By Ken McGoogan. 

Last June, during a voyage around Scotland, a history-buff friend told me about attending a talk by an academic historian who had written a book featuring a section on the 1758 siege of the Fortress of Louisbourg. My friend noted, with some dismay, that the professional seemed to take pride in the fact that he had never visited the fortress, though he could have gotten there by undertaking a two-day drive.

Appalled but unsurprised, I could only shake my head. During a previous historical adventure — when we had flown north out of Winnipeg in small planes — I had told my fellow voyager that, in my opinion, nobody should write history or biography without visiting relevant locations.

Why so? Well, for example, when I was researching Race to the Polar Sea, about Philadelphia-born explorer Elisha Kent Kane, I visited the well-preserved home of his grandfather, a local celebrity. There, where Kane had spent many summers, I gleaned volumes about his youth and early manhood. I also learned from a local historian that I was the first biographer ever to visit the place.

Three years earlier, when I was working on Lady Franklin’s Revenge, I sojourned in the upscale London residence that had once been home to Lady Franklin and is today a Quaker retreat. I also travelled to Lincoln- shire to see where, in an apartment above a shop (now a bakery), John Franklin had grown up. For me, this double immersion in place revealed the dynamics of their marriage: The “good Sir John” never felt quite good enough for Jane Franklin, and never ceased struggling to impress her.

Now, to my history-buff friend, who is some years younger than me, I reiterated my belief in going to the actual site. It increases understanding, adds colour, and generates emotion and energy. I invoked our experience of the preceding few days. We were three-quarters of the way through a Celtic Quest voyage with Adventure Canada, sailing on a ship with about one hundred passengers, and we had piled into inflatable Zodiacs to venture ashore on several islands.

On the island of Islay, best known for its whisky distilleries — think Lagavulin, Laphroig, Bowmore — we made our way to Lake, or Loch, Finlaggan, once the centre of the Lordship of the Isles. From this location, the earliest Macdonalds had ruled a Gaelic-Norse sea kingdom that, for three centuries, remained essentially independent of both Scotland and Norway.

Exploring the stone ruins on a tiny island in the middle of the lake, a visitor comes face-to-face with the parliamentary practices of the Lords of the Isles. The Macdonald chiefs and their thanes or sub-lords would arrive from islands north and south, pulling their craft ashore on the sandy beaches of Islay. Then, they would conduct meetings on tiny Council Island while the less powerful stood gathered on a larger island nearby, permitted only to watch and listen. Both groups included the ancestors of tens of thousands of contemporary Canadians, people with surnames like MacNicol, MacEachern,MacKay,MacGillevray,MacMillan — you get the idea. Not only that, but, for this voyager at least, seeing the island arrangement drove home the extent of Norse influence on both Scottish and Canadian traditions: This business of meeting on Council Island derived from the Vikings.

After visiting Islay, we sailed to Barra, where, among other things, we rambled around Kisimul Castle, ancient stronghold of the Clan MacNeill. It stands offshore on a tiny islet — a location that made it hard to attack. On an upper floor of the castle, some of us stuck our heads out the window through which, each evening, a minion would appear and holler: “MacNeill of Barra has dined and now the world may dine!”

That detail: Where else could one hope to pick it up? And later, while gazing at Kisimul Castle from the water, this voyager could not help thinking of the 370 locals (seventy-five families) who, in 1802, sailed from here for Pictou, Nova Scotia. They were driven by hardship, and their view of the castle and environs from the water was the last view they had of the only home they had ever known.

And what of our visit to Orkney, in the northern reaches of Scotland? Most literate Canadians are aware that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the islands of Orkney provided most of the workers for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which played a central role in developing Canada. On the outskirts of Stromness, we visited the boyhood home of HBC explorer John Rae, a once-grand mansion now in rough condition. I had visited for the first time in 1998, while researching Rae for Fatal Passage, so for me this viewing packed a wallop.

In Kirkwall, fourteen miles away, nobody who enters St. Magnus Cathedral, as we did, can fail to appreciate the sophistication of the Scandinavian society that built this edifice in the 1100s — almost one thousand years ago. Yet in Orkney, which has the greatest concentration of prehistoric sites in Europe, even the Viking era begins to feel like it was only yesterday.

We visited the four-thousand-year-old Ring of Brodgar, a circle of Neolithic standing stones that many people find more magical than Stonehenge. Through a tunnel, we entered Maes Howe, a massive chambered cairn, replete with etched communications, built around 2700 BC. And at Skara Brae we explored the ruins of a Neolithic village comprised of ten homes in which people lived more than five thousand years ago.

That evening, before the ship sailed, we got a taste of contemporary Orkney. Tom Muir, an archivist and historian who travels internationally as a storyteller, brought some of his pals on board to entertain — these included two acclaimed bands: Hullion and the Wrigley Sisters. Surrounded by ancient history, today’s Orcadians assert their vitality by telling stories and making music.

Experiencing that — ancient context, contemporary response — enhances our sense of the human condition. So I said, or perhaps just meant to say, as we sailed north towards Shetland. To the original question, I did return: Can people write history or biography without visiting relevant locations? Sure, I said: They can write books. But if they were to undertake some focused visitation, they could write better ones. They might even write books that others want to read.

Ken McGoogan, author of four bestsellers about Arctic exploration, sails as a resource historian with Adventure Canada. His latest book is How the Scots Invented Canada.

This article orginally appeared in the 2011 October/November issue of Canada's History Magazine.