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 With
some hesitation about altering history, we set ourselves to the two-day
task, with star drills, hammer, and goggles, of drilling holes into the
markings on the stone. When the tablet was firmly cemented in place over
the weathered inscription, Doug, polite Labradorean that he was, quietly
expressed disappointment with the name, "Government of Newfoundland" on
the tablet, instead of Newfoundland and Labrador. I could only offer the
lame excuse that the new name was still not official. While we waited for
our helicopter to pick us up for the return to Goose, I made the unwise
decision to remove from the canister under the rock, my 1973 record of
our visit, instead of simply deleting the names of the Canadian Forces
personnel who had missed sharing our experience.
It was not until 2004, when paddler Philip Schubert produced the first complete list of names left at the rock, that the consequence of my indiscretion of 1977 struck home. The fifty-odd wilderness travellers who reached the site after the installation of the bronze marker, quite understandably concluded that the discoverers of Hubbard's rock were the visitors whose calling card carried the earliest date. As a result, four officials from the nearby Churchill Falls Generating Station, who were among the first to learn of our 1973 success and flew to the site two months later, had inadvertently snatched from Dillon Wallace III and me, on paper at least, the honour of prior discovery! The confusion about just who it was who discovered Hubbard's rock lay far in the future as helicopter pilot Les Hanberg swung our Bell Ranger low over the Beaver River on the return to North West River after the installation of the memorial plaque in 1977. Wallace III and I had our first good look at the treacherous stretch of boiling water Wallace christened "Murdock's Rapids" in 1913 in honour of Murdock McLean, one of his paddlers who came close to disaster there on the arduous canoe and portage journey to the rock. Somewhere below us, under the rushing waters, lay the original Hubbard tablet. New technology, we speculated, might enable some future Wallace devotee to retrieve it. As I left Labrador for the last time and turned to new adventures, I felt Wallace III and I had done something really worthwhile to help keep his father's good name alive.
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