(ARCTIC CANADA) Photograph album compiled by Arctic explore

Sale 2186 - Lot 44

Price Realized: $ 6,000

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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500

(ARCTIC--CANADA.) Photograph album compiled by Arctic explorer Florence A. Tasker. About 130 photographs and 8 clippings of published photographs, a few of them detached, and more than 20 manuscript captions loose on slips of paper. Mounted in 118-page album, oblong 4to, original morocco, worn at extremities. Northern Quebec province, 1906

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In 1906, Florence and Stephen Tasker of Philadelphia completed the first known traverse of the Ungava Peninsula, part of the Labrador Peninsula in northern Quebec. George Elson, a famous Labrador guide who had survived the fatal Hubbard expedition of 1903, was also part of their group, as was a Cree named Job Chapies. This album documents their historic trip from town to wilderness and back to the outskirts of civilization. The images are wide-ranging--an Inuit man in overalls playing a violin in a kitchen, two Hudson's Bay Company stores, desolate landscapes. Several images appear to depict Florence Tasker on the trail: one with mosquito netting shrouding her head, another of the party dining at a riverside camp, and one standing by her canoe (pictured). Several more depict the local Inuits who were encountered on the coasts. One image of three Inuit by a small hut is captioned "Nothing more forlorn can be imagined than this habitation and its surroundings. The little old man was crazy & wanted to follow us." The album is not signed, but the captions appear to be in a female hand. A few photographs are marked "Published," corresponding to those which appeared in Mrs. Tasker's articles in Field & Stream and elsewhere. Her article about this trip, "A Woman through Husky-Land," was recently anthologized in The Best of Field & Stream. with--an advertising card for a talk by Mrs. Tasker, [1907?] Flier for a lecture by fellow female Arctic explorer Mina Hubbard Ellis, circa 1937.