Exploring and Mapping Labrador: The Exploration Narratives of Mina Benson Hubbard and Dillon Wallace

In 1903 the young American explorer Leonidas Hubbard died while leading an expedition to Labrador and was, therefore, unable to accomplish his project to provide a cartographic illustration of that region, still scarcely known at the time. In 1905, Dillon Wallace, Hubbard’s travelling partner on his last journey, and Mina Benson Hubbard, the wife of the dead explorer, both determined to fulfill his goal, embarked on two separate new expeditions to Labrador.Their journeys were reported in two diaries, published a few years later: The Long Labrador Trail (1907), and A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador (1908) The purpose of this essay is to carry out a comparative study of these two texts from a discourse analysis perspective to reveal their differences beyond their generic similarities. The aim is not only to compare how the protagonists of these two parallel expeditions built their narratives, but also to investigate how they articulated their experiences on a linguistic and textual level. More specifically, the analysis focuses on how their use of language shows their different ways of approaching both the external geographic space they were exploring, and the experience itself of the exploration of a far-off land as the propelling force of an interior journey within the intimate space of the self. The analysis has been conducted from a socio-historical point of view to try and establish how the two writers’ ways of articulating discourse have been affected by their different “place” within, and relationship with, the society of the time as the site where gender, class and racial roles are defined.