Selma de Lotbinière Barkham, (née Huxley; 8 March 1927 – 3 May 2020), was a British-Canadian historian and geographer of international standing in the fields of the maritime history of Canada and of the Basque Country. In 1972, as an independent researcher, she moved to the Basque Country to do archival research on an aspect of Canadian and Basque history about which very little was known: Basque fisheries in the old Terra Nova, today some 2,000 kilometres of the Atlantic coast of Canada, in the 16th and 17th centuries. The research she carried out during the following years, mostly in Basque, Spanish and Portuguese archives, allowed her to make important archival, historical and archaeological discoveries. She found thousands of documents with which she was able to reconstruct most elements of a largely unknown chapter of the history of Canada and of the Basque Country: the Basque cod and whale fisheries in Terra Nova especially in the 16th century. She discovered the existence of a 16th-century Basque whaling industry in southern Labrador and adjacent Quebec, their whaling ports, archaeological remains of their bases, as well as the presence of Basque galleons sunk in those ports, among them the San Juan (1565). In 1981, she was awarded the Order of Canada for her pioneering work and for having made "one of the most outstanding contributions, in recent years, to the story of this nation". One of those whaling ports found by her, present-day Red Bay, Labrador, has been declared a National Historic Site of Canada (1979) and a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (June 2013). She was made an Officer of the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2015.
Family and youth Selma Huxley was born in England in the midst of a family of intellectuals and scientists. Her father, Michael Huxley, a diplomat and the founder-editor of the Geographical Magazine, whose cousins included the writer Aldous Huxley and his brother the biologist Sir Julian Huxley (first Director General of UNESCO), was a grandson of the eminent English scientist Thomas Henry Huxley known as "Darwin's Bulldog". Her mother, Ottilie de Lotbinière Mills, was a granddaughter of the Canadian politician and conservationist Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, who was a Cabinet minister in the Government of Canada and Premier of the province of Québec. She spent her teenage years during the Second World War in England and the United States. When the war ended she studied at the universities of Paris and London.
From England to Canada and the Basque Country In 1950 she decided to spend some time visiting relatives in Canada where she settled in Montreal, working for the Yellow Pages, as a teacher and finally as the Librarian of the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of McGill. There, in 1953, she met her future husband a young English architect, Brian Barkham, who was deeply fond of the Basque Country. In the summer of 1950, he had left England on motorcycle, with a fellow student of the University of London, John Stoddart, to study the rural architecture of Andalucía in southern Spain. But, due to various circumstances, he had ended up in the Basque Country studying its caseríos (farmhouses), which would be the subject of his degree thesis. He and his companion made good friends and fell in love with that region, with the result that they returned to the Basque Country in the summer of 1951. Huxley could not have known then that that meeting was going to change her life so much, nor that in the future her own research on the Basque Country would lead her to make discoveries of importance to Basque and Canadian history. In 1954, the newly married couple moved to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, where Barkham set up an architecture practice and they had four children. Two years later, they visited the Basque Country where a friend, the priest Don Pío de Montoya, spoke to them about the old Basque presence in Canada. She became a Canadian citizen in 1964.
Conceiving a plan for the future In 1964, aged 37, Selma Barkham was left a widow with four children under the age of ten and had to find a way of making a living. She worked mostly for the National Historic Sites as a historian on various projects. These included the restoration of Louisbourg, the 18th-century French fortress and commercial-fishing port on Cape Breton Island on the Atlantic coast of Canada. Doing that she became interested in European fishing voyages to that region in previous centuries, especially from the Basque Country with which she had personal ties. She developed a plan to research, in archives of Spain and France, Basque fisheries in Canada in the 16th and 17th centuries, thereby combining her personal and intellectual interests. She knew that for that she would have to learn Spanish, she already spoke English and French. At that time, the late 1960s, it was recognized that there had been Basque cod fishing and whaling expeditions to Terra Nova in those centuries, but there was very little documentary information about them.
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