Gilbert Bossé, Navigating the Lower Saint Lawrence in the 19th Century, version 2.0. Métis Beach, QC: G.R. Bossé, [email protected], 2003. 4,200 pp. Table of contents with hyperlinks, maps, glossary, bibliography, index. CDN $59.95; ISBN 0-96984887-0.

An edition statement like "version 2.0" is rarely seen in the review pages of The Northern Mariner, but then again neither is work of this nature. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a significant movement among historical societies to publish editions, both great and small, of transcribed and edited manuscripts. The tradition is carried on in the publication programs of the Champlain Society and the Naval Records Society. More commonly, with the advent of microfilm, the great runs of manuscripts and of newspapers have been preserved as they originally appeared, without the value of editorial comment or searchability. Indeed, microfilm has more in common with the scroll than the book. In recent years there have been a number of attempts to reproduce the historical newspaper experience on the web with varied success, particularly with respect to reasonably accurate searchability.

In this astounding collecting of documents, Bossé has charted a different course. He claims (and I'm not here to challenge the claim) that printed out, this version contains about 4,200 8.5 x 11 inch pages. But printing the whole volume would significantly reduce the value of somewhere in the order of 18,000 hyperlinks between the various parts of the work.

So what do you get on your CD-ROM? Essentially, it is a web site on a disk. Drop it in your computer's CD-ROM drive (or make the one permitted copy on your hard drive) and you have the entire work in your favourite browser without going online. Should you, the author even points you to free online tools that can be used to index every word on the disk in a way that supplements his more precise indexing. The simple markup standards used in its preparation means that the intellectual content of this collection will be of value for years, if not decades, after the over-designed CD-ROMs of the 1990s will no longer play on any device outside of a computer museum. In good design often less is more. That said, in similar projects started more recently, the underlying markup is less often in the HTML, and more often in the more flexible XML, but that's a distinction that means less to the end-user than it does to the person charged with re-proposing the content over the long haul.

Version 2.0 of Navigation brings the collection of data up to 1860 (ten years more than version 1.0). Bossé has set his sights on the end of the century. What would fill another shelf or so in paper has lots of room for growing in the CD-ROM format, largely because this is transcribed, searchable text and not pictures. The bed rock of the content is the result of a close reading of the nineteenth century newspapers published in Quebec City: the Chronicle, Gazette and Mercury. Beyond that are a fascinating collection of documents created when the mariner met the law; the deeds registered with the notaries public and the proceedings and judgments of the Quebec Court of Vice-Admiralty. Most shipwreck involve at least the potential loss of property, and with money at stake, can the courts be far away?

Indeed, with that many lawyers in the room, Bossé has supplied a good glossary of terms which are as often obscure legal Latin as they are nautical in origin. The material is presented in its original language which means, more often than not, that the documents are in English, and so are the place names. Consequently, we are also supplied with a very useful list of equivalent places. In another edition, a chart or two would not go amiss.

Interspersed with the original content, there are some editorial notes and contemporary historical articles by people like Gaspé historian Ken Annett. What is not to like? My personal bêtes noires are ambiguous dated. "19/12/1854" is, with a minimum amount of thought, December 19, 1854, but one has to look for an unambiguous date when confronted with "05/08/1858." Given that the rest of navigation elements of the CD-ROM are presented in English, rendering this as "5 Aug 1858" would not be inappropriate. That said, the citation that was one twitch on my mouse away was "Quebec Mercury, Thursday, August 5, 1858. Page 3, Col. 1B." and even I can't complaint about that.

Beyond the date factor, the biggest challenge that Bossé has to face is marketing a product that is admitted to be a work in progress. Just as version l.0 is subsumed in this release, so too can we expect all of this content to be contained in version 3.0 (along with a substantial quantity of material from the 1860s if the current pattern is followed). Navigating the Lower St. Lawrence in the 19th Century is a substantial work of private scholarship, produced on a shoe-string, offered at a very reasonable price and which will only become more useful as successive versions emerge.

Reviewed by:

Walter Lewis,
Acton, Ontario.