Heart So Hungry (36 page)

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factual because they were written by the participants themselves: the journal of Leonidas Hubbard Jr.; Mina Hubbard’s unpublished diary and her book,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George Elson’s unpublished diary, plus the narrative he composed at Mina’s request—the latter included, along with portions of her husband’s diary, in Mina’s book; Dillon Wallace’s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.

Elson, George. Narrative of 1903 Labrador expedition, published in
A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador
by Mina Hubbard. John Murray, London, 1908.

——Unpublished diary, microfilm copy. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, reference #R1648–0-6-E, A-26.

Hubbard, Leonidas Jr. Diary of 1903 Labrador expedition, microfilm copy. National Archives of Canada. Portions published in
Outing Magazine
(March 1905, pp. 648–89) and
A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador
(pp. 239–85).

Hubbard, Mina.
A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador
. John Murray, London, 1908.

——“Labrador, from Lake Melville to Ungava Bay,”
Bulletin of the American Geographical Society
, 38:9, 1906, pp. 529–39.

——“My Explorations in Unknown Labrador,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine
, May 1906, pp. 813–23.

Hubbard, Mina. Unpublished diary of 1905 Labrador expedition, microfilm copy. National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, reference #R1648–0-6-E, A-26.

Stanton, Leigh. Unpublished diary of 1905 Labrador expedition. Transcript copy prepared and edited by Craig Monk. Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s. Collection 244, 3.02.006.

Wallace, Dillon.
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York, 1905.

——The Long Labrador Trail
. Outing Publishing, New York, 1907.

——“Dillon Wallace Succeeds,”
Outing Magazine
, February 1906, pp 659–60.