Selma Barkham

Selma de Lotbinière Barkham, (''née'' Huxley; March 8, 1927 – May 3, 2020), was a British-Canadian historian and geographer of international standing in the fields of the maritime history of Canada and of the Basque Country. In 1972, as an independent researcher, she moved to the Basque Country to do archival research on an aspect of Canadian and Basque history about which very little was known: Basque fisheries in the old Terra Nova, today some 2,000 kilometres of the Atlantic coast of Canada, in the 16th and 17th centuries. The research she carried out during the following years, mostly in Basque, Spanish and Portuguese archives, allowed her to make important archival, historical and archaeological discoveries. She found thousands of documents with which she was able to reconstruct most elements of a largely unknown chapter of the history of Canada and of the Basque Country: the Basque cod and whale fisheries in Terra Nova especially in the 16th century. She discovered the existence of a 16th-century Basque whaling industry in southern Labrador and adjacent Quebec, their whaling ports, archaeological remains of their bases, as well as the presence of Basque galleons sunk in those ports, among them the San Juan (1565). In 1981, she was awarded the Order of Canada for her pioneering work and for having made "one of the most outstanding contributions, in recent years, to the story of this nation". One of those whaling ports found by her, present-day Red Bay, Labrador, has been declared a National Historic Site of Canada (1979) and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (June 2013). She was made an Officer of the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2015. Provided by Wikipedia