University of Montana. Earning his Ph.D. at King's College London, he was tutored in the maritime foundations of imperial history by Gerald S. Graham, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in the University of London. Years after the earned doctorate, Gough was in 1991 awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature from University of London for distinguished contributions to Imperial and Commonwealth history. His thesis 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 in his review remarked that "author and publisher alike have set a high standard for the publications of the new Press." An expanded edition was published in 2016 by Heritage House as Britannia's Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812-1914.

Teaching and consulting
Initially on the teaching staff of Victoria High School, Gough became in turn Lecturer, Assistant and Associate Professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, and Co-director of the Centre for Pacific Northwest Studies. From 1972 to 2004 in the history faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University, he was named Associate Professor, then Professor and University Research Professor. Within the department, he organized a series of public lectures by leading scholars and published the material with an introduction. He was founding director of Canadian Studies at Laurier and served as coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies and Assistant Dean of Arts. On retirement in 2004 after thirty-three years there, he was appointed University Professor Emeritus and resettled in his Victoria childhood home to continue research for new books.

His writings, including young adult non-fiction and coursework for civilian and military personnel, are used in various teaching contexts. Gough was advisory editor to Macmillan Publishing for World Explorers and Discoverers (1992) and to Scribner's for Explorers: From Ancient Times to the Space Age (1998), and he was editor-in-chief of the magazine American Neptune based at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts (1997-2003). Following publication of From Classroom to Battlefield, he wrote guidelines for community groups or classes of students to draft manuscripts about Canadian high schools and the First World War: the approach and methodology of the historian, materials available for use, suggestions for giving individuals' stories their historical contexts.

Since 2007, he has been Adjunct Professor of War Studies and History, Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont.

Contract work in history has included Great Lakes shipwrecks research, the Alaska inland waters case on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice and research materials for the Nuu Chah Nulth. He was asked to prepare a historical legal claims dossier for the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council in the Meares Island case.

Affiliations and affinities
Gough is a former President of the British Columbia Historical Federation and later was named BCHF honorary president, an "ambassadorial" or "historian laureate" role he characterizes as "a sort of spokesman and advocate for B.C. history." The federation of ninety-nine member societies and roughly 25,000 members in B.C. works to recognize historical preservation work being done through local museums, archives, collections and special projects, and honours those involved.

Gough is Past President of the Canadian Nautical Research Society, Past President of the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Vancouver Island, and past member of the Board of Academic Advisers, The Churchill Centre, Chicago. He is Past President of the North American Society for Oceanic History, Past President of the Organization for the History of Canada, and Past Vice-President of the Champlain Society of Canada. In Ontario, he was President of the Rotary Club of Kitchener and, after his return to B.C., resumed active duty as Chair, Victoria High School Alumni Association.

He is a Life Member of the Association of Canadian Studies, founding member of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States and past Chair of the Joint Committee of the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association. He lectures on maritime and naval topics, on Canadian history and public affairs, and since the 1970s has served on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly and Terrae Incognitae: The Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries.

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 British Columbia, Victoria, on various 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." Video production the following year was published as Our Seas Our Coasts Our Navy.

A lifelong jazz clarinetist, he for many years has been a member of the non-profit society Universal Jazz Advocates and Mentors (U-JAM). Gough was 2012 president and continues to mentor. He played a community performance 22 June 2014 at the TD Victoria International JazzFest.

Awards
Gough and his writings have received honours, prizes and awards in the United States, the U.K., Spain and Canada.

A life member of the Society for the History of Discoveries, he 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...."

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. "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.

The U.K. award was followed in September 2016 by the highest award bestowed by the Washington State Historical Society, the Robert Gray Medal, for lifetime achievement.

Gough has received the Psi Upsilon Distinguished Service Alumnus Award, the Wilfrid Laurier University Alumni Hoffmann-Little Award for Outstanding Teaching, and was recognized with a 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 and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In November 2014, Her Honour Judith Guichon, Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia, presented him with the Maritime Museum of B.C.'s 2014 SS Beaver Medal for Maritime Excellence.

Prizes have included the Clio Prize of the Canadian Historical Association and 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 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, B.C. Book Prizes, and the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing given by the British Columbia Historical Federation. The Hallmark Heritage Society of Victoria chose Vic High alumni Gough's study of teachers and students in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War, for its 2015 Communication Award.

Gough's Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty was chosen by the Canadian Nautical Research Society for a 2018 Keith Matthews Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in the field of nautical research. Evaluations noted his researches included newly accessible papers of both Fisher and Churchill at Cambridge "generated a human perspective of the pressures both faced."

The same award had gone to Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder, Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History in 2010, and in 1985 to Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846-1890. In 1993, The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and Discoveries to 1812 earned honourable mention.

Published works
As historian and educator, Gough attends to maritime history of the Pacific Northwest as well as directing attention to British Columbia's interior and northern regions. His research into early navigation in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Strait of Georgia resulted in publication of the long-neglected plan and elevation by Charles Duncan of Cape Flattery and Fuca's Pillar, charted by Duncan in August 1788 and first published in 1790. His 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. Press coverage of the pending auction of an 18th-century pistol engraved with Peter Pond's name drew attention to Gough's 2013 study of the soldier, fur trader and explorer's historical importance in pushing northwest into the Mackenzie River basin and in establishing the North West Company. “He presciently forecast," said Gough in an interview, "a transcontinental Canada linking the St. Lawrence with the Pacific, all based on trade and under the British flag."

Pax Britannica in 2014 explored the intersection of British naval reach and the guarding of imperial commerce during the post-Napoleonic century. Britannia's Navy two years later documented within that global context a century of events in the North Pacific, the evolution of the strategic Esquimalt naval base and jurisdictional disputes and developments in the U.S.

Published in 2017, Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty received early acclaim as an inquiry into the role of personality in the making of history, the context being 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 Jan Morris comments, attends to Gough's accounts of the struggles within British Cabinet and the Admiralty in formulating strategy and policy for war and the "bitter complications" of Churchill's and Fisher's fall from power, and ends 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 in his annual Christmas list called it "a fascinating study." A reviewer in Finest Hour: The Journal of Winston Churchill and his Times, observing the dual biography is well-written and long past due, specifically notes the wide use of primary sources and the "many 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" that is "sure to join the shelf of vital Churchill studies." A 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." The writer adds that "notes, bibliography, index and illustrations are of the highest standard" and that this is "likely to remain the definitive work on this subject for years to come."

The following year, research into 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.

Selected bibliography

 * The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1914: A Study of British Maritime Ascendancy. UBC Press, 1971. ISBN 0-7748-0000-3. Rev. edition, 2016.
 * Canada. Modern Nations in Historical Perspective Series. Prentice Hall, 1975. ISBN 0-13-112789-6.
 * 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. ISBN 0-660-12911-6.
 * The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade and Discoveries to 1812. UBC Press, 1992. ISBN 0-7748-0399-1. UBC Press 1980 first edition published as Distant Dominion.
 * The Falkland Islands/Malvinas: Struggle for Empire in the South Atlantic. London: Continuum, 1992/Athlone Press, 1992. ISBN 978-0-485-11419-5.
 * ; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. ISBN 978-0-7710-3406-0.
 * Geography and Exploration: Biographical Portraits. Vol. 4, The Scribner Science Reference Series. Princeton, N.J.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. ISBN 0-684-80662-2.
 * Britain, Canada and the North Pacific: Maritime Enterprise and Dominion, 1778-1914. Ashgate Variorum, 2004. ISBN 0-86078-939-X.
 * "From Nootka Sound to Trafalgar: Commodore Dionisio Alcalá Galiano," in Emilio Soler Pascual, ed., Trafalgar y Alcalá Galiano, Jornadas internacionales, Cabra, 17 al 23 de octobre de 2005. Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, 2006.
 * Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America. Harbour Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-55017-428-2.
 * Historical Dreadnoughts: Arthur Marder, Stephen Roskill and Battles for Naval History. Seaforth/Pen & Sword, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84832-077-2.
 * Introduction to Andrew David, ed., William Robert Broughton's Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific 1795-1798. Hakluyt Society, 2010. ISBN 978-0-904180-97-8.
 * ; 2nd edition, 2011.
 * Juan de Fuca's Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams. Harbour Publishing, 2012. ISBN 978-1-55017-573-8.
 * "A Tangle of Rock and Moving Water: William Broughton's 1792 Exploration of the San Juan Archipelago," Columbia 27, no. 4 (Winter 2013-14), 20-7.
 * From Classroom to Battlefield: Victoria High School and the First World War. Heritage House Publishing, 2014. ISBN 978-1-77203-006-8.
 * The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, Fur Trader and Explorer Who Opened the Northwest. Douglas & McIntyre, 2014. ISBN 978-1-77162-039-0.
 * Pax Britannica: Ruling the Waves and Keeping the Peace before Armageddon. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-0-23035-430-2.
 * Britannia's Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812-1914. Heritage House Publishing, 2016. ISBN 978-1-77203-109-6.
 * "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 ISBN 978-1-4738-7563-0, 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. ISBN 1591146135.
 * "Writing a Canadian High School History of the Great War: Victoria High School: Challenges, Pitfall, and Sources." Canadian Military History 25 (no. 1), article 13 (2016).
 * "Charles Duncan, Cape Flattery, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca: A Voyage to the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams," Terrae Incognitae: The Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries 49:1 (April 2017), 37-49; retrieved 25 April 2017 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00822884.2017.1295597?journalCode=ytin20/.
 * Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty. In the U.K., Seaforth/Pen & Sword, 2017 (ISBN 9781526703569); in the U.S., Naval Institute Press, 2017 (ISBN 9781526703569); in Canada, James Lorimer Ltd., 2017 (ISBN 9781459411364).
 * 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. ISBN 978-0-230-35481-4; eBook 978-1-137-31414-7.
 * "Charles Duncan, Cape Flattery, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca: A Voyage to the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams," Terrae Incognitae: The Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries 49:1 (April 2017), 37-49; retrieved 25 April 2017 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00822884.2017.1295597?journalCode=ytin20/.
 * Churchill and Fisher: Titans at the Admiralty. In the U.K., Seaforth/Pen & Sword, 2017 (ISBN 9781526703569); in the U.S., Naval Institute Press, 2017 (ISBN 9781526703569); in Canada, James Lorimer Ltd., 2017 (ISBN 9781459411364).
 * 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. ISBN 978-0-230-35481-4; eBook 978-1-137-31414-7.