In 1903 Hubbard's husband, Leonidas, starved to death on his cartographic and ethnographic expedition to Labrador. Hubbard decided to complete her husband's work, becoming a skilled explorer and cartographer in her own right. She set out in July 1905 and with the help of George Elson, a Métis guide who had been employed by her husband on the original trip, and three other guides completed her expedition in record time with significant results, including completing the first accurate map of the Labrador river system, thus correcting the earlier map that had led to her husband's death. Her original photographs and the map are reproduced in this volume.

Author gives an account of her husband's life and of his expedition of 1903 to central Labrador, and of her own expedition from Lake Melville to Ungava Bay in 1905. Diary of Leonidas Hubbard, July-October 1903, and of his companion George Elson, October 1903-May 1904.

In July 1903 Leonidas Hubbard set out to explore the uncharted interior of Labrador by canoe, accompanied by Dillon Wallace, his best friend, and George Elson, a Métis guide. Bad luck and bad judgment led the expedition into disaster and the party was forced to turn back. Hubbard died of starvation just thirty miles from camp. Two years later Wallace decided to complete the overland expedition and clear himself of blame for Hubbard's death. He had, however, a rival - Mina Hubbard. She blamed Wallace for her husband's death and, with Elson as her guide, intended to complete the trek first. The result was an epic race between the avenging widow and her husband's best friend. Reconstructing the story from the long-lost journals and diaries of the 1903 and 1905 expeditions, James Davidson and John Rugge trace the explorers' routes and re-create the saga. Great Heart is a gripping drama of individuals pushed to the limits of human endurance.

As well as providing vivid and sympathetic accounts of geography, peoples, and cultures, three women writers use their books to chart their own historical and social positions. In Maps of Difference Wendy Roy explores the ways in which Anna Jameson, Mina Hubbard, and Margaret Laurence were attuned to the cultural imperialism underlying their travel writing. Roy considers the connections Jameson makes between feminism and anti-racism in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), Hubbard's insights in A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908) into her relationship with First Nations men who had both more and less power than she, and Laurence's awareness of colonial and patriarchical oppression in her African memoir, The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963). Roy also examines archival and First Nations accounts of these women's travels, and the sketches, photos, and maps that accompany their writing, to examine contradictions in and question the implied objectivity of travel narratives. She concludes by looking at the myth of "getting there first" and the ways in which new technologies of representation, including cameras, allow travellers and writers to claim new travel "firsts."

The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is a mythologized place that resonates with tragic adventure, polar expeditions and Grand Banks fishing; a real and imagined geography with an incredible artistic output that calls for critical discussion. This book examines the diversity of this province’s literature and culture, taking into consideration the expertise of scholars and writers who have first-hand knowledge of its unique context. Chapters on history, travel, fiction, autobiography, poetry, theatre, storytelling, filmmaking, and the visual arts provide an up-to-date survey across a broad range of artistic endeavours, as well as close readings of selected texts. The questions that fill the pages of Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador arise from the awareness its contributors have of historically shared experiences, but also of shared delusions, and their essays provoke contemplation beyond the labels local/global, Newfoundlander/Come-From-Away. Aboriginal histories and writing come to the foreground in this panoramic view that balances descriptions of mainstream, vernacular and Indigenous cultural productions. The final chapter is organized as a multi-voiced interview which serves as a supplement to the academic essays. Here, themes are revisited and personalized as several writers express their feelings about what it means to be a Newfoundlander and an artist. As such, this book will encourage dialogue about Newfoundland and Labrador’s literary and artistic achievements within the international community of readers and researchers.

Lobsticks and stone cairns are landmarks that mark paths and commemorate events. The one hundred biographies in this book also offer themselves as paths to be taken. Centuries of human endeavour, hardship, folly, and suffering are collapsed into stories through which we can discover what the Arctic is and has been. Profiled in this book are "human landmarks" dating from as far back as the sixteenth century to those still active in the North today. Included are stories of adventurers, military officers, authors, guides, culture heroes, police, traders, and even the occasional charlatan. The biographies are of Inuit, European, American, Indian, and Canadian men and women. What appears here is the essence of each person, rendered by an expert and put in a new context, bringing the history and geography of the North to life.

Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination begins with the premise, first suggested by Margaret Atwood in The Animals in That Country (1968), that animals have occupied a peculiarly central position in the Canadian imagination. Unlike the longer-settled countries of Europe or the more densely-populated United States, in Canada animals have always been the loved and feared co-inhabitants of this harsh, beautiful land. From the realistic animal tales of Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, to the urban animals of Marshall Saunders and Dennis Lee, to the lyrical observations of bird enthusiasts John James Audubon, Thomas McIlwraith, and Don McKay, animals have occupied a key place in Canadian literature, focusing central aspects of our environmental consciousness and cultural symbolism. Other Selves explores how and what the animals in this country have meant through all genres and periods of Canadian writing, focusing sometimes on individual texts and at other times on broader issues. Tackling more than a century of writing, from 19th-century narrative of women travellers, to the "natural" conversion of Grey Owl, to the award-winning novels of Farley Mowat, Marian Engel, Timothy Findley, Barbara Gowdy, and Yann Martel, these essays engage the reader in this widely-acknowledged but inadequately-explored aspect of Canadian literature.