18 - Womans Way Through Unknown Labrador by Mina Benson Hubbard

In 1905, Mina Benson Hubbard embarked on a remarkable 576-mile canoe expedition through the uncharted wilderness of Labrador, guided by four skilled companions. This journey was not only a personal quest but also a tribute to her late husband, Leonidas Hubbard, who tragically lost his life while attempting the same route in 1903 as a writer for an outdoor magazine. Mrs. Hubbard became the first to accurately document the river paths of her expedition, and her story is complemented by her husbands diary detailing his ill-fated adventure, along with George Elsons gripping account of survival and the recovery of Mr. Hubbards remains. A map created by Mrs. Hubbard during her travels is also featured on this page—narrated by Zach Hoyt.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eighteen of A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador by
Mina Benson Hubbard. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain,
Chapter eighteen, the reckoning. There are times when that which
constitutes once in herself seems to cease. So it was
with me at the moment mister Ford uttered those last words.
My heart should have swelled with emotion, but it did not.

(00:21):
I cannot remember any time in my life when I
had less feeling. Mister Ford was asking me to come
with him to the post house, and looking at my feet.
Then George was seen to rummage in one of the bags,
and out came my seal skin boots, which I had
worn but once, mainly because the woman at Northwest River
Post who made them had paid me the undeserved compliment
of making them too small. My lirigands, which had long
ago ceased to have any waterproof qualities, were now exchanged

(00:43):
for the seal skins, and thus fortified. I stepped out
into the slippery mud. So with the paddle as staff
in one hand and mister Ford supported me by the other,
I completed my journey to the post. At the foot
of the hill below the house, Missus Ford stood waiting.
Her eyes shone like stars as she took my hand
and said, you are very welcome, Missus Hubbard. Yours is
the first white woman's face I have seen for two years.

(01:05):
We went on up the hill to the house. I
do not remember what we talked about. I only remember
Missus Ford's eyes, which were very blue and very beautiful
now in her excitement. And when we reached the little
piazza and I turned to look back, there were the
men sitting quietly in the canoes. The Eskimaux had drawn
canoes men an outfit across the mud to where a
little stream slipped down over a gravelly bed which offered

(01:25):
from her footing, and were now coming in single file
toward the post, each with a bag over his shoulder.
Why were the men sitting there? Why did they not
come too? Suddenly I realized that with our arrival at
the post, our positions were reversed. They were my charges.
Now they had completed their task. And what a great
thing they had done for me. They had brought me safely,
triumphantly on my long journey, and not a hair of

(01:46):
my head had been harmed. They had done it too,
with an innate courtesy and gentleness. That was beautiful. And
I had left them without a word, with a dull
feeling of helplessness and limitation. I thought of how differently
another would have done. No matter how I tried, I
could never be so generous and self forgetful as he
in the hour of disappointment and loneliness, even in the
hour of death, He had taken thoughts so generously for

(02:08):
his companions, I, in the hour of my triumph, had
forgotten mine. It were like light and darkness, And with
the light gone, how deep was the darkness? Once I
had thought I stood up beside him? But in what
a school had I learned that I only reached to
his feet? And now all my effort, though it might
achieve that which he would be glad and proud of,
could never bring him back. I must go back to
the men at once, and, leaving mister and missus Ford,

(02:30):
I slipped down the hill again and outlawed the little
stream across the cove. They came to meet me when
they saw me coming, and Heaven alone knows how inadequate
were the words with which I tried to thank them.
We came up the hill together now, and soon the
tents were pitched out among the willows. As I watched
them from the post window, busy about their new camping ground.
It was with the feeling of genuine loneliness that I

(02:50):
realized that I should not again be one of the
little party. Later came the reckoning, which may be summed
up as follows. Length of journey five nds seventy six
miles from post to post, with thirty miles additional to
Ongava Bay covered later in the post. Yacht Lily time
June twenty seventh to August twenty seventh, forty three days
of actual traveling eighteen days in camp, provisions seven hundred

(03:15):
fifty pounds to begin with, three hundred ninety two pounds
of which was flower surplus, including gifts to Nascapi Indians,
one hundred fifty pounds one hundred five pounds of which
was flower, making the average amount consumed by each member
of the party fifty seven and a half pounds. Results
the pioneer maps of the Nascapi and George Rivers that
of the Nascape, showing seal lake in Lake Michikamao to

(03:37):
be in the same in drainage basin at which geographers
had supposed were two distinct rivers, the northwest and then
Uscapi to be one and the same. The outlet of
Lake Michikamao, carrying its waters through seal Lake, agains to
Lake Melville, with some notes by the way on the topography, geology, flora,
and fauna of the country traversed. It is not generally
borne in mind by those who have been interested in
mister Hubbard's last venture that he did not plan its

(03:58):
outfit for the trip which they made. The failure to
find the open waterway to Lake Michikamau, which has already
been discussed, made the journey almost one long portage to
the great lake. But even so, if the season of
unprecedented severity in which my husband made his journey could
have been exchanged to the nor normal one in which
I made mine, he would still have returned safe and triumphant,
when there were have been only praises for his courage, fortitude,

(04:18):
and skill in overcoming the difficulties which lie across the
way of those who would search out the hidden and
untroud ways. Nevertheless, rising far above either praise or blame,
stands the beauty of that message which came out from
the lonely tent and the wilderness in utter physical weakness,
utter loneliness. In the face of defeat and death, my
husband wrote that last record of his life, so triumphantly characteristic,

(04:39):
which turned his defeat to a victory immeasurably higher and
more beautiful than the success of his exploring, which here
could ever have been accounted, And thus was compassed the
higher purpose of his life, for that it had been
given to me to fulfill one of those lesser purposes
by which he pledged, to build up a hole that
would give him the right to stand among those who
had done great things worthily. I was deeply grateful. The
work was but imperfectly done. Yet I did what I could.

(05:00):
The hills were white with snow when the ship came
to Angava. She had run on a reef in leaving Cartwright,
her first port of call on the Labrador coast. Her
keel was ripped out from stem to stern, and for
a month she had lain in drydock for repairs at
Saint John's, Newfoundland. It was October twenty second when I
said good bye to my kind friends at the post,
and in ten days the pelican landed us safely at Rigolette.

(05:21):
Here I had the good fortune to be picked up
by a steamer bound for Quebec. But the wintry weather
was upon us, and the boys dried itself out to
three times as natural length, so that it was the
evening of November twentieth, just as the sun sank behind
the city, that the little steamer was docked at Quebec,
and I stepped from her decks to set foot once
again in God's country. End of Chapter eighteen.