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.
