I have an addiction to catastrophe porn of the exploration genre. I used to collect stories of Arctic (and Antarctic) explorers whose ships sank or became ice-locked leading to mass starvation. That and mountain-climbing expeditions that went wrong (with the usual photos of hands and feet black with frostbite, bodies frozen like statues along the path). Hot countries didn’t interest me so much at the time. But give me a shipload of Newfoundland seal hunters stranded on ice floes and I would be a happy reader indeed.
I thought I had exhausted the possibilities but by chance the other day I stumbled upon Mina Benson Hubbard’s A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador, An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers (1908), which is pretty much the most fascinating thing I have read in ages. It mixes several of my favourite themes, not just catastrophe porn, but the surprising-things-women-can-do theme (the feminist side of me is always amused at the way women doing things is so often met with astonishment) and the surprising-if-tangential-anthropological-snapshots theme (I have mentioned this before, that often the most interesting thing about old books is not what they think they are telling you, but the real things they let slip in passing). It left me with vivid mental images, not to be erased: the frightened Naskapi women screaming at Mina to leave them alone, starving Leonidas Hubbard alone in the snow writing his last diary entry, the half-Cree guide George Elson stumbling barefoot in the thigh-deep snow singing hymns to keep his spirits up, suddenly in the middle of nowhere spying a lone Indian child who saves him.
A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador isn’t just Mina Hubbard’s book. One of the great beauties of the thing is the way it amalgamates three first-hand narratives. First, there is Mina’s story of how she successfully completed her dead husband’s failed journey from North West River, Labrador (just around the corner from Happy Valley-Goose Bay) to Ungava Bay via the George River in 1905. Second, we have her husband’s (Leonidas) diary of his failed 1903 expedition, which ended in his death by starvation. And, finally and perhaps most remarkably, George Elson’s own narrative of the last weeks of that 1903 expedition, how, starving himself, he watched Leonidas fatally weaken, then set off alone (no mittens, no shoes fit to the name) through the snow to try to get downriver to a trading post to find help. This last is something rare, a first hand Metis report of the expedition (in the annals of exploration you hardly ever see the hired help given a chance to speak). Each tale is different, a different voice, a different outcome, a different point of view. Together they provide a thickly woven tapestry of meaning (most so-called explorers are operatic egotists — to her credit, Mina Hubbard mostly was not).
Mina Hubbard was born Mina Benson on a farm near Bewdley, Ontario, in 1870. As with many young Canadian women who wanted training in a profession, she ended up going to New York to study nursing. She was working in a hospital on Staten Island when she met a young American journalist named Leonidas Hubbard, Jr, (slightly built, boyish, big moustache) who wrote travel and adventure articles for a magazine called Outing (not the name one would choose today). They were married in 1901. Two years later, Leonidas headed to Labrador with the brilliant idea of exploring the unknown overland route from North West River to Ungava. This is one of those white, European ways of speaking — the overland route (by canoe and portage) was well known to some, people actually lived there, for goodness sake, but no white person had yet precisely marked the route on a map. So Leonidas could call himself an explorer while the local Naskapi and Montagnais could not (this is an old story of hubris and point of view, not to be belaboured).
Leonidas brought along a New York lawyer friend and hired local guides, including the above-mentioned George Elson, to help with the paddling and portaging, ie. the work (another old story). They set off from North West River on July 15 and almost immediately took the wrong turn into an alternate route that pitched them into a myriad of small lakes and long portages. The men had depended on being able to hunt for food along the way to supplement the stores they carried in (no freeze-dried meals in those days), but game proved amazing sparse. Leonidas was occasionally ill with diarrhea, probably exacerbated by short rations.
Despite the lack of food, they pushed on, almost reaching the height of land separating the north-flowing George River from the eastward drainage, when they admitted defeat and turned for home. But they were too late. Snow and freezing temperatures hit. They boiled bones they found at old campsites and ate the maggots. They abandoned their canoes because they were too weak to carry them. Eventually, Leonidas could go no further, and George Elson and the New York lawyer pushed on to try to get help. Then it was just George alone (and his story is epic — at one point he crossed a half-frozen lake on a raft he built without an axe or rope, actually holding the thing together with his arms and legs as he floated half-submerged in the freezing water). A rescue party went back and found the New York lawyer still alive. It took months to retrieve Leonidas’s body.
In 1905, Mina hired George Elson and two other paddlers to help her finish the job Leonidas had attempted. She did not take the wrong turn, and though difficult, her journey was relatively quick and without fatality. They made the right turn at the appropriate place and knew from trappers roughly where they were meant to go. They found game along the way, sometimes just adequate (she ate a lot of porcupine early on) and sometimes plentiful (they struck the George River caribou herd on migration, witnessed scenes of boreal splendour that no longer exist). She measured the latitude and longitude regularly (for the map). They stopped every Sunday for a day of rest and Bible reading (what surprised me: even the Metis paddlers knew their Bible and would ask for specific readings). They ran into bands of Montagnais and Naskapi, brief insights into a world now lost. The Naskapi were particularly poignant. They were all women and children, the men having gone east on their annual trip to the coast to trade for supplies, and they were short of food and fatalistic (Mina left them what she could). You wonder throughout about the vectors of attraction, and it now seems that George (a handsome young man with a moustache) may have developed an unrequited thing for Mina. At any event, he was forever deeply entangled with that family.
I used to take my sons on annual 10-day canoe trips in Ontario parks (Temagami, Algonquin, Killarney), fun and slightly arduous, for the most part, but car-camping in comparison to what Leonidas and Mina Hubbard did. But still the routine was the same. Coffee and breakfast in the morning (our supply of bacon growing increasingly greasy and gray as the days wore on). Break camp and paddle out, sometimes rainy and cold, sometimes the waves were frightening. Low on the water, land rising around us, birds and occasional moose. Sparkling marshes, tufts of coloured blossoms. Portages with legions of monstrous mosquitoes. Then finding a new campsite, gathering wood, cooking over a fire, smell of wood smoke, bedding down in the tent with the mosquitoes buzzing like chainsaws just outside (how many nights, like Mina, did we spend the first half-hour squashing bugs inside the tent). We didn’t hunt, of course, and we sucked at fishing. We would not have survived Labrador in 1905. But there is enough of this day-to-day canoeing routine that was the same to give me a deep sense of pleasure reading her story (Leonidas starving to death and George struggling through the snow, singing hymns, not so much).
Not to diminish Mina’s bravery or her accomplishment (for goodness sake, her husband had just starved to death trying the same trick), but it’s clear that George Elson and the two other men she hired carried her through the trip. They did the hunting and fishing, humped the loads over portages, and negotiated the rapids. Their splendid physical condition and outdoor craft got her through to Ungava Bay. One of the most poignant scenes in the book (aside from the dying part) happens when they reach the trading post at the end of their journey. Whites from the post rushed down to the mud flats of the landing to welcome her and usher her back to civilization. Joyful and full of herself, she lets herself be carried along, leaving George and his friends standing by the canoes waiting to be noticed.
And when we reached the little piazza and I turned to look back, there were the men sitting quietly in the canoes. The Eskimo had drawn canoes, men and outfit across the mud to where a little stream slipped down over a gravelly bed, which offered firmer footing, and were now coming in single file towards the post each with a bag over his shoulder.
Why were the men sitting there? Why did they not come too?
Suddenly I realised that with our arrival at the post our positions were reversed. They were my charges now. They had completed their task and what a great thing they had done for me. They had brought me safely, triumphantly on my long journey, and not a hair of my head had been harmed. They had done it too with an innate courtesy and gentleness that was beautiful, and I had left them without a word.
I cannot add to that.
I'm pretty sure Hammond Inness is nodding to the Hubbards' stories with his The Land God Gave to Cain. And have you read Great Heart, James Davidson and John Rugge's canoe trip adventure to follow the Hubbard route?
Fascinating stuff. Apart from anything else, Mina's narrative seems like a modern grief memoir (I can almost see her on the talk show circuit). I wonder who decided on the three complementary narratives. I would like to think Mina wanted George's story given equal time.