David Buisseret, The Going was Good: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life

This book is the autobiography of David Buisseret, an academic, but it is not an academic book. Buisseret does not tell us anything substantial about the ideas, big or small, in his prolific scholarly writings, and he is too modest to provide a convenient list. Born in England in 1934 into a solid middle class family of Belgian antecedents, he was (to use his own words) part of the ‘lucky generation’ too young to fight in the Second World War (1939–1945), and he escaped later with only two years of national service, part of which was spent guarding the Suez Canal, but apparently without firing a shot in anger.

Early high points in his ascent up the academic ladder were his success in capturing a scholarship to Cambridge University in 1952, the brilliant completion of his first degree as a history major there, and his subsequent acquisition of a Cambridge scholarship to do a PhD on seventeenth-century French political and economic history, which he completed expeditiously in 1961. There had been no need to waste time with all the nerve-wrenching business of finding a research topic. One of his tutors promptly suggested a viable topic. This completion was followed by his selection as a three-year (1961–1964) post-doctoral fellow at his former college in Cambridge University, no mean academic distinction. There he did a little teaching and apparently much consolidation of his biography of Sully, Louis XIV’s extraordinary prime minister (1589–1610). By 1964, at the age of thirty years, David Buisseret, presumably bilingual son of a French-speaking schoolmaster, could already echo the title of this book: The Going was Good and the transatlantic life had begun.

In his self-effacing unaffected narration of his life, Buisseret made all this academic achievement seem so unexceptional. He never really seemed to have studied until he started his PhD research in France. Yet, the academic talent was always lurking in the background, and if he had unimaginably stayed in the British Army, not even a tank could have stopped him from becoming an officer! By age thirty, all the major elements of his life appeared to have already been in place: he was a good practising Catholic, a man of faith; a man who loved libraries, but equally addicted to the outdoor life of touring and camping, and to gentlemanly games, like cricket (not football), clearly his favourite. His life already was successful, well-regulated, quite balanced, disciplined (after all he had been a scout and a cadet), and with no hit-and-miss romantic adventures, he had met in France the lady of his life, who became his wife in September 1961.

With an increasing family of young children, Buisseret, a quintessential family man, could not afford to flit from one job to the next. He spent sixteen years in Jamaica, at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (1964–1980). This was followed by fifteen years in Chicago at the Newberry Library and its associated Hermon Dunlap Smith Centre for the History of Cartography; and then eleven years (1995–2006) as Garrett Professor of the History of Cartography at the University of Texas at Arlington. He was employed at the University of the West Indies, Mona, as a specialist in European history in what was evolving as a Caribbean social history-focused Department. Buisseret is well aware that he flew off creditably in a new direction by introducing undergraduate courses in Jamaican historical landscape and in Caribbean material culture. His work in the aerial photography of Jamaica obviously benefitted from his army experience with aircraft and sailing boats. Unable to endure the financial hardship of Jamaica in the late 1970s, Buisseret accepted a post in Chicago which sent his career in a new and apparently uncharted direction in the underdeveloped field of the history of cartography. Here he was his own boss, though surrounded and supported by a collaborative cluster of like-minded, similarly motivated professionals in allied research centres. It was here that Buisseret did his best work as a historian of cartography and promoter of the recovery and interpretation of maps of North American explorers. The subsequent appointment at the University of Texas consolidated and broadened his work apparently to global dimensions.

But, curiously, Buisseret’s initial study of seventeenth-century Europe was providentially foundational to almost all his later work in Jamaica and the American mid-west, and he never quite abandoned it. Seventeenth-century colonisation in the Caribbean sprang from seventeenth-century Europe, and so, too, did some of the early exploration and map-making activities of Europeans in the New World. As his reputation and publications increased, Buisseret must have mused ‘The Going was Good’.

This book is not an account of the life and times of one man, David Buisseret. Do not look in it for an account of the politics or sociology of England, Jamaica, or the American mid-west (you will get only some quick jabs into new ‘developments’ Buisseret dislikes). Look at this book as an account of a man and his tribe: his wife, his children, his parents, his wife’s parents, his children’s spouses, and their children. Buisseret watched his children grow into adulthood and followed their fortunes. Family reunions were obviously evocative occasions; the book is replete with colourful family photographs. In this respect, the book is inspirational. Buisseret has lived a good life, ‘The Going was Good’.