Authors: Randall Silvis
In Hubbard’s day, the best extant map of the interior was one made by A. P. Low of the Geological Survey of Canada. But much of that map remained blank space. And some of it, as Wallace would write, “proved to be wholly incorrect, and the mistake it led us into cost us dear.”
On that November evening in 1901, as Wallace sat before a campfire with his friend, Leonidas Hubbard Jr. could still proclaim without much exaggeration, “It’s terra incognita!”
With that exclamation Hubbard leapt to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. He searched the ground for a good piece of wood, found a log nearly three feet long, heaved it onto the fire. Then, even as he continued to speak, he poked and prodded at the log with a long stick, sending one swirl of embers after another into the night sky. Perhaps he did not view those dancing sparks as fireworks to
his words, but Wallace did. It was as if the sparks were coming from Hubbard himself, an emanation of his passion.
“Just think of it!” he said. “A great unknown land right at our fingertips! I’ve been to the edge of Labrador already for that article I did on the Montagnais trappers. But what I want is to get into the really wild country. I want to have the same experience the old fellas had when they first opened up the very country where we now sit.”
Wallace nodded and sucked on his pipe. He did not wish to smile too broadly lest Hubbard suspect he was amused by these ambitions. “Just how would we go about it?” he asked.
“What I propose is to set off north across Grand Lake by canoe. Grand Lake is some forty miles long. You don’t have to go much beyond it, only as far as the Naskapi River, to be into virgin territory. Land no white man has ever seen, Wallace. And I mean to claim a piece of the unknown, just as Boone and Crockett and all the others did before us. Just as Peary is doing. Man, I’ve been dreaming about this kind of thing all my life. And now—don’t ask me to explain it because I don’t think I can—but now, at last, I know that Labrador is the place for me. And furthermore, I know without a doubt that we can pull it off.”
Wallace lifted his pipe away from his mouth. He considered the crackling log, the sputter of boiling sap. “I’m not as confident as you are that I would be up to such an adventure.”
“You say that every time I suggest another outing. But you always come with me, don’t you? Last time, you said you really didn’t have time any more for these trips of ours, yet here you sit, looking happy as a clam.”
“True enough,” Wallace admitted. “But this isn’t Labrador.”
Hubbard jabbed at the fire. Sparks shot into the air. “I thought my Lake St. John trip might be enough for me.” He smiled wistfully. The scent of wood smoke always filled him with a strange longing. “And for a minute or two, it was. But as I stood there gazing ever
deeper into Labrador
—looking into the unknown, Wallace! Can you imagine what that was like
?—I knew then that the mere beginning of the unknown would never be sufficient. I have to go. I have no choice but to do it.”
He sat motionless for a minute or two, his gaze going over the fire and beyond Wallace, into the unfathomable darkness.
He spoke softly now. “The city is like a poison for me. Sure, I go there every day, I do my work, same as everybody else. But I’m not alive there. Not the way I am out here. That’s why we make these trips, isn’t it? To make us feel alive again? I challenge you to tell me it’s not the same with you, because I know it is. Back at the office you feel like little more than a machine, don’t you? But out here with the elements, out here where you have to catch your food and blaze your own trail, don’t you feel like more of a man than at any other time? Really, Wallace, isn’t that why you keep coming back for more?”
And there it was, in words too bald for Wallace to articulate himself, words too honest for him to utter. Since his wife’s death he had tried to numb himself with work, yes, but he did not love the work any more, he did not awaken to it each morning with a sense of renewal and expectation. He threw himself into it because it deadened him.
But out here … How good he had felt traipsing through the snow this afternoon. These expeditions were tiring, yes, but the exhaustion was satisfying somehow, far more satisfying than the dull fatigue of office work could ever be. Here every morning he awakened fully alert, eager for a glimpse of the sun as it poured its first pink light through the trees. Here the raucous call of ravens and the chatter of jays was a music purer to his ears than the orchestrated boom of any symphony. And here even his grief released its weight on him, the grief that at other times so sapped his strength, weakened his legs and put a tremble in his hands. It was not that his grief lessened here—it never diminished—but there was a peculiar kind of lightness to it when he came into the woods. When he waded through
knee-deep snow and thought of Jennie he was not depleted by bitterness but felt instead—and this he finally admitted to himself—he felt closer to her out here.
As for Hubbard, well, he was just a boy really. He’d had some rough times of his own, certainly, but of real loss, of life’s blackest and deepest despair, what scars did he bear? Still, the boy was bold and reliant, no one could claim otherwise. Hubbard was, in truth, a splendid companion. Wallace had never known another man young or old with Hubbard’s verve. He had joie de vivre and he wasn’t the least bit shy about sharing it.
Truth be told, Wallace thought, where would I be now without him?
A minute or two later Wallace picked up one of his mittens, wrapped it around the teakettle’s smoke-blackened handle, filled first Hubbard’s cup, then his own. He picked up his mug of tea and smiled across the campfire. “All right,” he said. “I’m with you.”
“You’ll go?” Hubbard leaned forward; his eyes reflected the fire.
Wallace leaned toward him. “To Labrador,” he said. And they clinked their cups together.
“To the great unknown!”
For all of Hubbard’s enthusiasm, his plan to conquer Labrador remained an elusive one while he tended to the business of making a living, turning out one assignment after another. This continued until April 1902, when he was promoted to assistant editor at
Outing
. He revelled in the chance to have a real influence on the magazine but regretted that the office work left less time for his own writing. But never did he lose sight of his lifelong goal. And in January of the following year, by which time he felt he had proved his worth to the magazine and justified Caspar Whitney’s faith in him, he approached his editor.
“What I propose is this,” he told Whitney. “I and a small party shall proceed from the head of Grand Lake up the Naskapi River,
exploring and charting the territory north to Lake Michikamau. Thence to the headwaters of the George River, and down the river until I make contact with the Indians. No white man has ever visited the Barren Ground Indians at their inland camps. But I will. After which I mean to either continue north to Ungava Bay or else return south by the same route, depending on the weather and the season.”
Whitney was anything but sanguine about the magazine acting as sponsor for the expedition. “And you will make the trip by canoe all the way?”
“No doubt there will be a good bit of portaging. The trappers around Grand Lake make mention of an Indian trail.”
Whitney, who was more than ten years Hubbard’s senior, pulled at his chin. “To be honest with you, Leon, it doesn’t strike me as much of a challenge.”
“Six hundred miles through uncharted lands!”
“But if I’m not mistaken, you intend to travel through the summer. And return before the snow falls.”
“Even so,” Hubbard said, and struggled to come up with a convincing argument, “by all accounts it is a bleak, unforgiving place. There are sure to be dangers and hardships aplenty.”
But Whitney was not easy to persuade. He was determined not to waste the magazine’s money on a trip that might result in less than thrilling copy. Although
Outing
regularly published articles on all manner of recreational activities—hunting and fishing, bicycling, boxing and football—he was wary of throwing his magazine’s support and money behind a summer-long project that required little more of its participants than a strong back. When it came to wilderness adventures, he had only to look at his own experiences as exemplars of dangers faced and hardships endured, with compelling stories as the result. Whitney had trekked two thousand miles across the Northwest Territories in 1895, for example, not in summer but in the frozen heart of winter, and not gliding
along by canoe but trudging along on snowshoes, accompanied by mutinous Indians so starved he had been forced to guard the rations at knifepoint. Now
that
had been a challenging adventure. Hubbard’s, in comparison, promised to be little more than a camping holiday.
“What kind of provisions would you take?” he asked, if only because he held Hubbard in high esteem and did not wish to dismiss him without a fair hearing.
“We would travel light,” Hubbard said, “to facilitate quickness. Caribou and other game, as well as fish, will provide for most of our needs.”
“Game is abundant in the area?”
Hubbard recognized the question as a trap. If game was indeed abundant, where was the challenge? “Not overly so,” he answered. “Uncertain at best, I’d say.”
Whitney’s instincts told him to back away from this endeavour. Normally he would have had no difficulty doing so, for he was a forthright man with strong opinions seldom kept to himself. Some of his staff found him brusque, even abusive, and more than one had suffered a lashing of sharp words from his quick, thin lips. But Whitney did not mind if others considered him harsh. It was what the job demanded of him.
His problem was that he liked Leon Hubbard a great deal, both as a writer and as a man. He knew him to be unselfish and loyal, generous to a fault. But too much equanimity out on the trail could rapidly turn from a virtue to a liability. The wilderness called for a taskmaster unafraid to be dictatorial, prepared to push his crew to its limits. Beyond them, if necessary. Whitney doubted that Hubbard had even a drop of the tyrant in him. He would be solicitous of every thorn-prick and blister.
Even so, Hubbard was among the most popular of the writers on the magazine’s staff. Any dispatches from him in the field would make for hot copy. Moreover, if denied this opportunity to fulfill a
lifelong ambition, he might grow dissatisfied with his editorial duties, and might seek support elsewhere.
“If you go to Labrador,” Whitney told him, “I cannot keep you on salary here.”
Hubbard felt the wind go out of his sails, felt his chest grow leaden.
“I will, however, be happy to consider all articles and photographs that result from your adventure, and to pay you your usual rate for them.”
Well, it was something, at least. Enough to bring a smile to Hubbard’s mouth. And it was that look, at once humble and without a trace of resentment, that nudged Whitney toward another concession.
“And perhaps
Outing
can see its way clear to providing a bit of additional support as well. So as to ensure adequate provisioning.”
Hubbard was as close to ecstatic as he had ever been. At home that night in the village of Congers, some thirty miles north of New York City, where he and Mina had rented a cottage, he pinned a Geological Survey map of Labrador to the wall of his study. To Mina it seemed a mere outline of the peninsula, its perimeter sketched in detail but much of its interior only empty white space.
“Here is where I expect to find the George River,” Hubbard told his wife, laying his finger to the map. “And somewhere in here I hope to encounter the caribou as they make their migration eastward. Here, reportedly, we shall see the Indians. And here the Height of Land, whence our canoes will be carried northward with the current rather than having to fight against it.”
Mina did her best to conceal the tentativeness of her smile, the quiver in her voice. A whole summer without her Laddie? How could she bear it? She could not return to nursing for a mere two months; no hospital would take her on knowing it would soon lose her again. So what would she do with herself? There was a garden to put in, yes, but by June most of the work would be done. She
could not pull weeds from daybreak to dark. If Laddie would write to her daily, that would be something, but months would pass before he could post the letters. No, his summer of adventure would mean a summer of emptiness for her. Long, long days and even longer nights. How do you masquerade as happy when the focus of your life is taking itself away from you?
She kept her dread to herself, bit down hard on every selfish thought.
In February Hubbard placed a call to Dillon Wallace’s office. “Bully news!” he said. “I’ve got bully news today!”
“Is that so? What’s up?”
“We leave for Labrador this summer.”
Wallace could do little more than blink. What had been a mere idea, and one he had never entertained with as much zeal as Hubbard did, loomed on the threshold of actual deed.
“Come out to Congers tonight,” Hubbard told him, “and I’ll tell you all about it. Mina will make something special for our celebration.”
Over the course of that evening, as Mina doted and served, her stomach fluttering with trepidation, Hubbard’s exuberance eroded away Wallace’s doubts. Yes, they would have a grand time conquering the wilderness together. They would both be famous men.
At evening’s close the Hubbard exploration into unknown Labrador was christened with a glass of sherry and a handshake. The men plighted their troth, as Wallace would later write in the dedication of his first book. The phrase made Mina grit her teeth in silence—this allusion to marriage—an allusion that might have been altogether ridiculous except that she, indeed, was to be left behind.
Such desolation, inside and out. Mina’s first good look at the Labrador coastline, seen through the weak light of a coastal dawn and the grey of a bone-chilling drizzle, perfectly mirrored the
anguish of her heart. It was July 5, 1903, and ahead in the mist lay Battle Harbour, a small settlement on Labrador’s southeastern shore, and the place where she would be put ashore to return home alone while Laddie and his crew continued.