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Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter
Helen Wallis, Scholar and RCRO Advisor, 1925-1995 by David B. Quinn Emeritus, University of Liverpool
On February 7, 1995, Dr. Helen Wallis, OBE, FSA, passed away. The editors of the Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter asked her friend and colleague David B. Quinn to write a remembrance of Dr. Wallis to commemorate the life of this special person. On May 9, 1995, a special program in Dr. Wallis’s memory was held at the Royal Geographical Society in London, The Globe My World, consisting of tributes, both written and spoken. If you are interested in these tributes, please contact Tony Campbell, Map Librarian, The British Library, Great Russell St., London, WC1B 3DG, England. With the death of Helen Wallis, we have lost one of the outstanding cartographical scholars of her generation. Her interests and involvements were world-wide, though she was centered for all her professional career in the Map Room of the British Museum (latterly the Map Library of the British Library, of which she was Librarian until her nominal retirement in 1990). Among her many American interests was North Carolina and especially the Roanoke colonies. This was nurtured largely through her friendship with Bill and Betty Cumming of Davidson, North Carolina. She collaborated with Bill in several ways and did much to help him organize his unsurpassed map collection in North Carolina and catalogued it after his death, when it became the Cumming Collection of Davidson College. Her interest in Roanoke began when she concerned herself with the Harriot-White maps of 1585 when Paul Hulton and I were working on The American Drawings of John White from 1958 to 1964, and was focused more specifically in the Map Room’s association with the British Museum’s Hakluyt and Raleigh exhibition of 1968, to which the Map Room contributed a number of items. She also interested herself in the preparation of the map for my The Roanoke Voyages which came out in 1955, later on becoming a member of the Harriot Seminar after its creation in 1969 down to its meeting in Cambridge in May l994. It was, however, during the quatercentenary celebrations of the Roanoke Voyages in the 1980s that she become closely involved in the colony as well as its maps. Thus in 1987 she took a prominent part in the concluding conference of the celebration series in Chapel Hill, where she and the Cummings lectured on the cartographical aspects of the colonies. Back in England, she organized the fine exhibition on Roanoke in the British Museum in 1988 which brought together a unique collection of maps, drawings and books on the subject. Her most significant personal contribution was to obtain a satellite map of the area covered by the voyages and to demonstrate for the first time, what some of us had maintained for many years, that Harriot and White had got the scale and detail of the surveyed parts of the 1585-86 map correct to a remarkable degree, almost uniquely so for English cartographers of the sixteenth century. Wherever she went she made close friends of almost everyone she met and found her visits to North Carolina, and especially to Fort Raleigh, particularly fruitful in this regard. Her openness and her amusement at the more solemn aspects of academic involvements made her accessible to many who might not have cared to involve themselves in her purely cartographical expertise. She enlarged her circle of North Carolina friends greatly at the Roanoke Decoded conference in May 1993 (hers and Alison’s last visits to America). At the hotel where we were quartered, her laugh could be heard at every breakfast table, and her new as well as her old acquaintances all spoke and speak of her openness and accessibility and her humour and took her warmly to their hearts. Throughout 1993 and 1994 I was in close contact with her on another project in England and found she looked back on her North Carolina experiences in Davidson and at Roanoke Island with particular affection, and with regret that she could not aspire to get back to see her American friends again since she knew that cancer was on its way to bring her life to an end. She was never cast down by pain or discomfort but continued her academic and social interests untrammelled until almost the end. I last spoke to her on the telephone, and though she had not long to live, she was still anxious to carry on a lively discussion as she had done during periods of remission. We shall miss her greatly in England, and she will be missed also in many parts of America as well as in the Far East, but she had a special place in her heart for North Carolina and especially for Roanoke.
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