The Woman Who Mapped Labrador and Revolutionized the Literature of Exploration

Nothing changes the history of the world more profoundly than changing the landscape of permission and possibility for people — what is possible and permissible for whom in a given culture. And no one has changed the history of the world more profoundly than the people who, with the self-permission to defy the prohibitive dogmas of their time and place, have broadened the horizon of possibility for others; who by some variable of their birth were not allowed or expected to do the thing — the bold thing, the passionate thing, the unreasonable thing — they ended up doing.

“So wild and grand and mysterious,” Mina Hubbard (April 15, 1870–May 4, 1956) writes in her journal, looking out at Labrador from beneath her narrow-brimmed felt hat, feeling the weight of her revolver, hunting knife, and compass belted onto the skirt she is wearing on top of loose men’s breeches and heavy leather moccasins rising almost to her knees. Stowed in her canoe are her sextant, barometer, folding Kodak camera, and some fishing tackle. After weeks at sea, she has finally arrived at the last unexplored frontier of her continent, which she would come to see as an “uncommon place with an uncommon power to grasp the soul.”

Meanwhile, her competitor — the man she blames for her young husband’s death in this very landscape twenty months earlier, now leading a parallel expedition — is seeing only “dismal waste” in it, feeling menaced by the “desolate” landscapes, and complaining about the mosquitos. “Homecoming will be the best part of the trip,” writes Dillon Wallace. “I dread going back,” writes Mina Hubbard, her state of mind “one of continued surprise” as she watches the river grow “more and more splendid all the time,” the majestic migration of the caribou, the aurora borealis swirling above the crackling campfire.

In the official accounts of their expeditions, neither would make mention of the other. Mina alone would make a lasting scientific contribution — her maps of the Naskaupi and George Rivers would backbone all atlases of the region for decades, until the advent of aerial mapping in the 1930s. She would accomplish this by making a home at that place where poetry and science meet — the blessing refusal to decouple truth and beauty — revolutionizing the literature of exploration.

Born on a pioneer farm in Canada — a ...