Explorations and Discoveries

Abstract

B ) ORN in Dublin on April 24, i909, I had my elementary schooling in Clara in the Irish midlands, an unusual village because it had an exceptionally large and active Protestant element dominated by a Quaker hierarchy. My secondary education was at a famous Belfast public day school, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, from which I went to The Queen's University. There I was taught by James Eadie Todd, who demanded a great deal from his students and gave them much in return. I was also influenced by E. Estyn Evans, a polymath geographer, who left me forever dissatisfied with the narrower kinds of history. When I graduated in I93 I, I went to King's College and the Institute of Historical Research in London to study under A. P. Newton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, who set me to work on British colonial history and, in parallel, on that of Ireland in the early modern period. It was he who got me my first post at University College Southampton, I934-I939, where my special responsibility was British colonial history, although my dissertation had been on early Tudor rule in Ireland. From there I moved to Belfast where, at Queen's, I helped Todd develop Irish history, but soon I found myself, somehow, in I 944 as professor and head of department at a campus of the University of Wales at Swansea, where I remained until I957, when I moved to the Andrew Geddes and John Rankin chair of modern history at the University of Liverpool. There my developing concern with early European expansion, North America, and Ireland could find fuller expression. Between I927 and I 946 1 had lived in a regime of one professor, one lecturer, and one assistant lecturer (the earlier assistant to the sole professor). From I 946, things began to move and specialist appointments made it possible to cover more and more extra-European history, in Liverpool as elsewhere. My North American preoccupations led me to visit the United States in summers in I948, I957, and I959, as I became recognized as something of an authority in the early history of North America. My authority was admittedly minor, but it was enough to enable me to obtain my first sabbatical in i963, when with Alison, my wife and working companion since I 937, I ranged through the land and libraries of North America. We had another fine year in i969-i970, when I was Visiting Harrison Professor at the College of William and Mary. The years down to I976, when I retired at age sixty-seven, were punctuated by research or lecturing opportunities in Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, and Hungary, and we visited New Zealand universities for the British Council. On retirement I became visiting professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland, for some part