York University Department of History Professor Emeritus Adrian Shubert will be visiting Whanganui to speak about his latest book.
York University Department of History Professor Emeritus Adrian Shubert will be visiting Whanganui to speak about his latest book.
Two Canadian professors are visiting Whanganui to discuss their latest book, which is about the complex and rich legacy of one of the oldest existing ships in the world.
Built in Kolkata in 1853, the Edwin Fox is now in the Edwin Fox Maritime Museum in Picton.
York University Department of History Professor Emeritus Adrian Shubert said the pair of historians traced the Edwin Fox’s voyages, spanning 30 years of sailing, for their book The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalisation 1850-1914.
The Edwin Fox transported convicts from the United Kingdom to Western Australia, and also made four voyages carrying settlers from the United Kingdom to New Zealand between 1873-1881.
Later in the ship’s life, it was transformed into a floating refrigeration factory just after the first cargo of frozen lamb was sent from New Zealand to England.
“It moved around four to five ports in New Zealand.”
Shubert said the Edwin Fox told the story of the process of globalisation that was taking place between 1850 to WW1.
To create the book, Shubert and York University history Associate Professor Boyd Cothran used thousands of digitised newspaper articles from New Zealand’s Papers Past website and Australia’s Trove site.
York University Department of History Associate Professor Boyd Cothran co-authored the book alongside Shubert.
By searching on Ancestry.com, the authors’ were able to find out details of passengers who travelled on the three-and-a-half to four-month voyage to New Zealand from the United Kingdom.
This meant they could add a human element to the ship’s story by finding out what happened to these passengers’ lives after they left the ship.
“We couldn’t have written this book in this same way without all of the digital resources that exist.”
But there was also a lot of archival material that had to be trawled through in the United Kingdom: “That was a lot of old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears in the Guild Hall Library.”
Shubert was looking forward to visiting Whanganui to do further research into the figure of Joseph Solar, a Spaniard who came to Whanganui in 1860 and was one of the founders of the wine industry in New Zealand.
He first came up with the idea for the book after a chance encounter with the ship on a trip to Picton.
“My intuition was, ‘This adds up to something that no one is saying: that we can see globalisation from the decks of this ship’.”
He said New Zealand’s place in the story of globalisation was not at all marginal, and in fact, this book put New Zealand at the centre of this great process that knitted the world together
The talk will take place at the Alexander Heritage & Research Library on April 7.
Eva de Jong is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicle covering health stories and general news. She began as a reporter in 2023.
