Upcoming Lectures
“‘I will try & tell you some of our trouble’: Exploring Contested Truths of Violence and Murder Onboard the Selkirk, 1894” by Grace McNutt
Wednesday, 21 October 2026, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link.
Dr. Grace McNutt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cape Breton University, and in 2027, she will be joining the University of Prince Edward Island as an Assistant Professor of History. She has also been a member of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society’s council since 2022. Her research investigates the gendering of the shipping trade in Atlantic Canada, using women’s firsthand accounts to explore the interplay among sailing, authorship, and gender identity in the nineteenth century.
Abstract:
In 1894, Patrick Flinn, a sailor employed on the Nova Scotian barque Selkirk, reported to Hong Kong police that the ship’s first mate had thrown a man overboard and that Captain Jim Crowe had abused members of the crew during their passage from New York. What followed was a weeks-long contest of competing stories unfolding in courtrooms, in the Hong Kong press, and in the private letters of Janie Crowe, Jim Crowe’s wife. In this talk, Dr. Grace McNutt traces those surviving records to reconstruct how an alleged murder at sea became a public scandal. Rather than seeking a definitive “truth,” this talk will examine nineteenth-century ideas of “truthfulness”: who did the public in colonial Hong Kong believe at different moments, and why? It will also consider how the central figures in the “Selkirk Scandal” crafted their own credibility, revealing the cultural logics that shaped trust, authority, and reputation in the nineteenth-century British sphere of influence, drawing on notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality.
"The Quest for Saint Aspinquid: Colonial Myth, Indigenous Leader, Modern Enigma" by David Griffiths
Wednesday, 9 December 2026, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person in the BMO room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link.
David Griffiths
After two previous careers, first as a naval officer and then as a consulting researcher on international relations, David Griffiths is now a Halifax-based essayist and researcher with a particular interest in history. For more, see his website at davidgriffiths.ca
Abstract:
At this Society's December 1887 meeting, the speaker urged that some member should investigate "the remarkable myth of Saint Aspinquid, the grand sachem of all the Northern Indian tribes" and the feast held in his honour annually in 18th-century Nova Scotia. None did. Since then, most researchers have assumed that the story was imported from New England and speculated whether it was based on a real Indigenous figure or simply a colonial invention. Apparently, no one thought to ask the Mi'kmaq.
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