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 cluster of colonies Queen Victoria had confederated into a country just three years earlier — Mina Benson was the seventh child in a family of meager means and strict adherence to a Methodist church that believed higher education corrupts the soul. She learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse by the local sawmill with a belfry on the roof and a portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall. By sixteen, she had become an elementary schoolteacher herself. But she dreamt of a larger life. After a decade of teaching, she left for New York and enrolled in nursing school.

“Oh dear I wonder what is going to become of me,” she wrote to her sister just before her thirtieth birthday.

Five months later, having risen to assistant superintendent of a Staten Island infirmary, she was assigned a young man with typhoid fever. Two years younger than her, he too was a dreamer who had grown up on a pioneer farm and had gone to New York seeking to contact the world, starving his way into journalism.

Less than a year later, Mina Benson married Leonidas Hubbard, her “Laddie,” in a small New York church with no family present. They honeymooned in the wilderness and in the years that followed, she often accompanied him on assignments in nature.

In 1903, Leonidas Hubbard persuaded his boss at Outing magazine to assign him to Labrador — three paid articles about the last frontier, and an unsalaried leave to undertake the expedition they would require. He invited his new friend Dillon Wallace, in many ways his opposite — a junior partner in a law firm, pale and pot-bellied from his desk job, suspicious of the remote wilderness. But, perhaps driven by the secret yearning that even the most contentedly caged creatures have for freedom, Wallace accepted the invitation.

On the last day of spring, their expedition sailed from the Brooklyn harbor with Mina aboard. After passing through Halifax, they spent a night at a hotel in a St. John’s hotel where, by an auspicious stroke of chance, they met the Newfoundland captain who had once been first mate on Robert Peary’s historic expedition to the North Pole. At Battle Harbor, Mina disembarked and the men continued on. “Fog and rain,” she wrote in her journal. “Cried. I wanted to.”

On January 22, after months of anxious silence, Mina Hubbard received a telegram that simply read:

Mr. Hubbard died October 18th in the interior of Labrador.

Her bright-eyed Laddie, her beloved dreamer she would always remember as “glad of Life because it gave him a chance to love and to work and to play.”

She would eventually learn that the two men and their local guide, George Elson, had run out of provisions after going up the wrong river; that Wallace and Elson had turned around to search for a cache of flour, leaving Hubbard in a tent; that Wallace had returned to search for him, but had lost his way and nearly his life in a snowstorm. Hubbard’s famished body was found a fortnight later, his diary at his side. Wallace’s circling footsteps were preserved in the snow just two hundred yards of the tent. It seemed to Mina that he “simply turned around and went back.”

Wild with grief, unable to bear the finality of his death, Mina Hubbard set out to honor her husband’s life and commissioned Wallace to write an account of their expedition.

Upon receiving the manuscript, she was galled to find a hero’s journey with Wallace as the heroic explorer and her husband as the “homesick boy” who perishes along the way. She asked Wallace to return her husband’s papers. He refused, keeping Hubbard’s field notes, maps, and photographs, sending her only his last letters, and holding on to the diary until the book was finished. Against Mina’s explicit repudiation, he published it, illustrated with Hubbard’s uncredited maps and photographs.

One January night in 1905, after weeks of “feeling very, very helpless and sad” while living as a boarder at another widow’s house in Williamstown, Mina Hubbard heeded a call that came to her “like a sudden illumination of darkness,” saying simply: “Go to Labrador.”

In February, Wallace’s book was published. It was nightmarish enough to watch it become a national bestseller, but when Wallace decided to capitalize on his newfound fame and recast himself from desk-bound lawyer to writer and intrepid explorer, announcing it was “God’s will” that he should finish “the work of exploration Hubbard began,” Mina couldn’t bear the idea of him warping her husband’s image and hijacking his dream.

She protested the only way a person of courage and creative vitality protests — she would do it herself.

With redoubled determination, she set out complete her husband’s work by embarking on a 600-mile expedition across the wildest edge of the continent, discovering herself along the way and charting a new terrain of permission and possibility for others.

She kept her plans secret, even from her parents, only telling her mother that she was going on a long journey. Understanding that the fulcrum of any great feat is the total person, body and mind, she enrolled as student in the senior class of the Williamstown high school. Every morning, Mina Hubbard, thirty-four, laced up her mourning black and headed to the classroom to study the classics alongside the teenagers, then went home to work on her meticulous provision and equipment lists.

On June 16, 1905, while the young Albert Einstein was sitting at a Swiss government desk dreaming up the relativity theory that would make GPS possible, Mina sailed for Labrador to map its uncharted rivers.

Her vast arsenal of equipment and provisions included two balloon-silk tents, three axes, two Kodak cameras, and twelve pounds of chocolate.

After a nauseating ten-day crossing, she found herself not in the “desolate peninsula” she had read about in the accounts of other explorers who had approached and turned away but a place of “strange, wild beauty, the remembrance of which buries itself silently in the deep parts of one’s being.”

Dillon Wallace, who had found out about her expedition from the newspaper headlines, was on her heels. Although they had left days apart, he arrived six weeks after her, already paying the price of their different strategies. By the overconfidence that is the Achilles heel of performative masculinity, Wallace had set out with just two canoes and three assistants hired from the mainland primarily for their academic training and their skills as handymen, all novice canoeists. They had lost their way attempting to follow old portage overground routes, lost some of their equipment trying to canoe into a snowstorm, and finally turned up at the Hudson Bay Company’s trading post at the mouth of the George River, trapped on a cliff after running their canoes into the low-tide mud. They had to be rescued by the company employees ashore.

Mina, though less resourced, had invested in three canoes and hired local guides — George Elson, who had tried valiantly and in vain to save her husband’s life, a Cree man who spoke his few English words prolifically and with great cheer, and a half-Cree, half-Russian man who hardly spoke at all and startled with his Scottish accent when he did. Her party traveled the native way, sticking to the river by canoe.

All along, Mina filled her diary with observations and exultations. Against the history of male explorers writing about nature and native cultures in the phallic language of conquering continents and penetrating uncharted wildernesses in a perpetual hysteria about the hardships their heroism surmounted, Mina’s account stands as a love letter — to the wilderness, to its people, to her Laddie, to the courage of facing the unknown with openhearted curiosity.

From the moment she set foot its shores, she looked at Labrador not with a plunderer’s eye but with a painter’s, like a poet, marveling at the silver cloud masses, the “deep rich blue” of the hills and rocks, “the sweet, plaintive song of the white-throated sparrow.” She writes in her diary:

I awoke on Friday at 2.30 A.M. The morning was clear as diamonds, and from the open front of my tent I could see the eastern sky. It glowed a deep red gold, and I lay watching it. An hour later the sun appeared over the hills touching the peak of my tent with its light, and I got up to look out. The mists had gathered on our little lake, and away in the distance hung white over the river.

As she struggled with her sextant and the eternal problem of latitude, she never ceded her responsibility to awe:

The trail led down into a valley opening eastward to Seal Lake, and walled in on three sides by the hills. On either hand reaching up their steep slopes were the spruce woods with beautiful white birches relieving their sombreness, and above — the sheer cliffs. A network of little waterways gave back images of delicate tamaracks [Larches] growing on long points between. Not a leaf stirred, and silence, which is music, reigned there. The valley was flooded with golden light, seeming to hold all in a mysterious stillness, the only motion the rapids; the only sound their singing, with now and again the clear call of a bird.

Among the purposes of all three expeditions was to meet the indigenous Naskapi people — a branch of the Cree nation, considered at the time the most “primitive” of “Indians” — known today by their own term for themselves: Innu, meaning “human beings” or “the people.” Taunted with tales of rape and violence in their hands, Mina simply met the people she encountered as people — sitting with the women, playing with the children, photographing families with her Kodak, and chuckling at how much the young men’s advances resembled those you would encounter at a New York bar — those “little touches that go to prove human nature the same the world over”:

One of the young men, handsomer than the others, and conscious of the fact, had been watching me throughout with evident interest. He was not only handsomer than the others, but his leggings were redder. As we walked up towards the camp he went a little ahead, and to one side managing to watch for the impression he evidently expected to make. A little distance from where we landed was a row of bark canoes turned upside down. As we passed them he turned and, to make sure that those red leggings should not fail of their mission, he put his foot up on one of the canoes, pretending, as I passed, to tie his moccasin, the while watching for the effect.

But as she marveled at how “Labrador can be so kind and so beautiful,” Mina did not romanticize the indifference and brutality of wild nature. Her hands were swollen with sunburn, her neck “wet and sticky with blood” from the “mosquitos and flies in clouds,” whose bites felt “like the touch of live coal.” Some days she walked most waking hours across hard rocks and thorny bush, crossing mountains along bear paths, watching the river make playthings of her tents and canoes. When the canoe capsized in the violent rapids, one of her men nearly drowned and the river swallowed half of what was stowed in the boat — their stove, tarpaulin, frying pans, one pole, one paddle, and all of their axes. That night, Mina wrote in the diary:

No thought of giving up.
Only anxious to go at it harder than ever.

What menaced her was not fear of the forces without but the terror within. She was haunted by the knowledge that her beloved had looked upon these same hills, bathed in these same rivers, slaked his own soul on the same beauty. “Try to make memories breathe inspiration, not discouragement,” Mina instructed herself in the diary.

Some days were harder than others. On the two-year anniversary of the day she said goodbye to her Laddie at Battle Harbor not knowing she would never kiss him again, she writes:

Sometimes seems too much to bear. This work keeps me from being utterly desperate. Wonder what I shall do when this is done.

Over and over, she met him in beauty:

To-night after the rain the sun came out again before disappearing beyond the hills and lit everything up with a golden light. Clouds lay like delicate veils along the hillsides sometimes dipping down almost to their feet. It is all so wild and grand and mysterious and how his heart would have beat hard with pride and joy in it all if he could be here. Along the edge of the bank I watched it for some time thinking, thinking.

It took Mina two months to complete her maps, traveling the George River and tracing the Naskapi River to its source — the first white person to do so. Reluctantly, she left Labrador, knowing Labrador would never leave her.

Upon returning home, Mina began writing her account of the expedition and nested into it a loving memorial of her husband. A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador was published three years later to patronizing reviews, focusing more on the body of the explorer than on the body of work accomplished. One reviewer, aiming to compliment, described Mina as “one of those semi-masculine ladies who astonish their readers by their courage.” Another dismissed the book as “essentially a woman’s story, filled with the unsophisticated wonder of it all,” taking care to note that “Mrs. Hubbard would probably have been a failure were it not for her male companions.”

A sole review in a London paper focused on the science, comparing her work to Wallace’s:

The main geographical results of both expeditions are the maps which the books contain, and it must be admitted that Mrs. Hubbard’s contribution to the cartography of Labrador is far superior to that of Wallace. It is both on a larger scale and more carefully plotted… It would require a third exploration to show whether Wallace or Mrs. Hubbard is the more accurate surveyor, but from the extremely sketchy character of Wallace’s maps we may hazard the opinion that the lady would prove the safer guide.

Within weeks, Mina and the reviewer were engaged, and so began the second chapter of her life. She moved to London, went on a lecture tour, raised three children, and became an advocate for women’s participation in the study of the natural world.

One spring morning in her mid-eighties, crossing the railway tracks by her house, Mina was killed by an oncoming train — that fuming mechanical mascot of industrialization, emblem of all that is unwild.

Covering the bed she had woken up in were her two plain wool blankets from Labrador, emanating all that unsophisticated wonder of a life worth living.