Introduction

by Bill McKibbenThough the three expeditions chronicled in this overpowering book took place almost exactly a century ago, much in them will be familiar to the reader who has just put down,, say, Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's epic account of a season on Mt.Everest.Take, for instance, the way the Hubbard-Wallace treks were in effect commercialized, media-driven crusades.True, they lacked satellite phones to keep in touch with their sponsors, and there was no cross-labrator.orgto check for daily updates.But Leonidas Hubbard, Jr. was a junior editor of Outing magazine, and he dreamed up his trip to the hunting grounds of the Naskapi Indians as a literary adventure from the very start.Labrador had just enough appeal (the largest unexplored wilderness remaining in North America) that he was able to get an assignment from Outings editor, Caspar Whitney.Still, Whitney, who had snowshoed two thousand miles across the Northwest Territories in 1895, doubted whether the Naskapi trek, taking place in mid-summer, was really in the magazine's league.And his dubiousness infected his young writer, who knew he needed to "make his name" with this trip; at every juncture when turning back would have saved his life, he reflected that he did not yet have enough material to make a story.Just like the Everest guides, who knew business would suffer if they did not ferry their clients to the summit, Hubbard realized that coming back empty-handed would cost him dearly.Each time these expeditions returned to New York, a crowd of newspapermen would be waiting at the pier, and those omnivorous journalistic hordes did as much to shape these travels as the omnivorous clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies.And consider the way that death spices the tale.When Leonidas Hubbard dies of starvation in the forced march back towards his base camp, what had been merely a story of flybitten struggle and poor navigation becomes an epic, with at least four gospel accounts, plenty to set people arguing.Then as now, a fasci-

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.