Mapping Canada

Mapping Canada’s physical space involves much more than plotting geographic positions on paper. Also implied are the acts of claiming territory through charting and naming, negotiating racial and gender politics, and recording effects of human development on the physical environment. Two recent books broach some of these complex questions in their discussions of little-known figures who, in the early twentieth century, helped map what is now Canada. Both The Woman Who Mapped Labrador: The Life and Expedition Diary of Mina Hubbard and Mapper of Mountains: M.P. Bridgland in the Canadian Rockies, 1902–1930 make extensive use of archival and historical records in the form of diaries, letters, maps, and photographs; both are highly collaborative projects; and both, at least in small ways, raise political questions related to exploring and charting geographical space in Canada.

The first of these two books is the diary detailing Mina Hubbard’s 1905 expedition to Labrador with four Métis, Cree, and Inuit companions. The diary has been painstakingly transcribed, edited, and introduced by Roberta Buchanan of the Department of English at Memorial University and Bryan Greene of the Geological Survey of Newfoundland and Labrador, and is accompanied by a comprehensive biography written by Anne Hart of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies. (All three collaborators have since retired from their official positions.) In the title of their book, Buchanan, Hart, and Greene emphasize one aspect of Mina Hubbard’s achievement: her mapping of the portion of Labrador from Grand Lake north along the Naskaupi and George Rivers to Ungava Bay. This cartographic focus is reinforced by the inclusion of a fold-out replica of the 18-by-20-inch four-colour map that Hubbard produced with the help of the American Geographical Society and that was inserted into early editions of the book she published about the expedition. Mapping was just one part of Hubbard’s activities, however, and is just one aspect of her diary’s appeal. As the editors note in their introduction, her journal raises questions related to the politics of exploration, attitudes towards wilderness, and relations of gender, class, and race at the time of her travels. Illustrated by a number of photographs taken during her expedition, as well as by family photos and new maps of parts of her trip, the diary is a wonderful resource for those interested in early Canadian travel writing, photography, and cartography.

For anyone who has read Hubbard’s book, A Woman’s Way through Unknown Labrador: An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers, first published in 1908 and available since 2004 in a scholarly edition edited by Sherrill Grace, it is immediately evident that the diary served as source material for Hubbard’s book. The daily entries document not only the trip but also Hubbard’s development as an author. While the first entries are perfunctory, by the middle Hubbard describes the landscape with eloquence, quotes the remarks of her travelling companions in colourful detail, records geographical details in appealing ways, and feelingly discusses her personal motivations for the trip. In the latter part of the diary, she repeatedly describes the process of using previous entries to create her book. Having strained my eyes to read the diary in its original form in the Centre for Newfoundland Studies Archives, I found it a pleasure to read this handsome, highly legible edition.¹ The published version allows scholars to make comparisons between journal and book easily, and in particular to note the way in which Hubbard represented events in significantly different ways in each. As previous scholars who have compared the two have shown, for the book Hubbard edited out intimate reflections about...