The GeoREACH Lab is launching a new project: Sail the Gulf of St. Lawrence with Captain Henry W. Bayfield, 1831-1853. The project has long been an interest of mine, but this year it was possible thanks to the SSHRC Partnership Development project “Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region” that I co-designed with the late Dr. Elizabeth Mancke, and which I now lead with Dr. Erin Spinney (UNB-SJ) and many graduate and undergraduate students from our two universities.
Henry Bayfield (1795-1885) was a British naval surveyor who went to sea at the age of 11, and came to Canada with the British Flotilla as a teenager. In 1816, at age 21, he became a surveyor on Lake Ontario serving under Captain William Fitz William Owen (McKenzie DCB). After five years of surveying the Great Lakes, Commander Bayfield assumed command of the St. Lawrence Survey. He spent decades meticulously charting the dangerous coastlines and waterways of eastern Canada. Understanding his career is important to the GeoREACH Lab because his accurate cartography became essential to the growth of rural communities, eager to export goods and build the region’s agricultural and fisheries sectors. By examining his charts and his routinely generated survey journals in modern mapping software, we can clearly see how the development of shipping routes allowed settlers to clear more land, build up port towns, and permanently reshape the coastal environment.
Now, for the first time, those journals and charts may also be explored interactively. “Sail the Gulf with Bayfield” is a web-based animated map that traces the route of the Gulnare — Bayfield’s survey vessel — through twenty-two seasons of fieldwork in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Each stop on the map is drawn directly from Bayfield’s own journal entries, recorded between 1831 and 1853. Viewers can play through the survey year by year, explore the coastal places Bayfield named and described, and see where his recommendations helped establish the lighthouses that made the region’s shipping lanes navigable.
“Sail the Gulf” includes the location of more than a dozen lighthouses and one floating light (at “The Traverse” near the shoals at Saint-Roch, Quebec) that Bayfield promoted early in his career. For instance, in 1845 Bayfield helped guide the colonial government of Prince Edward Island as it searched for the ideal location for its first lighthouse, Point Prim on the Hillsborough Bay. He also guided sailors more directly with detailed sailing guides for dozens of busy ports. In the winter months he wrote Sailing directions for the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence, and later the St. Lawrence Pilot. Harry Holman (Sailstrait 2019) argued that the directions for Hillsborough Bay were so methodical that they “could still be used today to bring a ship into safe harbour in Charlottetown.”
To build the map, the students and I extracted hundreds of named places from 2,500 entries in Captain Henry W. Bayfield’s journals (edited by Ruth McKenzie and published by the Champlain Society in 1984-1986, see MUN’s Digital Archives Initiative). With the help of an LLM I created an animated map of where the Gulnare most likely was on each day in the summers of 1831-1853. There are a few gaps as Bayfield’s journals were missing in the late 1830s and from 1849-1850, but viewers can see the main thrust of the St Lawrence Survey over two decades.
The result shows both detailed journeys and broader trends in the Gulf’s history. For instance, the location of the Gulnare shows how the Survey’s attention (and Bayfield’s home base) moved to the Southern Gulf in the early 1840s. Lighthouses appeared in strategic locations and detailed navigational charts were constructed for over a hundred bays and rivers (for more information and updates see the GeoGulf project page).
Or, Click here to visit the app and Sail the Gulf with Bayfield
Visit the app and click “Play” to board the Gulnare, join the St Lawrence Survey, and sail the Gulf of St. Lawrence with Capt. Henry Bayfield.
This project is made possible by the Canada Research Chairs Program, the SSHRC Partnership Development project “Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region” co-designed with the late Dr. Elizabeth Mancke, and many graduate and undergraduate students from UNB’s History Department and UPEI’s GeoREACH Lab. For more on lighthouses and navigational safety initiatives see the work of Zachary Tingley (Z. Tingley and E. Mancke, “Intercolonial Cooperation and the Building of St. Paul Island and Scatarie Island Lighthouses, 1826–1840,” Acadiensis (Autumn 2022).
