Killing animals for food, science, and sport is historically an acknowledged and accepted aspect of travel for male journeyers. The activity is routinely described and the motives often taken for granted in narratives of exploration, trade, and adventure by writers as diverse as Samuel Hearne (A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort 1769–72; 1795), Alexander Henry the Elder (Travels and Adventures 1760–76; 1809), John Franklin (Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea 1819–22; 1823), and Dillon Wallace (The Lure of the Labrador Wild 1905). In one of the most well-known hunting narratives, written by Theodore Roosevelt the year after he left the presidency of the United States, all three motives are put forward to justify an African safari. Roosevelt claimed in his 1910 African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (just one of his many books about hunting) that he was in charge of a “scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian, to collect … specimens of big game, for the National Museum at Washington” (3). He also made repeated comments about his and others’ hunting prowess and recorded killing a number of birds to use as food. Under the primary guise of science, though, Roosevelt and his son engaged in an unapologetic slaughter documented throughout the book: eleven elephants, seventeen lions, twenty-nine zebras, fifty-three hartebeests, and so on, for a grand total of 512 animals, not counting those shot “for the pot” (468).
The title Roosevelt gave himself, “Hunter-Naturalist,” indicates an uneasy marriage of hunting and naturalism that may not have seemed as peculiar then as it does now. As Marti Kheel points out, most “early environmentalists were avid hunters, anxious to ensure that enough wildlife remained to hunt” (93).1 And even pursuit for purely scientific motives required that participants kill animals in order to stuff them for museums. Thus Charles Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) refers repeatedly to obtaining, procuring, and collecting specimens of animals, which in less euphemistic language meant killing them. While Roosevelt’s book provides scientific and naturalistic motives for his hunting and justifies some of it as having been done to provide food, much of the book’s adventure-style narrative and most of its illustrations stress the “sport” aspect of hunting: the conquest of man over nature and the recovery of trophies in flesh to provide evidence of that conquest. Especially disturbing for some contemporary readers are trophy photos such as the one of Roosevelt with gun in hand leaning against a large dead elephant (256).
In Canadian exploration and trade narratives such as those by Hearne, Henry, and Franklin, hunting is usually described as a way to provide food and occasionally to garner scientific specimens.2 However, even in narratives in which killing animals is only a subsistence activity, illustrations sometimes stress the trophy motive. An example is a photo by Leonidas Hubbard published in the book written by his travelling companion, Dillon Wallace. The Lure of the Labrador Wild describes an ill-fated 1903 trip through what is now Labrador and Northern Quebec, undertaken by two American adventurers and their Canadian Métis guide, ostensibly for adventure and discovery. The men took the wrong route and as a result one of the party, Hubbard, died of starvation. In his book, Wallace describes an incident in which he and Hubbard both shot at a stray caribou at a time when they were rationing their dwindling supply of food. In his diary entry about the incident, Hubbard indicates that he “[d]id not think of sport, but grub, and was therefore cool” (qtd. in M. Hubbard 253). Yet it was the two adventurers and sportsmen, not the more experienced guide, who aimed their guns at the animal, and in the photograph the caribou head with its large antlers is held up as though it is a trophy (Wallace 76).
English-speaking women travellers have long been celebrated for their focus on the feminine domestic, including Mary Wortley Montagus 1718 descriptions of the interior of a Turkish zenana and Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1796 reports on domestic arrangements in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.3 But female travellers have also recorded traditionally masculine activities such as the killing of animals for some combination of food, sport, and science, as is attested by the records of travellers to and from Canada as diverse as Anna Brownell Jameson (1838), Lily Lewis (1888), Mina Benson Hubbard (1908), Agnes Deans Cameron (1909), and Margaret Laurence (1963). Whether these writers criticize hunting and identify with the animals killed, or celebrate their own participation in this traditionally masculine activity through the collection of animal trophies, their descriptions of hunting are often political in the broad sense of the word in that they comment on relations of power. These women do not just record without comment the acquisition of animals as food for the group, which could be classified (at least in part) as a domestic activity. Their descriptions of hunting also highlight differences in race, culture, class, and gender, providing an opportunity for the writers to contrast themselves to their male, often indigenous, companions.4
Hunting and fishing are several times a focus in Irish-born writer Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. As a watercolour sketch made during her two-month trip in 1837 to Mackinac Island, Sault Ste. Marie, and Manitoulin Island suggests (Figure 1), Jameson included reports and visual representations of hunting and guns as part of her ethnographic documentation of the life of the Anishinabe people she encountered. Her approach was influenced by Alexander Henrys descriptions of his experiences hunting with Anishinabe families in the same area seventy-five years earlier. Thus when she encountered several bear heads stuck on the branches of a dead pine tree, she assumed that they were what Henry might have described as “offerings to the souls of the slaughtered animals” (3:335).
During Jameson’s visit to the Lake Huron area, hunting and fishing supplied most of the food for her plate. She does not describe the killing of animals in any detail, however, until the end of her journey when she travelled with twenty-one men in two canoes from Manitoulin Island to Penetanguishene. As she reports on this segment of her travels, she figuratively separates herself from the men by emphasizing her aversion to seeing animals killed, in contrast to the men’s pleasure in hunting: “My only discomposure arose from the destructive propensities of the gentlemen, all keen and eager sportsmen; the utmost I could gain from their mercy was, that the fish should gasp to death out of my sight, and the pigeons and the wild ducks be put out of pain instantly” (3:322). In this passage, Jameson blurs class differences among her travelling companions by describing them all as “gentlemen,” even though probably at most three or four, including superintendent of Indian affairs Samuel Peters Jarvis, could be so described. (Others included Métis voyageurs, an interpreter, and the young son of the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada.) Hunting is dismissed as evidence of the “destructive propensities” of such men of leisure and is identified with prolonged suffering by fish and ducks.5
FIGURE 1: “Indians,” watercolour by Anna Jameson. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library (TRL) 966–6L-37.
Jameson very soon admits, however, that animals were killed on her journey not just for sport but to provide food, which she herself ate with enthusiasm: “[W]hen the bass-fish and pigeons were produced, broiled and fried, they looked so appétissants, smelt so savoury, and I was so hungry, that I soon forgot all my sentimental pity for the victims” (3:322). Her earlier appeal to the “mercy” of the men is now tempered by an acknowledgement that what she felt in seeing the animals killed can be read as “sentimental pity” for “victims.” In this brief passage, she criticizes sport hunting, points out her feminine feelings about the death of animals, and then undercuts her sentimentality by suggesting that it can easily be overcome by hunger.
Her criticism of hunting that is not for subsistence becomes increasingly pointed toward the end of her book. When the men killed a water snake they had no intention of eating, she calls their actions “a gratuitous piece of cruelty” (3: 329), and when they pursued a mink, she judges that they were repaying “the beauty, and enjoyment, and lavish loveliness spread around us, with pain and with destruction” (3:331). Indeed, Jameson’s criticism of what she sees as the pointlessness of killing the mink encompasses all the men, not just the “gentlemen”: “the voyageurs beat the reeds with their paddles; the gentlemen seized their guns; there were twenty-one men half frantic in pursuit of a wretched little creature, whose death could serve no purpose” (3:331). Even hunting for food at times strikes her as cruel and unnecessary. She describes a mother duck and ducklings as “a sight to touch the heart with a tender pleasure” for which she “pleaded hard, very hard, for mercy” (unsuccessfully, for “what thorough sportsman ever listened to such a word” [3: 331]), and she calls the spectacle of “poor gulls” being called by the voyageurs so that they could be killed and eaten “really very touching” (3:332). Her distaste for this latter practice has cultural as well as gender implications, since Jameson cannot understand the Métis voyageurs’ interest in eating the fishy-tasting birds. And she points to the traditional social and literary representation of male hunting as the conquering of female nature by explicitly comparing the fate of the gulls to that of women:6 “[T]he wretched, foolish birds, just as if they had been so many women, actually wheeled round in the air, and came flying back to meet the ‘fiery death’” (3:332). Jameson’s identification of birds with women is not simple anthropomorphism but can be read as a cross-species comment on the vulnerability of diverse groups of living creatures.7
Her critique of the pointlessness of sport hunting, her characterization of herself as tender-hearted and the men as cruel and destructive, her creation of cross-species sympathies, all highlight her gender difference and thus her figurative aloneness on her journey. These passages reinforce earlier ones in which Jameson has argued that as a European gentlewoman travelling in the wilderness, she is unique. After she shoots the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie in a canoe, for example, she asserts that she was “the first European female who had ever performed” this feat (3:199). And the language she uses to describe her journey throughout emphasizes solitude; even when she has companions, albeit of another gender or race, she writes, “I was alone—alone—and on my way to that ultimate somewhere of which I knew nothing” (2:36–37), and she repeatedly characterizes herself as “a wayfaring lonely woman” (2:122) and a “poor, lonely, shivering woman” (3:337). Her separation of herself from the male hunters and her occasional association of herself, or at least her gender, with the hunted animals form part of a general representation of aloneness, uniqueness, and primacy based on gender.
In her 1908 book A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador: An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers, Canadian Mina Hubbard makes more complex negotiations with guns and hunting because she herself was sometimes a hunter. In addition, because her American husband starved to death on a similar trip two years earlier, subsistence hunting by members of her expedition had more complex personal and political implications than for most groups of wilderness travellers. Hubbard’s two-month canoe journey in 1905 from North West River Post to George River Post, upstream along the Naskaupi River and downstream along the George River, was an attempt to successfully complete her husband’s failed journey. Because after his death he had been criticized both for his lack of planning and his lack of hunting skills, she set out to prove that such a journey was possible even for a woman.8 Among the secondary goals of her expedition were the geographic, ethnographic, and naturalistic objectives of exploring and mapping the area, meeting with Innu groups, and witnessing the great caribou migration. As with Jameson, she was the only woman in the group, accompanied not by “gentlemen” but by four Métis, Cree, and Inuit men whose cultural backgrounds she explicitly states (except those of her chief guide, her husband’s trusted companion George Elson, a Scots-Cree man from James Bay). On this expedition, Hubbard was not just a passenger in the canoes but the expedition leader and chief explorer. The men—Elson, Job Chapies, Joseph Iserhoff, and Gilbert Blake—were entrusted with the crucial roles of navigating, canoeing, portaging supplies, preparing camp, and using firearms to protect her and to hunt for provisions.
As a result of her husbands previous experience of starvation, hunting for food was an enormous unspoken concern of Hubbard’s journey and narrative. Indeed, she purposely did not bring a shotgun (a choice also made by her husband for which he had been criticized) because she wanted to demonstrate that a group of travellers could survive on portaged supplies supplemented with animals killed using rifles and pistols alone (Wallace 99; Davidson and Rugge 196). The expedition equipment Hubbard lists thus includes only two rifles for the group and pistols for each of its members, and she is shown in one photograph carrying a rifle (Figure 2). She also includes at the back of her book an edited version of her husbands diary from his 1903 trip, along with a retrospective account by George Elson of his 1903 experiences after he abandoned the canoes and walked out alone for help. Both these accounts are structured in such a way that they emphasize Leonidas Hubbard’s heroism, but the reported obsession of the three men with obtaining food also embodies a striking and often moving narrative of struggle against starvation. Thus when George Elson describes killing a porcupine and several partridges after he had left his weakened companions, his sorrow that he was unable to share the meat with them provides poignancy for this section of his narrative (qtd. in M. Hubbard 304). Writing of her own journey, Hubbard expresses a similarly eloquent sorrow when Elson pointed out places where her husband and his two companions, desperate for something to eat, had two years earlier shot a rabbit and a ptarmigan (139).
FIGURE 2: “On the Trail,” from A Woman’s Way through Unknown Labrador by Mina Hubbard.
Mina Hubbard never represents herself actually killing animals (except a few fish), but her book contains frequent descriptions of Elson and her other male companions hunting and fishing, as well as several photographs of them handling dead animals. Almost every day she records the men killing, skinning, preserving, cooking, and eating porcupines, muskrats, caribou, ducks, geese, ptarmigan, partridges, loons, namaycush, and brook trout, to supplement the 400 pounds of flour, 200 pounds of bacon, and other supplies with which the group had embarked. Occasionally, she also describes hunting simply for sport. On the second day of the journey, when “[a] full supply of provisions made it unnecessary to secure game,” the men spied a bear that “proved too great a temptation” (58). In this passage, Hubbard blames the bear for the men’s gratuitous desire to kill, since he “went leisurely along” despite several warning shots fired in his direction. She then admits that even she was eventually carried away by the thrill of the chase, although not to any effect: “I took out my revolver and sent a few shots after him. It is hardly needful to say they did not hurt the bear” (59). The bear eventually escaped, although Hubbard indicates that he had been wounded by a shot from one of the men.
As is clear from the incident described above, Hubbard’s tone when she speaks of her own unsuccessful experiences of hunting is self-mocking. Her viewpoint reflects the attitude of her male travelling companions and illustrates the complex negotiations of gender, race, and companionship that were constantly enacted on the journey.9 As First Nations guides and as men, her companions would have been considered, and would have considered themselves, much more capable than she of hunting successfully. Her attempts as expedition leader to emulate them allowed the men to tease her—a familiarity, a taking of liberties, and a breaking down of class and gender barriers that would never have occurred on Jamesons trip (when, Jameson writes, the men always pitched her tent “at a respectful distance from the rest” [3: 326]). In contrast, Hubbard records the following exchange, beginning with a question posed by Elson: “When you were shooting at that bear the other day, where did you aim?” Her reply, “Oh, any place, … just at the bear,” was greeted with “[p]eals of uncontrolled laughter” (98). All the men, not just Elson, laughed at her for her inability to aim a gun, and they also made fun of her identification with the animals that were being hunted.10 She reports that after she asked about a muskrat that was unable to swim fast enough to escape, “Why, what’s the matter with him? Is he hurt?” (62), her comment became the men’s refrain whenever they wanted to tease her. She adopts their mocking tone in her self-description when she writes of having shot at an owl “from a distance that made it quite safe for the owl” (97); ridicules her terror of noises outside the tent that led her to clutch her revolver (but not actually shoot, 98–99); and records jumping back and screaming when a fish twitched while she was filleting it (146–147).
Despite a self-deprecatory tone about her own squeamishness, Hubbard’s empathy for animals often leads to a figurative crossing of species boundaries. When the men killed a female ptarmigan and her babies, Hubbard condoled with the remaining male, watching as he “flew back to where had just been enacted one of the endless succession of wilderness tragedies” and wondering “if he would not wish he had stayed to share the fate of his little family” (151–152). Although this description attempts to obscure her group’s responsibility for the birds’ deaths through the use of a passive voice that turns their fate instead into just one of many “wilderness tragedies,” it also anthropomorphizes the male ptarmigan, in part by referring to him (as she has with the bear) as “he” rather than “it” and by commenting on his paternal wishes and family feeling. A literary and emotional crossing of species boundaries is also evident when Hubbard sees her first caribou swimming in a small lake. She writes that she was excited and happy because she was sure the caribou was too far away to be killed: “[I]n my thought I saw him bounding up over the hills away out of our reach, and was glad” (112). Hubbard empathizes with this large, beautiful animal, whom she again identifies using the personal pronoun “he.” Her description of what happened when a bullet dropped in front of him and turned him back toward the hunters becomes a lament that more thoroughly humanizes him: “My heart sickened as I realised what it meant. He was so near to safety. If he had only gone on. If he had only known” (112). In this passage, Hubbard endows the caribou with consciousness and understanding. Although by this time in the journey her group needed the 250 pounds of meat the animal would provide—“for although we had considerably more than half the original supply of provisions, we were still far from the journey’s end” (113)—Hubbard is clearly disturbed by his death. She is especially upset by Elson’s attempts to turn the kill into a sporting event by using a pistol instead of a rifle. She writes that she pulled her hat over her eyes and, when the wounded animal continued to try to swim away, asked Elson to end his life more quickly. Her photo of the kill is clearly not a trophy illustration; instead, it shows the animal being skinned and dressed so that it can be eaten (Figure 3). But her contradictory feelings are revealed when she writes that although she wished she could think of the caribou “as speeding over his native hills” (113), the caribou roast they had for supper was “one of the most delicious things I had ever eaten” (114). Several weeks later, when the group sighted another lone caribou, Hubbard’s appreciation of the “splendid creature” (156) was overshadowed by her anxiety about the group’s dwindling supplies. In these circumstances, she expresses a strong admiration for the men’s (and especially Job Chapies’s) skills at hunting by comparing Job to a gun’s ammunition: “He seemed as if suddenly inspired with the energy of a flying bullet, and moved almost as silently” (155). Her list of the animals killed that day veers toward trophy-izing as she reports a “record” for their trip: a caribou, a partridge, and two geese (156). Thus subsistence and sporting motives often overcome her empathy for the animals killed.
FIGURE 3: “Skinning the Caribou,” from A Woman’s Waythrough Unknown Labrador by Mina Hubbard.
As well as providing food and sport, the pursuit of caribou on Hubbard’s expedition also had purportedly scientific purposes. The day after the second caribou kill, when the party had plenty of meat and thus no need to hunt, they encountered part of the large George River caribou herd Hubbard had hoped to document in migration. In her book, she provides a detailed description of the animals and of the excitement the whole party felt in seeing the countryside “literally alive with the beautiful creatures.” She notes that the men’s faces were “luminous with pleasure,” and she describes Chapies on this occasion not as a bullet-like hunter but instead “like a boy in his abandon of delight” (164). She also comments that although the caribou were often within “easy rifle shot,”
I am glad I can record that not a shot was fired at them. Gilbert was wild for he had in him the hunter’s instinct in fullest measure. The trigger of Job’s rifle clicked longingly, but they never forgot that starvation broods over Labrador, and that the animal they longed to shoot might some time save the life of one in just such extremity as that reached by Mr Hubbard and his party two years before. (164)
What keeps the men (who are represented here as instinctive hunters both because they are male and because they are part-Inuit and Cree) from shooting is not the beauty of the animals but a desire to conserve a natural resource and a respectful appreciation of the plight of other travellers. As Hubbard makes clear in her subsequent statistical account of the caribou herd (169), she was aware that its numbers were radically declining, and her description of the migration reflects an early conservationist record-keeping. Her attitude is more naturalist than hunter; thus she reports that she asked the men to help her chase after the caribou with her Kodak cameras to try to get her trophies (or, more accurately, her scientific specimens) in photos alone. (In this goal she was ultimately unsuccessful, since whenever the caribou caught sight of her they were soon “many more than twenty feet away, and there was barely time to snap my shutter on them before they disappeared over the brow of the hill” [164].)
As Jameson had done, Hubbard emphasizes her uniqueness in seeing and documenting this herd when she adds the claim, “I alone, save the Indians, have witnessed the great migration” (167). Her description of the migration is already in part ethnographic, since she has reported “piles of whitened antlers” that indicated that Innu traditionally hunted in that area (167). Indeed, Mary Jane Pasteen, an Innu woman of about Mina Hubbard’s age who lived in the region of Labrador Hubbard visited, has spoken in a transcribed oral narrative of routinely killing caribou on their annual migration: “Whenever the caribou crossed the Mushuau-shipu [Barren Grounds River, now called the George] and there were no men around, we women had to chase caribou by canoe. I would be in the front of the canoe with a spear. It was no problem to kill a caribou” (36). In order to make her claim to primacy, Hubbard discounts the experiences of both the Innu women who were there before her and the male Métis, Cree, and Inuit companions who witnessed the migration with her. Hubbard’s need to be considered authoritative, especially as a woman usurping the masculine role of exploration, causes her to disregard others whose activities might weaken her claim to be first.11
Her dual position as woman and explorer also contributes to an overstatement of her willingness to use a gun to shoot potentially dangerous humans. As her group approached the camps of the Innu, whom she called “Nascaupee” and “Montagnais” in accordance with ethnographic practice of the day, Hubbard reports that she oiled her gun and told the men, “You do not need to suppose that because I will not kill rabbits, or ptarmigan, or caribou, I should have any objection to killing a Nascaupee Indian if it were necessary” (183). In this passage, Hubbard acknowledges her distaste for hunting animals while at the same time attempting to project the bravado of the explorer toward potentially hostile human groups. When Hubbard’s party did meet the first group of Innu women and children, she had no need to use her gun except to signal her arrival (189). In a narrative turn that undermines and indeed mocks her representation of herself as a potential defensive killer of humans, she reveals that the Innu she met were not only completely harmless but also almost comically fearful of Hubbard, Elson, and company. Her narrative thus at first emphasizes and then subverts her lack of empathy for humans in contrast to animals.
Canadian writer Margaret Laurence’s descriptions of guns and hunting during her stay with her engineer husband, Jack, in the British Somaliland Protectorate from 1951 to 1952 bear some striking similarities to those of her much earlier predecessors. Like Jameson and Hubbard, Laurence in The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963) positions herself as someone who, because of her gender and culture, regards hunting as an unpleasant activity. Like them, she represents the killing of animals as necessary for subsistence and herself as sometimes carried away by masculine enthusiasm for the chase. But unlike Jameson and Hubbard, Laurence never uses descriptions of hunting to support claims to uniqueness or primacy.
The most striking incident related to hunting that Laurence reports occurs when Jack, their driver Abdi, and several other Somali men from the work camp Jack was directing were hunting for a gazelle to supply fresh meat. Margaret was with Jack in their Land Rover when he “on wild impulse stood and took a pot shot at a fox” (65). She does not record her own response to this sport killing during a trip supposedly designed to obtain meat, but she writes that the Somali men reacted with “fantastic jubilation!” They considered it “[a] good omen— now, obviously, we would get agerenuk.” Indeed, she writes, “Although so few gazelle remained in the Haud, we sighted one almost immediately” (65). In this passage, Laurence acknowledges that gazelle were on the brink of extinction in that part of Africa, but demonstrates that this detail does not alter the behaviour of the Somali men or their Canadian employers. Her description of the gazelle that is subsequently shot at but missed first by Jack (in his role as Sahib) and then by Abdi (in his role as skilled hunter) indicates her recognition of the individuality and intrinsic value of the animal: “We saw its beautifully arched neck, and as it leapt it seemed to be held there for an instant against the pale sky, an image of perfect proportion. I was struck, hypnotized almost, by the unbelievable grace of it. Not so the Somalis. They were too meat-hungry to consider anything else” (66).12 Laurence’s use of the inanimate pronoun “it” provides a measure of distance from the animal, while her rhetorical shift from the first-person plural pronoun to the singular pronoun sets her apart from the more “meat-hungry” Somali men (although she avoids negative comment on her husband’s implied enthusiasm for the hunt). Eventually, however, like Hubbard with the bear, Laurence indicates that she was unable to maintain the gender distinction: “Even I was infected now with the spirit of the hunt, and would have seen the creature destroyed for the sheer triumph of scoring, even apart from the need for meat” (66). The word “scoring” in this context provides final acknowledgement that this hunt is as much about sport as it is about meat and that Laurence is not immune to the pleasures of sport.
The difference between her sensibility regarding animals and the attitudes of the men is reinforced by her reaction to the subsequent killing of a domestic animal, a sheep that Abdi purchased to replace the escaped gazelle. Laurence writes that fifteen minutes after the camp cook led the live animal away, he reappeared with two plates of cooked meat. From her point of view, she writes, “The interval between life and death, creature and meat, had been indecently slight” (67). Because of her geographical and social position on this trip—she was the only woman in the dry Somali countryside with a group of Somali men and her Canadian husband—Laurence was unable to put the kind of distance between herself and the source of her food that she desired. She was forced to recognize that the meat she ate arrived live on the hoof, rather than cut up and packaged on the shelf of a butcher store or supermarket. Her narrative indicates an uncomfortable awareness of the fictional nature of the distance she placed between herself and the animals she consumed.
Later in the book, Laurence provides a criticism of sport hunting qualified by her awareness of her own cultural position. When Abdi shoots two cheetahs— animals it was against the law to kill—she at first excuses him by saying that “he had been quite unable to resist the temptation…. He was a hunter. He simply could not help shooting” (146).13 She then articulates her distress at the fact that the men found pleasure in tormenting one of the still-living animals: “The Somalis thought I was foolish to want the cheetah put out of its pain at once, and I thought they were cruel to want to prolong its agony” (147). The difference between her reaction and the men’s is explicitly identified as both cultural and gendered. Laurence is similarly explicit when she later reports her distaste for the Islamic requirement that meat come from animals that have had their throats slit. She watched Abdi shoot animals only to wound in order that he could later cut their throats, and records her dismay at seeing a gazelle run around “crazily for what seemed an eternity, bleeding thickly, half its stomach shot away” (202). Laurence does not let this initial cultural and gendered criticism stand, however, without some analysis of what she sees as her own cultural imperialism, an analysis that at the same time emphasizes the species divide. She adds that she eventually concluded it was “foolish” to feel “sickened” by such a thing (202). After all, the animal had been “meat” and not a living creature to Abdi “even before he shot it,” and “[i]f I had known starvation, I would not be much concerned, either, about the death throes of a deer” (202–203).
Laurence cannot distance herself from the killing of animals in Somaliland because some of it was done for her personal benefit and some had implications related to gender: hunting not only provided meat for her to eat but also defined her in terms of her reproductive capacity as a woman and highlighted the purported masculine heroism, romanticism, and exoticism impfled by the pursuit of wild animals. Thus Abdi hunted (unsuccessfully) for a lion because he believed that if the childless Laurence ate lion fat, she would conceive a child (145). And Laurence accepted one of Abdi’s two poached cheetah skins as a gift and even smuggled it out of the country when she left because it symbolized the romantic and exotic elements of her stay in Africa. She reports that for her two children, born after the couple left Somaliland, the cheetah skin was that of “a legendary beast,” and they persisted in believing “that it was their father who shot this cheetah as it charged at him in the wilds of a distant land” (147–148). Laurence and her children transform the destruction of this endangered animal into a heroic act undertaken by the male head of the family in his role as intrepid adventurer.14
Laurence learned to shoot a gun in Somaliland not to hunt but instead to protect herself from Somali camel herders who had threatened to attack her husband’s work camp.15 Jack decreed that because Margaret was often alone (except for the cook), she must learn to shoot the rifle. Just as Hubbard’s poor marksmanship when she tried to shoot the bear became a joke for the men of her expedition, Laurence’s experience learning to shoot was humorous for the men watching. She reports that after Jack handed her the loaded.303 and told her to fire,
Whoom! Stunningly, I found myself sprawled on the ground, the rifle beside me. In the background, the Somalis were quietly guffawing.
“For pete’s sake,” Jack said, trying to hold back his laughter, “I told you to hold it tightly—why didn’t you.” (71–72)
The description of this incident emphasizes the way in which cross-cultural assumptions about gender break down social and class barriers. Because Laurence was a woman, she could be laughed at for incompetence by her husband and by men who would have been considered her subordinates in a British colony such as Somaliland. This passage also emphasizes the perceived dangers for a woman “alone” in another culture. Like Hubbard and Jameson, Laurence was never truly alone, but her cultural and gender isolation created an apparent solitude.
FIGURE 4: “A Magnificent Trophy,” from The New North by Agnes Deans Cameron.
While Jameson, Hubbard, and Laurence all to some extent distinguished themselves from their male companions by humanizing and empathizing with hunted animals, another traveller, Agnes Deans Cameron, represented her own hunting as a way of undermining gender and cultural difference. The opening page of Cameron’s 1909 The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman’s Journey through Canada to the Arctic is a frontispiece photo that shows her holding the severed head of a dead moose (Figure 4). Thus the reader’s first impression is of a woman unapologetically usurping the traditional role of a male traveller, hunter, and sportsman. The photograph and its tongue-in-cheek caption, “A Magnificent Trophy” (ironic because, as is evident in both photograph and narrative, the moose is anything but magnificent), set the tone for the adventurous, masculine persona Cameron adopts throughout the journey, while simultaneously mocking and implicitly criticizing traditional representations of the huntsman-explorer.
As with other books that contain ethnographic description, The New North discusses hunting as evidence of the cultural practices of the people Cameron visited in northern Alberta and what is now the Northwest Territories, as she travelled to and from the Arctic Ocean along the Athabasca, Mackenzie, and Peace Rivers. She argues, for example, that one of the reasons Inuit women of the day agreed to become second and third wives was that hunting seals and walruses was essential to survival in the Canadian North, and “a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a man to hunt for her” (219). Cameron was also concerned with hunting as it related to the food she was served. She writes that when she was presented with food such as seal brains and entrails, she was forced to “approach the Arctic menu with mind and stomach open to conviction” (271). Later, she lists “a bewildering variety of wild game” served in Vermilion, Alberta, including “moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs, and mallards” (343). Finally, Canadian nationalism and an interest in conservation led her to include a full chapter on whale hunting in which she criticizes both heavy American involvement and a decline in whale numbers. Her descriptions of hunting by others thus have alternately ethnographic, subsistence, and naturalistic motives.
In one passage in the book, however, Cameron represents herself primarily as a hunter, and ethnography and naturalism as the least of her concerns. Earlier, she has expressed regret that she did not have a gun or camera when she encountered a wolf and thus was “unable to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture” (327). She has also reported purchasing two bear pelts and some meat from a Cree family. Now, she describes shooting a young moose encountered while travelling on the Peace River. Her stated reason is to provide food for the tugboat’s passengers, but her implied reasons are to participate in a masculine sport and to become the first Euro-Canadian woman in the area to do so. Cameron notes that she had arranged ahead of time “that if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine” (346). As she, her niece (whom she calls “The Kid”), the boatmen, and the other (mostly Métis and First Nations) passengers travelled up the river, they saw moose tracks everywhere on shore and met families of “Indians” who “last season bagged eighty moose among them” (346). When one of the boatmen “spied a moose” on shore, Cameron’s rifle was handed to her. Her description of the animal, in contrast to similar descriptions by Jameson, Hubbard, and Laurence, serves to diminish rather than humanize him: “What an ungainly creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,—a regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet biscuit” (347). The moose becomes first an insect, then a child’s food-turned-toy. Cameron’s representation of the animal she hopes to kill is both familiar and unsentimental, although her diminishment of the creature is partially mitigated by her use of the animate pronoun “he.”
Her description of the kill that follows is matter-of-fact: her first shot grazes the beast’s spine; he plunges into the river and is pursued by Cameron in the tugboat. Finally, she writes, “One more shot is effective, and I have killed my premier moose. ‘Cruel!’ you say. Well, just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat” (347–348). Although Cameron represents necessity as her explicit excuse for usurping this masculine role, her previous description of buying and eating bear meat, her earlier comment that she has arranged to kill any moose they might encounter, and the word “premier” in both text and accompanying photo caption indicate that other motives are at play. The photo, labelled “My Premier Moose,” shows a serious (and masculine-looking) Cameron holding a gun over the dead animal while her niece clutches their typewriter and the boatmen look on (Figure 5). A desire to participate in a conventionally masculine sport is evident here, as is the traditionally masculine desire to be “premier.”
FIGURE 5: “My Premier Moose,” from The New North by Agnes Deans Cameron.
Cameron’s only concession to expected gender roles is her defence of what might be interpreted as unwomanly cruelty. Perhaps because, unlike Jameson, Hubbard, or Laurence, Cameron is not travelling only with men but instead is chaperoning a younger female companion, she feels comfortable representing herself as being “first” through the contestation rather than the re-inscription of feminine norms. As with Jameson and Hubbard, this representation aligns with other claims to primacy she makes on her journey, most of them grounded in her race and gender. Thus she suggests that she longs to see Lake Athabasca in northern Saskatchewan because “no white woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity” (115) and claims that she and her niece were “the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae” (309).
The remainder of her description of the killing of the moose, however, serves to undercut both her own achievement and hunting in general, as does the frontispiece caption ironically pointing to her “Magnificent Trophy.” She describes the antlers as only two prongs and the moose as young and weighing only four or five hundred pounds, while a “full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton.” In her typically amused tone, Cameron then explicitly states the various motives for killing a moose: “The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo [a boatman] and Mrs. Gaudet [a passenger] each eloquently argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it, and Se-li-nah [Mrs. Gaudet’s daughter], looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in Cree, ’Marrow is nice.’ Poor young stripling of the Royal House of Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!” (348). As this passage indicates, the moose provided a trophy photograph, shelter or clothing, and food. Cameron’s wording also suggests that once the animal was no longer in her rifle-sights, she could humanize the young dead moose by addressing him as a prince and at the same time laugh at the overdetermined meanings of the kill.
The final Canadian travel writer I examine, Lily Lewis, participated unsuccessfully in sport hunting while at the same time undercutting the practice through her use of humour and exaggeration. In a newspaper report in 1888, Lewis, like Cameron, explicitly mocks both hunting and its participants. The twenty-two-year-old writer travelled westward across Canada and then to Japan, Ceylon, India, and Egypt in 1888–89 with a slightly older and today much more well-known female travelling companion, Sara Jeannette Duncan. Both sent back dispatches to Canadian newspapers under their established masculine bylines—Lewis to The Week as Louis Lloyd and Duncan to the Montreal Daily Star as Garth Grafton. Duncan’s 1890 novels, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves, was based on her newspaper columns and created two fictional women characters whom readers persist to this day in identifying with Duncan and Lewis. In their newspaper articles, each writer at times presented information that was not reported by the other. A striking example is “Louis Lloyd’s Letter” in The Week of 28 December 1888. In it, Lily Lewis uses her masculine byline to describe a bird-hunting expedition up the Fraser River in British Columbia she and Duncan (whom she calls Garth) ostensibly took with five men, three of them from Paris. As Peggy Martin points out, Lewis might be fictionalizing this episode, since Duncan does not mention the hunting trip in her article about Vancouver and since Lewis’s names for the Parisian men are Messieurs Pinson, Moineau, and Hirondelle (or Misters Finch, Sparrow, and Swallow). Lewis reports that these French gentlemen with the names of the most common, smallest of birds dressed “à la militaire,” ate well, cleaned their cabin thoroughly before settling in for the night, made a fastidious morning toilette, sang Massinet, and talked about art. But among them they were able to kill only one of the most common of water birds.
When Lewis relates in an arch tone similar to Cameron’s that the role of the travellers is to “slaughter as many ducks as a pleasure expedition can” (55), the reader immediately recognizes that her identification of killing with pleasure is also a critique. However, neither “Louis” nor “Garth” exhibits the conventional feminine distaste for sport hunting. Instead, Garth wants to kill a bear (and indeed in her own newspaper articles and book Duncan imagines shooting a bear, Figure 6). Lewis initially makes fun of Garths interest in killing this particular animal, but her satire becomes even more biting when she describes the men’s “sport.” First, Monsieur Hirondelle shoots, in the dark and from the boat, what turns out to be a log:
FIGURE 6: “A Bear Was a Good Deal More Probable Episode than a Cow,” from A Social Departure by Sara Jeannette Duncan. Illustration by F. H. Townsend.
After a while something large and dark floated past us, and instantly we heard a bang.
‘Oh! it’s a bea—,’ but Garth checked herself in time.
I betrayed myself by an ignominious shriek—and all for a log of wood. However, the log was struck which was more than could be said for the game next morning—but I anticipate. (55)
In this short passage, Lewis continues to mock Garth’s desire to kill a bear, satirizes her own conventional feminine response to hunting, and anticipates that the hunt will be unsuccessful. Later that night, in a dream that is also probably fictional, Lewis imagines a battle between the hunters as French soldiers and the ducks as Prussians: “They had web feet and flapping wings, and their brass helmets were continually slipping down over their beaks.” This humorous representation of the ducks reveals them as comical and thus unworthy opponents, at the same time as it humanizes them.
Lewis’s article concludes by mocking the women and men for their participation in hunting:
The next time I attempted a rifle, I think I should have succeeded better if I had only been able to remain half as tationary [sic] as the duck….
Suddenly there was a “whist.” Then I saw four rifles directed towards a little fluttering thing on the waves. Bang! bang! bang! bang!
“Oh! They have really killed it,” cried Garth.
No, they had not really killed it, but it was maimed, and the yacht went over to where the unhappy thing floated, and—Well, well it was only “un divers,” you know. (55)
While this passage performs a dehumanizing and deanimating function by naming the bird a “thing,” it also criticizes the mode of thought that enables the men to turn a duck into an “unhappy thing” soon to be dead. Indeed, it emphasizes the essential ridiculousness and excess of four men blasting away at one little bird. The use of masculine names for the two women in the column head and throughout the column itself also unsettles the reader in several important ways. This method of naming implies that the women are appropriating the authority to do what men usually do—travel, hunt, and write. At the same time, feminine pronouns identify the two undeniably as women. Lewis’s account thus irrevocably implicates women in sport hunting, but through what Martin calls the genre of “travel writing as a comedy of manners” (142) includes a playful and yet pointed critique of the practice.16
The title of the conference at which a version of this paper was initially presented, “The Animals in This Country,” evokes not only Margaret Atwood’s poem but also her work of literary criticism, Survival. In that book, she posits the animals in this country’s literature (as opposed to that of England or the United States) as furry representations of the Canadian victim mentality. In travel and exploration writing such as that by Anna Jameson, animals are sometimes victims that female travellers both pity and identify with. Such travellers and writers reject a psychological alliance with another subjugated group, “Native” hunters, because they associate women’s experiences with those of a third subjugated group: the hunted animals. But in travel narratives such as Agnes Cameron’s, animals also appear in the guise of Atwood’s American literary animals, as part of nature to be conquered, subdued, and carried home for domestic consumption in the form of trophies in text, photograph, or flesh.
In his essay “Traveling Cultures,” James Clifford argues that “‘Good travel’ (heroic, educational, scientific, adventurous, ennobling) is something men (should) do” (105). Clifford’s description of “good travel” is of course ironic, since he reinterprets such experiences of masculine exploration and adventure as stemming from essentially commercial or colonialist motives. Even when travel has demonstrably scientific purposes, Mary Louise Pratt suggests, it still has imperialistic overtones, because it implies an attempt at “possession without subjugation and violence” that is ultimately impossible to sustain (57). If one extends Clifford’s and Pratt’s arguments to hunting while travelling, it becomes clear that scientific, adventurous, and even subsistence motives for hunting can also be colonialist and gender related. And analyzing historical narratives by women travellers who use the killing of animals to comment on racism, classism, and sexism can pave the way for contemporary theoretical discussions of the speciesism inherent in both heroic and scientific accounts.
1. Even today, conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited are supported primarily by bird hunters.
2. In Franklins narrative, the responsibility for men eating men is transposed onto the First Nations other in order that the European explorers can say they had no idea (until afterward) that they were participating in cannibalism (451). Cannibalism is of interest to explorers and travel writers as diverse as Henry, Jameson, and Cameron. Henry, on whom Jameson modelled parts of her travels and narrative, also provides detailed discussions of hunting for subsistence by Anishinabe men and comments on the Anishinabe practice of honouring animal “friends” such as bears who have been killed so that humans can survive (136–138).
3. See Shirley Foster’s general discussion of the domestic focus of many early women’s travel narratives (23–24).
4. When travellers and explorers write about their journeys, as Alison and Blunt and Jane Wills argue, an essential part of their narratives is the claim to be first to discover, explore, or write about a particular area of the world (194). Dennis Porter points out that even travellers who make no claim to imperial power through discovery frequently claim to participate in or write about a unique activity (12).
5. Later in the journey, however, Jameson calls this area of Upper Canada “a very paradise” for sportsmen interested in “bear-hunting, deer-hunting, [and] otter-hunting” (3:332–333).
6. The discursive connections among masculinity, sexuality, and hunting are discussed by Emel, Kheel, and Comninou.
7. Dunayer and Kappeler provide contemporary comparisons of speciesism with sexism and racism. As many of the participants in “The Animals in This Country” conference pointed out, books such as Marian Engel’s Bear evoke a crossing of species boundaries not just through sexual activity but also through language that repeatedly posits the animal as a figurative, often female, human.
8. See, for example, the criticism of Leonidas Hubbard by Robert T. Morris.
9. In her essay on Hubbard’s book, Lisa LaFramboise provides a detailed exploration of Hubbard’s negotiations of femininity, respectability, and authority.
10. In her travel diary, Hubbard reports the men’s teasing in detail. Her entry of 12 July 1905, for example, quotes a long comment from Elson in which he tells her that she might have more luck catching a bear and an otter if she were to put away her rifle and instead try putting salt on the animals’ tails. As with many of her diary entries, Hubbard transcribes this conversation almost word for word in her book (99–100).
11. Writers such as James Clifford and Derek Gregory point out that only certain groups of people historically have been identified as travellers, while others are the guides who assist the travellers to reach their goals or the “natives” who are encountered along the way (Clifford 106–107, Gregory 14).
12. Here Laurence echoes Jameson’s comment that hunting repays the beauty and grace of nature “with pain and with destruction” (3:331).
13. One can compare this passage to Hubbard’s description of the men of her group as natural hunters.
14. Forty-seven years earlier, Hubbard accepted a “pretty deer-skin” as a “souvenir of the visit” to the camp of the second group of Innu (213).
15. The camp was never attacked, and thus this incident is similar to Hubbard’s earlier description of needlessly preparing her gun to meet the Innu. Jameson’s even earlier narrative downplays personal danger, but she reportedly carried a concealed knife for protection (Scadding 12).
16. Although this article makes no claim to primacy, Henry James Morgan reports that years later Lewis went “up the Nile to Dongola, where no white woman had ever been before” (966).
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