Mina hubbard biography

Mina Benson Hubbard (April 15, 1870 - May 4, 1956) was a Canadian explorer and was the first white woman to travel and explore the back-country of Labrador.
Mina Benson Hubbard (née Mina Benson, also Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis), explorer, geographer, author, nurse, teacher (born 15 April 1870 near.
Mina Benson Hubbard was a Canadian explorer and was the first white woman to travel and explore the back-country of Labrador.

•

Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis National Historic Person (1870-1956)

At the turn of the 20th century, explorer, surveyor, and exploration writer Mina Hubbard led an expedition to survey the last unmapped area of eastern Canada. Her daring 1905 expedition through unexplored eastern Labrador resulted in notable advancements in geographical knowledge. Taking continuous measurements of latitude along the 900 kilometre journey from North West River to Ungava Bay, Hubbard established the correct positions of the Naskaupi and George Rivers and associated lakes and tributaries. The map she produced was immediately recognised by both the American and British Geographical Society and remained definitive until the advent of aerial photography in Labrador in the 1930s.

Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis was born in 1870 on a farm in Ontario. She worked as a teacher from 1886 to 1896 before training as a nurse in New York. One of her patients there was Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., a former teacher turned journalist. They married in 1901, but two years later he died of starvation and exposure while exploring

•

A fresh look at an incredible journey through uncharted territory.

In 1905 Mina Benson Hubbard became the first white woman to cross Labrador, documenting her travels in the classic A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador. This reissue, edited and fully annotated by Sherrill Grace, makes the complete work available for the first time since the original 1908 publication and features an introduction that situates Hubbard's writing in the context of her life and times, making clear how unusual - and unexpected - it was for a woman to undertake such an expedition, let alone going on to write and lecture about it.

In 1903 Hubbard's husband, Leonidas, starved to death on his cartographic and ethnographic expedition to Labrador. Hubbard decided to complete her husband's work, becoming a skilled explorer and cartographer in her own right. She set out in July 1905 and with the help of George Elson, a Métis guide who had been employed by her husband on the original trip, and three other guides completed her expedition in record time with significant results, including completing the first

•

Mina Hubbard, a mild-mannered farm girl and nurse from Ontario, Canada, never set out to be a great explorer. But in January 1904, the safe, happy existence she had established with her young husband shattered, setting her life on a different course.

Nearly six months earlier, Leonidas Hubbard had set off from their home in New York in an attempt to become the first nonnative to cross the interior of Labrador, one of the last unmapped swaths of North America. With his expedition mates—Dillon Wallace, a portly middle-aged lawyer, and George Elson, a half-Scot, half-Cree guide—Hubbard retreated after getting lost in a labyrinth of swamps and waterways. On October 18, shivering in a silk tent, he died of starvation as his expedition mates went for help.

“I am not suffering,” Leonidas wrote in his diary, likely mere hours before he died. “The acute pangs of hunger have given way to indifference. I am sleepy. I think death from starvation is not so bad.” It took nearly three months for the news to reach his widow.

Mina was devastated, but within a year, her grief turned to rage. She