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:
LEONIDAS HUBBARD JR.
INTREPID EXPLORER
AND
PRACTICAL CHRISTIAN
DIED HERE OCTOBER 18 1903
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:
I am very sure could write a nice little story. I am sure someone would be good enough to help me in doing so. Another thing in my mind. I would like now to get married this fall, if I was lucky enough—if I could strak luck and could get a white girl that would marry me and especially if she was well learnt we then could write some nice stories because she would know lots more than I would but not likely I will be so lucky.
A week later he wrote:
In the afternoon Mrs. Hubbard and I working and talking about some things great importance. Great afternoon. … I could not sleep last night awake all night, thinking lots of new things. Was up at 3 A.M. What a happy life it would be if it would really happen. New plans so good of her to think so kind thoughts of me. She is more than good and kind to me.
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:
A former woman explorer in Labrador, who still liked to explore the district where she was staying, was killed when crossing the railway line near Coulsdon South station. She was 86-year-old Mrs. Mina Adelaide Benson Hubbard Ellis, who was staying with friends at Fairdene Road, Coulsdon.
Her daughter, Mrs. Margaret Russell, of Mirfield Common, Reading, told a Croydon inquest on Tuesday that her mother had gone out to Labrador many years ago to explore a river—a task which her first husband had left uncompleted when he had died from starvation on an exploration there.
Later an Advertiser reporter was told there was a mountain in Labrador called Mount Hubbard and that Mrs. Ellis, who had travelled with her first husband’s guides, had written a book called A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador.
Evidence was given that Mrs. Ellis had become very forgetful and often had to be brought home by strangers as she had forgotten where she was staying.
A verdict of accidental death was returned, and the coroner, Mr. J. W. Bennett, said he did not think there was anything in the history of Mrs. Ellis, or the circumstances surrounding what happened to indicate a suicidal act on her part. She had no right to be on the track—it appeared that she was just wandering about and did not know where she was.
A schoolgirl and two schoolboys saw the accident. The girl, 14-year-old Jill Foster of Coulsdon Road, Old Coulsdon, said she was on the platform at Coulsdon South station when she saw an elderly woman walking on the top of a grass bank near the railway.
After walking by the railway the woman started to cross the lines, walking slowly and carefully and stopping for a while between the two tracks. When the woman was crossing the last line of the second track, she was struck by a train.
Fifteen-year-old Roger Aslin of Chaldon Way, Coulsdon, and his schoolboy friend had shouted to the woman that a train was due, but he did not think she had heard.
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 su
ccess. Oh Laddie, dear precious beautiful Laddie, I want you. Oh I want you this beautiful Christmas eve.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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.
Additionally, neither book makes a single mention of the rival expedition. Are we to assume from this that neither explorer gave a thought to the progress of the other? Hardly. It seems far more likely that the members of each crew discussed their rivals frequently, and wondered, all along the way, about their relative locations.
And what are we to make of George’s and Mina’s carefully worded references to one another in their diaries? So much more is said by a deliberate silence on certain matters than any number of words could disclose.
Still, these books are the accounts closest to factual because they were written by the participants themselves: the journal of Leonidas Hubbard Jr.; Mina Hubbard’s unpublished diary and her book, A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador; George Elson’s unpublished diary, plus the narrative he composed at Mina’s request—the latter included, along with portions of her husband’s diary, in Mina’s book; Dillon Wallace’s books, The Lure of the Labrador Wild and The Long Labrador Trail; and the diary of Leigh Stanton, a crew member on Wallace’s second expedition. Working from these primary sources alone and putting secondary sources aside, I attempted to weave together a chronicle that would illuminate all three expeditions, and especially Mina’s.
But I soon found myself unable to move beyond a basic outline of known “facts.” I was paralyzed by what I did not know—all the conversations not recorded; all the emotions suffered alone through cold, grey nights; all the fears and doubts never uttered; all the secrets never shared. The novelist in me longed not only to observe the characters in this drama but to inhabit them. But I was writing a nonfiction book this time. How could I do so without observing strict fidelity to the facts?
I agonized for months. I read and reread the primary sources. And somewhere along the line the import of the various authors’ omissions and contradictions dawned on me. I realized that even these primary sources, whether composed mere minutes after the events described or after months of reflection, were, by their very nature, highly subjective accounts. Diary entries, for example, are sometimes scribbled in haste while waiting for the bacon to fry, and are sometimes pondered over long and hard, with full knowledge that a later generation may read and judge those words. Published books are subject to even greater artifice.
So what does this mean?
It means that Norman Mailer is correct. All writing is fiction.
As Simon Schama points out in the afterword to Dead Certainties, “… even in the most austere scholarly report from the archives, the inventive faculty—selecting, pruning, editing, commenting, interpreting, delivering judgments—is in full play.” Mina’s and Wallace’s books are not austere scholarship but subjective retellings of their adventures. In choosing to avoid any mention of each other—hardly an inconsequential omission—both Mina and Wallace chose to turn the corner from unedited fact to something much closer to fiction. Additionally, George Elson’s narrative of the 1903 expedition, written well after the fact, was surely affected not only by his own sense of guilt and grief, but by Mina’s fervent plea that he compose his account in order to assist her in vindicating her husband.
We can assume that each of the authors of the Labrador diaries and books believed that he or she was writing a full and truthful account of their experiences. But, as R. V. Casill observed in his novel Clem Anderson, “The end of every quest to know the truth is speculation.”
If I wanted to know the truth underlying Mina Hubbard’s story, I too would have to speculate. “Begin with a fact,” said Thoreau, “and hope it will flower into a truth.”
It was this admonition that gave me the freedom I needed to begin writing. From the primary sources I culled the most interesting scenes and fitted them together like pieces from five or six different jigsaw puzzles. Between the joints I added a good bit of glue in the form of speculation—description of setting and physical action, dialogue, emotional response, thoughts and feelings never recorded. In short, I dramatized.
Dramatizations are, by their very nature, speculations on how a scene might have played out. As Schama observes, the original meaning of the Greek word historia was “inquiry.”
“But to have an inquiry …,” he says, “is surely to require the telling of stories. And so the asking of questions and relating of narratives need not, I think, be mutually exclusive forms of historical representation.”
I think so too.
The best I could hope to do, I realized, when working a hundred years after the incidents described, was to produce, through my own imperfect and subjective response to the materials, an authentic portrait of a time, a place and a group of individuals who once engaged in a compelling drama that embodied every flaw and virtue of the human heart.
When I was writing nonfiction articles for the Discovery Channel magazines, I was encouraged by a very talented editor to put myself into every story. She did not mean by this that
every story should be a first-person narrative, but that the writer should inhabit every story as if he had been on site.
For Heart So Hungry I edged close to every campfire so as to hear what Mina, George, Job, Joe and Gilbert might say to one another, and to see how their facial expressions and body language confirmed or refuted what was said. I tucked myself into a corner of Mina’s tent each night. I placed my feet in her footsteps as she hiked through the brush. From time to time I peeked in on Wallace and his party, saw and heard what I needed so as to know those men better, and hurried back to Mina.
It was impossible for me to keep any emotional distance from those brave souls. I saw them through my eyes—eyes educated in a world a century distant from theirs. I experienced them through my sensibilities, my own abilities and fears and desires. Still, I strove at all times not to betray any of them with a depiction that was inherently false.
Throughout the writing of this book, I often wondered what it was about Mina Hubbard that I, a male writer in the twenty-first century, found so alluring. It is true that, like most men, I would love to be adored as completely as Mina adored her Laddie, would love to be viewed as a god. Others of Mina’s qualities are just as endearing: she was strong and brave and resourceful, an adventuresome woman, intelligent and loyal and resolute. But perhaps what fascinates me most about Mina Hubbard is that I know I would be a better man if I could be more like that shy nurse from Ontario. What she accomplished she did not for her own benefit but for another. And that, among our entire pantheon of explorers, is a rare thing indeed.
Heart So Hungry Page 26