Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Great Heart deals with the story of three Labrador adventures that took
place at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1903, Leonidas Hubbard
Jr., a young journalist eager to make his mark by exploring the interior
of Labrador (the “last great North American wilderness”), undertook
the first expedition. Accompanied by his friend Dillon Wallace and
George Elson, a young Scots-Cree guide from Hudson Bay, he traveled in
an 18-foot canvas canoe. Hubbard and Wallace were relatively
inexperienced; they were also under- equipped and unlucky. Misfortunes
and misjudgments eventually ended in disaster, and Hubbard died of
starvation after sending the others on to get help. Miraculously,
Wallace and Elson survived. But this was not the end of the story.
Hubbard’s remarkable widow, Mina, became dissatisfied with the way
Wallace told the story of her husband’s expedition and quietly planned
another with Elson as her main guide in 1905; at the same time, Wallace
was similarly engaged. The two groups took off, Mina’s arriving at the
George River Post on Ungava Bay a month before Wallace’s (he had
followed a rougher route).

The authors’ thorough knowledge of the terrain these expeditions
covered—the bugs and the bogs, the long portages, and the terrifying
rapids—strengthens their account immeasurably. What is questionable is
their decision to avoid hindsight and tell the story as it happened from
the point of view of the participants. The diaries of the Hubbards,
Wallace, and Elson take them a certain distance, but they are obliged to
extrapolate when presenting the “innermost concerns” of the
diarists. Except when the diaries are directly quoted, the reader has no
clear sense of what is recorded and what is inferred. As described by
the New York Times book reviewer, Great Heart combines “the grace of
fiction with the power of history.” In fact, the fiction undermines
the authenticity of the history. The Hubbards and Wallace and Elson are
brave and astonishing people; they do not need embellishment.
Recommended with reservations.