The land that God gave Cain

This book describes the experiences, primarily, of Gino Watkins and Jamie Scott, on the former’s expedition to Labrador in 1928 and 1929. It was the second expedition which Watkins had organised (the first had been to Edge Island in Spitsbergen in 1927) and its objective was to explore and map the unknown interior of southern Labrador (known colloquially by the book’s title) on foot, by canoe, in motor boats, and with dog sledges. The pair later went to Greenland, respectively as the leader and a member of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition of 1930-31. Watkins, by then a highly respected Arctic explorer, returned to Greenland in 1933 and drowned there when his kayak capsized. Jamie Scott married Gino’s sister Pamela, wrote the biography “Gino Watkins,” and in 1953 also published “Portrait of an ice-cap” about his Greenland experience. On the first part of the Labrador expedition, Watkins and Scott were accompanied by Lionel Leslie – who gave his own account of the experience in the book “Wilderness trails in three continents” (1931). They established their base at the settlement of North West River in July, 1928, and the pair spent nine months in Labrador, travelling about 800 miles by water and 1500 miles by sledge. The book gives a full and vivid account of where they went (there are two detailed maps with twenty black-and-white photographs) and how they travelled, with an account of the earlier exploration and descriptions of the trappers, Indians and Eskimos that they met. It was mostly written while Watkins was still alive, and with his encouragement, but, having been completed after his death, it includes a lot of comments that place on record what an exceptional leader he was. It is a good account also of how the pair learned the techniques of dog sledging in wild, mountainous and wooded terrain, and of the how the experiences and hardships shaped Watkins as a polar expert and expedition leader. In his short life he nurtured and inspired a number of people who laid the foundations for several decades of systematic exploration and mapping of British Antarctic Territory using dog teams initially obtained, via links back to Watkins, in that same part of Labrador.