Sherrill Grace,
"Inventing Mina Benson Hubbard: From her 1905 Expedition
across Labrador to her 2005 Centennial (and Beyond)"
(page 5 of 7)
When Mina returned south, she gave interviews and slide lectures and
published articles about her expedition. Nevertheless, male opinion
proved intransigent: one man, a clergyman who spoke with great
authority, assured the public that she could not have done what she
claimed in the time she had taken. Dillon Wallace was attempting the
journey at the same time as Mina and he took several weeks longer to
reach Ungava, suffered many near fatal accidents, and was obliged to
send half of his expedition team back at the mid-point. If Wallace had
this difficulty, Mrs. Hubbard was nothing short of a liar, or so this
gentleman implied. When her accomplishments became irrefutable, male
commentators and book reviewers dismissed her expedition as little more
than a pleasant canoe trip on which she did no real work. Finally, she
was displaced as the leader of a northern expedition and credit for her
success was given to George Elson.
In coping with these contemporary—and more recent—disparagements, I
have kept the following points in mind: no one who has hiked across
northern tundra and taiga can honestly claim that there is no work
involved; I have done a little of this and I would not have lasted a
week with Mina. No one who has canoed on the waters of rivers like the
Naskapi and the George can claim that this is a pleasant wilderness
paddle. True, Mina did not do the heavy work of poling, portaging
supplies, and making camp each night, but white men also expected their
native guides to do a great deal of this manual labour for them so they
could take measurements, keep their journals or, indeed, draw pictures
of the local fauna and flora as, for example, the gentlemen on Sir John
Franklin's first two expeditions into the Canadian North did. Finally,
the fact that Mina listened closely to George's advice (and he was
indeed a very brave, knowledgeable, and loyal man), appreciated his and
the other men's expertise, and was prepared to trust them in no way
diminishes her role as expedition leader (at least not to my mind). Her
husband's expedition failed in large part because he and Wallace
dismissed George's warnings as mere Indian superstition; Leonidas
stubbornly insisted that he knew what to do, and he was terribly wrong.
But I believe what really annoyed many of the men in the American and
British Geographical societies and in the general public was her map.
With this map she corrected the mistakes made by the distinguished A.P.
Low, proved that her husband had been misled by Low's map, and made an
impressively accurate cartographical representation of the Labrador
interior. Even today, geographers, like Brian Greene, who can use
highly sophisticated technology in their work, will allow that her map
was first rate for its time and for the minimal equipment at her
disposal. Here is where her training as a nurse, in the close
observation of physical facts, stood her in good stead.
A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador was published by John
Murray, one of the leading expedition publishers of the day, in 1908,
and it was handsomely produced and strategically marketed; her splendid
map was included with the book and folded into a pocket sewn into the
inside back binding. Mrs. Hubbard, as she was always called, was
marketed as a lady explorer, which her portrait confirms, and her
adventure was sanctioned by virtue of her stated mission of completing
her late husband's work; the mysterious North was exoticised for British
readers; and her practical accomplishments were placed within these
familiar boundaries. William Briggs published the Canadian edition
later in 1908 using the Murray text and map. However, when the New York
publisher McClure published her book in 1909, they cut the map, reduced
the photographs, dropped the important endorsement provided by William
Cabot (an American explorer who knew parts of Labrador) and made
numerous small, unauthorized, textual changes to insert sexual innuendos
and to heighten sensational aspects of a woman traveling alone with "red
men" (see Roy). In other words, for the American market, the book was
made less visually attractive, the accomplishments of its author were
diminished, and the woman herself was cast in a morally dubious light.
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