Heart So Hungry (35 page)

B
OTH
M
INA
H
UBBARD AND
D
ILLON
W
ALLACE
went on to write books about their expeditions. Neither book makes a single mention of the rival expedition nor once acknowledges the competitive nature of the race to Ungava. The name and spirit of Leonidas Hubbard Jr., however, haunt both narratives.

Wallace’s book,
The Long Labrador Trail
, was the more popular of the two accounts and went through numerous printings. First published in 1907, a year before Mina’s
A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador
, its prose is distinctly more lively, more calculated to emphasize the dangers and tribulations of the ordeal. Indeed, Wallace’s crew experienced far more mishaps and missteps than did Mina’s. His journey, in comparison to hers, seems to follow a blunderer’s route to Michikamau, with the Wallace party more often lost than not. Also, whereas Mina accorded full credit for the success of her mission to her crew, Wallace’s various accounts accentuate his own role as decision-maker and leader, and sometimes offer contradictory explanations for the choices he made.

In
The Long Labrador Trail
, for example, Wallace claims that he decided to continue from Ungava to Fort Chimo because too few
provisions remained in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s stores. But in an article in
Outing Magazine
dated February 1906, he wrote:

In other words, he was willing to sacrifice his own comfort for the sake of his readers. He had by now thoroughly adopted the pose of a bold adventure writer, a persona that, in his publications at least, supplanted that of the soft-spoken lawyer whom Leonidas Hubbard had had to coax along to a place called Labrador.

In that same
Outing
article, the next to last paragraph contains this almost grudgingly offered information, more revealing in its brevity than a dozen sentences could have been: “Mrs. Hubbard and her four Indians are here [at Ungava] and return by the
Pelican.”

Having discovered a flair for storytelling, Wallace eventually gave up his law practice for the life of a writer. He wrote on assignment for
Outing
and other magazines, and authored a total of twenty-eight books, many of them fiction and most aimed at a youthful audience. The last would be published in 1936, three years before his death at the age of seventy-six.

In 1913 Wallace went into Labrador once more, this time accompanied by a friend and four guides—one of whom was Gilbert Blake—for the purpose of marking Hubbard’s final campsite with a plaque. Unfortunately the plaque was lost when the party’s canoe capsized. Wallace continued, however, and on a large rock near the site where his friend had died he chiselled this inscription:

By all accounts, George Elson’s two expeditions with the Hubbards had a profound effect on his life. He frequently regaled his friends with stories of those adventures, though he did not write his stories down and publish them, as Mina had encouraged him to do. And perhaps the most revealing story was one he did not share.

Early in September 1905, while awaiting the
Pelican
’s arrival at Ungava Bay, he wrote this in his diary:

Whatever plans were made, they did not come to fruition. George Elson moved to Moosonee in northern Ontario after the
expedition and went to work for Revillon Frères, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s French rival, eventually assuming the position of manager at the Rupert House Post. There he met a sixteen-year-old Cree girl named Ellen Miller, whom he married in 1912. They had one child; it died in infancy.

George continued to work for Revillon Frères, transferring from Rupert House to Fort George and back to Moosonee, until 1936, when the company was taken over by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which kept him on until his retirement at the beginning of the Second World War. He died on November 15, 1944, and was buried on Moose Factory Island.

Mina’s return from Labrador, and in fact the first reports of her success there, were met with skepticism in the press. The North Adams
Evening Transcript
, published near her home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, speculated that “she cannot have carried out her original intentions. She was to have proceeded to Ungava, which would take her on a much longer journey than she has apparently made.”

Her public appearances, on the other hand, beginning with those organized by friends in Williamstown, were an immediate success, and in time her speaking engagements took her over much of North America and England. She wrote at least two articles about her expedition, one for
Harper’s Magazine
and the other, a more objectively phrased piece meant to outline the scientific accomplishments of her journey, for the
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society
.

Although Mina’s book did not enjoy the popular success of Wallace’s, her accomplishments were recognized by the scientific community. Hers were the pioneer maps of the Naskapi and George River systems, and the first map to indicate that Seal Lake and Lake Michikamau were in the same drainage basin and that the Naskapi and Northwest Rivers were not two distinct rivers, as had been generally assumed, but one and the same. In addition she
provided detailed field notes and observations about the area’s flora and fauna, plus invaluable photographic and written descriptions of the Montagnais and Naskapi natives.

While on a lecture tour in England in 1907, Mina met Harold Ellis, the son of a wealthy Quaker family. A year later, they married. They had three children. In 1926 the couple divorced.

Over the years Mina and George Elson maintained a correspondence, and during her visits to Canada the explorer and her guide often got together. In 1936, when Mina was sixty-six years old, she made an impromptu detour from her planned itinerary, travelled to Moosonee and surprised George with a visit, then persuaded him to take her on a canoe trip up the Moose River. Neither left any record of the details of their final day together.

Mina remained adventurous to the end. On a clear spring morning in 1956, she called out to the friend she was visiting, “I am going to explore!” and went off hiking into the unknown. The
Purley and Coulsdon Advertiser
of Friday, May 11, described the incident like this:

Whether Mina did or did not hear the warning calls will never be known. What is known is that her success in Labrador failed to bring the peace she had hoped for. On Christmas Eve in 1906, after attending a church service and listening to a concert of hymns, she wrote in her diary, “Some of it very sweet. Made me feel so lonely and sad in a way I do not altogether understand.”

Later she paused to look up at the night sky, then turned to her diary again: “Stars so beautiful. Heart so hungry, so hungry. Oh so hungry. How his eyes would shine if he could stand by me now to tell me how proud he was of my success. Oh Laddie, dear precious beautiful Laddie, I want you. Oh I want you this beautiful Christmas eve.”

I
FIRST HEARD THE STORY
of Leonidas and Mina Hubbard’s expeditions to Labrador in the early fall of 1995, after my return from Alaska’s Arctic Circle, where the Discovery Channel had sent me to find the Porcupine caribou herd. “Another place you might enjoy,” an acquaintance told me, “is Labrador. Just be careful you don’t end up the way a writer named Hubbard did back at the turn of the century.”

Like Dillon Wallace, the man who became Mina Hubbard’s nemesis, I had a vague idea of where Labrador is located and, after some difficulty, finally found it on one of my maps. Even modern maps often fail to identify Labrador as such, and blend it into Newfoundland. But my frustration in trying to locate Labrador only whetted my interest.

From the very beginning the Hubbards’ story intrigued me. I read everything I could find on the subject—and there was a great deal to find, most significantly the books and journals authored by the Hubbards and their colleagues. But despite the wealth of primary and secondary source material about these three expeditions conducted by the Hubbards and Dillon Wallace, I came to feel that a significant aspect of their story had not yet been told. For me, what existed of the literal truth of their story was insufficiently
illuminating. I craved a deeper truth—a dramatic and emotional truth. Still waiting to be revealed, it seemed to me, was the
interior
story—and Mina Hubbard’s most compellingly, for of all the participants in this drama, she has the richest and most complex story, the most heartfelt and the most heart-driven.

I was drawn to the story through Mina herself, particularly her unflinching devotion to her husband and her resolve to preserve his reputation no matter what the consequences. Several characters in my novels have exhibited a fanatical attachment to an ideal, so, I suppose, given my interest in characters whose excesses are poured out on the page, it was only natural that Mina Hubbard should haunt and enchant me.

But how to tell her story? Facts, like beauty, are only skin deep. Especially when the “facts” themselves are subject to interpretation.

The first book written about the first Hubbard expedition, the book that so outraged Mina Hubbard, was Dillon Wallace’s
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
. But it was composed with the help of a ghostwriter who had not accompanied Wallace on the journey. So the question arises: How much of the tale was embroidered by the ghostwriter, and how much by Wallace himself? Wallace’s and Mina’s books about their 1905 expeditions did not appear until 1907 and 1908 respectively; we can logically assume that both authors, after much reflection and revision, added and omitted information from their accounts so as to further their individual aims. They had their field notes and diaries as guides, yes, but the books were ultimately crafted from memory and intention passed through the filter of subjective experience. No tape recorders were used to capture conversations; any dialogue that appears in Hubbard’s and Wallace’s books can be assumed not to be verbatim, but imperfectly remembered re-creations. The same can be said of descriptions of settings, individuals and events.