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Foreword When Julian Gwyn asked me to write the Foreword to this book I was highly flattered and quite delighted. Over the past thirty years we have shared a mutual interest in Halifax as a naval base. Professor Gwyn's work on the personal fortune of Peter Warren, the sailor who first persuaded the British naval establishment to show a serious interest in Nova Scotia, paralleled my own work on the growth of that colony as an element in British sea power in the eighteenth century. In an eighteenth -century study group of historians, we shared our enthusiasm for the history of that period. As our interests turned gradually to other fields we kept on exchanging sometimes diverging views on the roleof the navy in Nova Scotia during the eighteenth century. It hasbeen mycontention that Halifax - a town created in 1749 after the War of the Austrian Succession, under the auspices of the President of the Board of Trade, George Montague Dunk, Lord Halifax - was meant to be the new metropolis of Nova Scotia, the first of many towns that would finally ensure a substantial Britishpresence in the colony.As Julian Gwyndemonstrates in this book, it was not until 1758, during the Seven Years' War, that the British Cabinet ordered the building of a naval yard, something that would make Halifax the counterpoint to Louisbourg and the essential strategic base for the RoyalNavy in North America. Halifax only became a naval yard after the failure to establish more than a handful of the planned British settlements in Nova Scotia, after the expulsion of the Acadianpopulation in 1755, and subsequent to the ignominious 1757 collapse of the attempt to capture Louisbourg. Until 1749 the naval presence in Nova Scotia had been limited to visits and surveys by station ships and some armed vessels from the American x Foreword colonies, and the escort for the annual fishing convoy from the West Country of England. After 1749, the establishment of a station ship and a "sea militia" of armed vessels based at Halifax supported the British presence, and it was only the outbreak of war that brought visits of larger naval squadrons in 1755,1756, and 1757. Winter in Halifax, British sailors complained, lasted seven to nine months of the year.Generally speaking, they detested the place. This book argues with good evidence that Halifax, although a remarkablyeconomical investment, was less desirable than New York during the War of the American Revolution , or Bermuda during the War of 1812, and would most likely have continued to be little more than a careening harbour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had it not been for the embarrassing failure at Louisbourg in 1757. What that would have meant for Nova Scotia and British North America is one of those "what-ifs"of history that will never be answered. "Foreign" stations, as the Royal Navy termed them, like Antigua, Jamaica, Trincomalee, Bermuda, and Halifax - often mentioned but seldom understood - have not received the detailed and careful attention they deserve. This is the first rigorous analysis of the origins and role of a dockyard in the outposts of empire, and it is hoped that it will provide a lead for a whole series of related studies. I commend it to the reader. W.A.B. DOUGLAS, PhD Former Official Historian for the Canadian Armed Forces Ottawa, February 2003 ...

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