The Woman Who Mapped Labrador: The Life and Expedition Diary of Mina Hubbard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Woman Who Mapped Labrador: The Life and Expedition Diary of Mina Hubbard Olaf Uwe Janzen (bio) Roberta Buchanan and Bryan Greene, editors. Biography by Anne Hart. The Woman Who Mapped Labrador: The Life and Expedition Diary of Mina Hubbard McGill-Queen’s University Press. xxi, 490. $49.95 This is the story of Mina Benson Hubbard (1870–1956), a Canadian of remarkable achievement and equally remarkable experience, yet who remains relatively unknown today outside of Newfoundland. In 1905 she organized and participated in an expedition that took her and her party in two canoes from North West River through the Labrador interior to Ungava Bay, mapping a region that was well known to Native people and trappers but quite unknown to Europeans. She subsequently published her adventure as A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador: An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers (1908). The volume reviewed here not only publishes, for the first time, the personal journal on which that book was based, complete with careful annotation, but also the first scholarly biography of this extraordinary woman as well as several essays that place her expedition within several contexts – personal, geographical, ethnographical, social. The result, in effect, is several works in one, making this a book that can be recommended on many levels and to many disciplines. That the writing and editing team have also crafted a story that is fascinating in its own right is a delightful bonus. The expedition of 1905 was driven by Hubbard's determination to memorialize her late husband, Leonidas Hubbard, Jr, who had died on an earlier attempt to explore the Labrador interior just two years before. Hubbard's partner in that previous effort, Dillon Wallace, had barely survived the attempt himself, and though his account of that expedition – The Lure of the Labrador Wild: The Story of the Exploring Expedition Conducted by Leonidas Hubbard, Jr. (1905) – offered a reasonably sympathetic and balanced account of the adventure, Mina Hubbard became convinced that Wallace had impugned her husband's reputation. She therefore set out to complete her husband's work. Ironically, so did Wallace, and so 1905 saw [End Page 501] not one but two expeditions set out. The press quickly saw this as a race, as indeed did Mina, though Wallace always insisted that the object was not to get to Ungava Bay first but to complete the original expedition's scientific survey. For a woman to organize an expedition of exploration into the Labrador wilderness was extraordinary enough; for her to go alone, accompanied only by four male guides, was even more extraordinary. Yet though her diary revealed self-doubts about her ability to succeed, she never revealed any doubts about what she was doing or why. When Hubbard returned to 'civilization,' public demand for her account of the journey seemed insatiable, so that even before completing her book, she had embarked on a successful public speaking career which took her to the United States and Great Britain, including a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society (to which she was later elected a Fellow in 1926). Her fame, strength of character, and beauty opened doors to the world of well-to-do upper-middle-class England, including Harold Ellis, a member of a wealthy and politically prominent Yorkshire industrial family and, before the end of 1908, her second husband. Though she always regarded herself as thoroughly Canadian, her life had become decidedly different from that of the rural Ontario farming culture into which she had been born. Her acquaintances included George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells. Her thinking was progressive – she advocated the Montessori Method for the education of her children, and supported the suffrage movement. Yet throughout her life, her expectations of those close to her were high, even impossibly high, so that her marriage to Ellis eventually failed and she became estranged from her own children. All of this suggests that The Woman Who Mapped Labrador was an extraordinarily complex person, and it is therefore appropriate that the book itself is equally complex. Though the contextual essays by Roberta Buchanan and Bryan Greene appear first, a case could be made to...