A Harbour for the King - Dathan, Wendy

. .

Résumé :
For two and a half centuries, Grand Harbour has been at the centre of Island life on Grand Manan. A Harbour for the King is the story of a courageous group of United Empire Loyalists from Maine who made their home on an island in the wide entrance to the Bay of Fundy. Their homesteading skills served them well as they settled around the shores of a large, shallow, harbour. They rapidly progressed from rustic shelters to fully framed houses and barns, and from subsistence provisioning to the business of fishing. Their descendants rose to the opportunities of the smoked herring and lobster canning industries. With the continuing strength and values of their ancestors, the people of the Harbour developed an on-going community of strong souls who survived fires, shipwrecks, economic downturns, and wipe-out storms like the Saxby Gale and the Groundhog Day Gale. Wendy Dathan lifts up the story of Grand Harbour's resilient people, who with a rich heritage and will to survive, have always recovered and made their Island home a stronger and better place to live.

Biographie:
Wendy Dathan has lived on Grand Manan Island for over thirty years but began life long ago and far away in a bauxite mining camp in the forested interior of Guyana. With the end of World War Two, her parents placed her in a boarding school in England. Six years later, she was reunited with her family in Montreal where she received her BA in English and Geography from McGill University in 1955.Married in Scotland in 1957, she and her husband returned to Montreal to bring up their two sons in Pointe Claire. She took up the study of botany, specializing in edible wild plants, which led to teaching and working in the Plant Science Department at McDonald College as well as employment at the McGill University Herbarium.In 1984, she returned to McGill for an MA in Geography and spent the following summer researching The Canadian Reindeer Project in the Northwest Territories and Alaska. As a result, she later wrote The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901-1977, a major biographical study of one of Canada's most important Arctic research scientists and eventual Curator of Botany at the National Museum of Canada. The Reindeer Botanist was published by the University of Calgary Press in 2012 and won the Clio Prize for Northern Canadian History in 2013. She is also the author of three additional books: Bauxite, Sugar, and Mud: Memories of Living in Colonial Guyana, 1928-1944; Swallowtail Calling: A Naturalist Dreams of Grand Manan Island; My Dust Will Dance: The Adventurous Life of Joanne Pauline Barberis.Wendy has travelled widely over North America on natural history field trips. She discovered Grand Manan in 1978 on a trip to study puffins and returned as often as she could until making it her permanent home in 1988. She became Curator of the Grand Manan Museum during its expansion years and immersed herself happily in learning about Island life and history. As one Grand Mananer put it, She didn't know much when she came but she has learned some since then!After retirement in 2000, she opened a small art shop and continued biographical writing. A Harbour for the King is her tribute to the place she feels privileged to be at home and where she lives quietly in her old house by the sea.