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most of the Labrador-Ungava peninsula’s 500,000 square miles were still a mystery to all but its indigenous population. Bordered on the west and south by Quebec and on the east by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, Labrador is a rugged and forbidding territory made up primarily of some of the oldest rocks on earth.
    Its deep valleys, ancient mountains, high cliffs and scoured plains were shaped by the Laurentide Ice Sheet some eighteen thousand years ago. The climate is marked by long, harsh winters and short summers. In the north, summers are too cool to support full tree growth; the terrain there and along the coast is mainly tundra. In the interior valleys, protected from the brutal winds, copses of balsam fir and dense forests of black spruce grow, but just as common are vast boglands, barrens, and valley floors covered in lichen and moss.
    In 1534 Jacques Cartier deemed Labrador “the land God gave to Cain.” Even so, whalers and fishermen and explorers from Spain, France, Portugal and England were drawn to the Labrador coast, as were Moravian missionaries beginning in 1752, nine years after a French trading post was established at Davis Inlet. Here the indigenous peoples came in the summer to trade furs and fish for sugar, tobacco, tea and other items.
    It wasn’t long before the coastline had been well mapped. Not so the interior. Europeans found little reason to venture far inland. In the winter of 1838, a Hudson’s Bay Company agent named John McLean made a dogsled trip from Fort Chimo south to the North West River Post, and at some point travelled on the Naskapi River. But, as Dillon Wallace would later point out in his book
The Lure of the Labrador Wild
, “The record left by him of the journey … is very incomplete, and the exact route he took is by no means certain.”
    The interior was well known to the indigenous peoples, however, who moved about nomadically as hunters, trappers and fishermen. The Innu and Inuit both claim Labrador as their home, but though they share a coincidental similarity in name they are unrelated. The Inuit (Eskimos) are the descendants of the Thule, an ancient whaling culture from Alaska. The Thule originally settled along the northern coast. Over time, as they followed the movements of whales and seals down the eastern shoreline, they migrated as far south as the Strait of Belle Isle.
    While the Inuit depended largely on whales for their survival, the Innu depended on caribou. The Innu are an Algonkian Indian nation who had once been thought to be two separate groups, the Naskapi and the Montagnais. Both spoke dialects of the Cree language, though the dialects were dissimilar enough that early white explorers mistakenly identified the groups as separated by more than distance. The name Montagnais comes from the French word for “mountaineer” and was applied to the Innu first encountered along the northern shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Montagnais in turn referred to their southern neighbours as Naskapi, which has been variously translated as “the interior people” and “shabby dressers.”
    Both the Naskapi and the Montagnais possessed an intimate knowledge of the maze of waterways and footpaths that criss-crossed inland Labrador. This knowledge was passed down from generation to generation but never recorded. So in 1717 the French geographer Emanuel Bouman could accurately observe, on behalf of all Europeans, “We have no knowledge of the inland parts of this country.”
    In Hubbard’s day, the best extant map of the interior was one made by A. P. Low of the Geological Survey of Canada. But much of that map remained blank space. And some of it, as Wallace would write, “proved to be wholly incorrect, and the mistake it led us into cost us dear.”
    On that November evening in 1901, as Wallace sat before a campfire with his friend, Leonidas Hubbard Jr. could still proclaim without much exaggeration, “It’s terra incognita!”
    With that exclamation Hubbard