Dr. Kirsten Sandrock The Chestico Museum in partnership with Dr. Karly Kehoe, Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Communities at Saint Mary’s University, is pleased to host a talk by Dr. Kirsten Sandrock, Postdoctoral Fellow from the University of Göttingen, Germany on Tuesday, August 13th at 7 PM.
Dr. Sandrock’s talk will be entitled Nova Scotia & Cape Breton in Scottish Colonial Literature.
Dr. Sandrock will examine two of the earliest texts written by Scots about Nova Scotia and Cape Breton: William Alexander’s An Encouragement to the Colonies (1624) and Robert Gordon’s Encovragements, For Such as Shall Have Intention to Bee Vnder-takers in the New Plantation of Cape Briton (1625). Both texts were written to encourage settlers to partake in Scotland’s attempt to establish its first overseas colony in the 1620s in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton. Since neither of the authors had ever been to North America, they drew on earlier travelogues to write about Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, even if their sources did not always correspond to the places they were writing about. Gordon, for one, copies copiously from Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) and describes Cape Breton, sometimes word for word, in the language Harriot used for Virginia. Gordon never tells his readers that his narrative is based on a different geographical location than the one he is writing about. Like much other colonial writing of the seventeenth century, Scottish colonial literature about Nova Scotia and Cape Breton must be thought of as fictional rather than factual writing, which also shows in the idealization of both places.
Admission is free – donations are gratefully accepted.
