The Royal Geographical Society

By Kristy McCaffrey

Established in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) is the United Kingdom’s professional body for geography and the advancement of geographical sciences. It began as a dining club in London, where select members held informal dinner debates on current scientific issues and ideas. It was long associated with the ‘colonial’ exploration of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the polar regions, and especially central Asia.

The Society was a supporter of many notable explorers. Here are a few.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a naturalist, geologist and biologist, and is best known for his theories on the science of evolution, specifically that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and natural selection.

Richard Francis Burton

Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was an explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. The RGS contracted him to explore the east coast of Africa, and he was one of the first Europeans to search for the source of the Nile River.

David Livingstone

David Livingstone (1813-1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, a pioneer Christian missionary, and African explorer. Taking up where Burton left off, he also attempted to locate the source of the Nile, although he too never pinpointed it. His meeting with Henry Morton Stanley was the source of the famous phrase, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Sir Ernest Shackleton

Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) was a polar explorer who led three expeditions to the Antarctic. He lost the race to the South Pole to Roald Amundsen, so he focused on a sea-to-sea crossing of Antarctica, which he unfortunately never achieved. He is most famous for a daring ocean crossing in lifeboats after his ship, the Endurance, became trapped in ice.

Percy Fawcett

Percy Fawcett (1867-disappeared 1925) was a geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, archaeologist, and explorer of South America. At the age of 39, he was contracted by the RGS to map a border area of Brazil and Bolivia. After seven expeditions to South America, he became certain that a great city lay lost in the jungle. In 1925, he made his last attempt to find the Lost City of Z, but disappeared, along with his son and a family friend. Theories abound that local Indians killed them or that they died from natural causes.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. In 1953, he became the first climber, along with the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Today the Society has over 16,500 members and its work reaches millions of people each year through publications, research groups and lectures.

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Mina Hubbard: The Woman Who Charted the Last American Wilderness

By Kristy McCaffrey

Mina Benson Hubbard, A winter picnic ca. 1901
(courtesy of Betty Cawkill Ellis)

In 1903, Mina Hubbard’s husband, Leonidas, died from starvation while trying to be the first non-native to trek across the interior of Labrador, at the time one of the last unmapped areas of North America. The other members of his expedition—Dillon Wallace, a portly middle-aged lawyer, and George Elson, a half-Scot, half-Cree guide—had left him alone while going for help.

Mina was devastated. When she encouraged Wallace to pen a book to memorialize her husband, her grief soon turned to outrage. Wallace portrayed her husband as an ill-prepared amateur, and he planned to finish the unsuccessful mission. Mina decided to reclaim her husband’s honor by completing the trip herself. When the press caught wind of the competition, the idea that a woman would attempt such a thing was truly scandalous.

While her husband’s expedition had been poorly planned, Mina prepared herself by learning mapping skills, investigating supplies and equipment, and consulting with men who had already traveled into parts of Labrador. She also persuaded George Elson to accompany her, as well as hiring three additional part-native guides.

Both Mina and Wallace launched their trips in June 1905. Not only was it outrageous for a woman to lead an expedition at the turn of the 20^th century, she would also spend months alone in the wilderness with four men. Mina chafed over their protectiveness and would occasionally journey on her own, worrying them to no end. “They said to me they never were on a trip before where the women didn’t do what they were told,” wrote Hubbard.

Mina Hubbard and three men around campfire, 1905.
(Coll-241, Archives & Special Collections, Memorial University, Canada)

Despite the racial and gender differences, Mina and her team became close over the next two months. They navigated raging rivers, scaled boulders, and suffered intense clouds of mosquitos and black flies. Mina surveyed the land, took latitude readings and snapped photographs, as well as naming rivers and rapids. She also made contact with the Naskapi Indians.

Wallace’s team had taken a different route and were plagued with poor navigation and disasters. They completed their trek six weeks after Mina Hubbard. The ensuing headlines made Mina famous.

In the end, however, questions remained over how a humble and farm-raised girl from Ohio could travel more than 550 miles in the rugged wilderness, and she was dogged with rumors that she had had an illicit affair with George Elson.

Several years after the journey, Mina married the scion of a coal-mining fortune and settled in an English mansion. She never undertook another expedition. She died at the age of 86 by walking in front of an oncoming train, and some speculate that it had been on purpose.

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