Mina Benson Hubbard (April 15, 1870 – May 4, 1956) was a Canadian explorer who became the first white woman to travel and explore Labrador's backcountry.

Mina Benson Hubbard (April 15, 1870 – May 4, 1956) was a Canadian explorer who became the first white woman to travel and explore Labrador's backcountry. She was the first to accurately map the Nascaupee and George River systems in 1905. She was the wife of Leonidas Hubbard, best known for his disastrous expedition to Labrador in 1903.

𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞

Mina Adelaine Benson was born near Bewdley, Ontario, on an apple farm. Her father was an Irish immigrant named James Benson, and her mother was an Englishwoman named Jane Wood. She was the seventh of eight children and attended the village school before going on to teach for two years in Cobourg.

After graduating from the Brooklyn Training School for Nurses in 1899, she went to work in a small hospital on Staten Island, New York, USA. She nursed the journalist Leonidas Hubbard while he was hospitalised with typhus in 1900. On January 31, 1901, they married.

𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Hubbard asked a surviving member of her husband's ill-fated expedition to Labrador, Dillon Wallace, to record the experience as a memorial to her husband. His published book, Lure of the Labrador Wild, was a commercial success in America, but Hubbard was dissatisfied, believing Wallace was responsible for her husband's death and that Wallace's book had harmed her husband's reputation.

While Wallace was planning a new expedition to complete the goal of 1903, Hubbard put together her own team to do the same in order to clear her husband's name. Hubbard's team, which included the same George Elson who had been on the previous expedition, as well as two Cree Indians who had taken part in the unsuccessful rescue attempt in 1903, left Northwest River on June 27, the same day as the Wallace expedition. The press dubbed it a race, and it received a lot of attention in the media. Before or during the expedition, the two parties never communicated.

Despite weather delays at the beginning of August when they reached the watershed at Lake Michikamau, the 576-mile journey through the Labrador wilderness was efficient and well-organized. On August 29, the expedition arrived at the George River post on Ungava Bay, seven weeks before Wallace.

The Hubbard expedition confirmed in 43 days of travel that the Nascaupee, Seal Lake, and Lake Michikamau were all in the same drainage basin and that the Northwest River and the Nascaupee were indeed the same. Hubbard also took extensive notes on the topography, geology, flora, and fauna of this unknown wilderness. Lake Hubbard, the headwaters of the George River, was named after her husband.

Her book, A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador, and her diaries detail her encounters with the Naskapi and Montagnais Indians, as well as the last great herds of caribou in Labrador.

𝐋𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞

Following the trip, Hubbard went on a lecture tour of England, where she met and married Harold Ellis, a businessman and the son of John Ellis, MP and his wife Maria, in 1908.

Initially residing at Wrea Head Hall, the couple purchased The Wabe, a large detached house in Hampstead, London, from its designer and original owner, academic and mathematician William Garnett, in 1913. They had three children together before divorcing in 1926.

In 1936, she returned to Canada to join George Elson on a canoe trip down the Moose River in northern Ontario. Hubbard died in 1956, at the age of 86, when she was hit by a train while crossing railway tracks in Coulsdon, England.

In 2018, Mina Benson Hubbard Ellis was named a National Historic Person.