Research
Transcription of the Diaries of the Rev. Joseph Annand
For forty years the Reverend Joseph and Alice Annand served as missionaries in the archipelago that forms modern day Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides. They departed Nova Scotia in 1872 for the South Pacific, where they made their home until their retirement in 1912. During his tenure in the New Hebrides, Joseph recorded the events of his life in a daily journal that has survived to this day, housed at the Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management in Halifax. In the style of a Victorian gentleman, Annand was an avid collector of natural history specimens and ethnographic artifacts. In response to a request for artifacts from David Boyle at the Toronto Normal School Museum in the 1890s, Annand sent a collection of native artifacts to Toronto, which now resides in the ROM.
Since the mid-1990s ROM librarian Arthur Smith has been engaged in the transcription of the Annand diaries, funded in part by grants from the ROM Governors. Two volumes were contributed to the ROM Archives, and a third is in progress. He has also completed a compilation of Annand letters, which originally appeared in a number of Presbyterian newspapers and magazines during the course of Annand’s missionary years in the South Pacific and provide insight to 19th-century native culture from a Victorian perspective. Smith’s research has appeared in the journal Acadiensis and the Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. He contributed a chapter to Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2005) and has presented papers on the Annand collection at conferences and colloquia in Connecticut and Toronto.
Librarian
Arthur Smith
Publications
| 2005 | “Curios from a Strange Land: The Oceania Collections of the Reverend Joseph Annand”. In Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad, edited by Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) p. 262-278. [peer-reviewed] |
| 1998 | "Bringing 'Salvation' to the 'Heathen': The Forty Year Sojourn of The Reverend Joseph Annand in the New Hebrides". In Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. 1 (June 1998), p. 150-170. [peer-reviewed] |
| 1997 | "Missionary as Collector: The Role of the Reverend Joseph Annand". In Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 26 (2) (Spring 1997), p. 96-111. [peer-reviewed] |
The Reverend Joseph and Alice Annand, in London on their trip back to Nova Scotia, 1913.
Photo Credit: Maritime Conference Archives file box V-31
