Mina Benson Hubbard

Mina Adelaine Benson was born on an apple farm near Bewdley, Ontario. Her father was James Benson, an Irish immigrant, and her mother was Jane Wood, from England. She was the seventh of eight children and received a primary education in the village school before teaching in Cobourg for two years. After graduating as a nurse in 1899 from the Brooklyn Training School for Nurses, she went to work in a small hospital in Staten Island, New York, United States. In 1900, she nursed the journalist Leonidas Hubbard whilst he was hospitalized with typhus. They married on January 31, 1901. ==Expedition==

Following her husband's ill-fated expedition to Labrador in 1903, Hubbard asked a surviving member of the party, 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 not satisfied, coming to believe that Wallace was responsible for the death of her husband and that her husband's reputation had been blemished by Wallace's book. In 43 days of travelling, the Hubbard expedition confirmed that the Nascaupee, Seal Lake, and Lake Michikamau were in the same drainage basin and that the Northwest River and the Nascaupee were, in fact, the same. In addition, Hubbard made extensive notes on the topography, geology, flora, and fauna of this unknown wilderness. Her book, ''A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador'', and her diaries provide descriptions of her encounters with the Naskapi and Montagnais Indians, and of the last great herds of Labrador's caribou. ==Later life==

After the trip, Hubbard carried out a lecture tour of England, where, in 1908, she met and married Harold Ellis, a businessman and the son of John Ellis, MP, and his wife Maria. The couple lived at Wrea Head Hall at first, but in 1913, they purchased The Wabe, a large detached house in Hampstead, London, from its designer and original owner, the academic and mathematician William Garnett. Together they had three children but divorced in 1926. She returned to Canada in 1936 to accompany George Elson on a canoe trip down the Moose River in northern Ontario. ==Bibliography==