Repost: Black History Month: Matthew Henson

In 1878, at age twelve, Matthew Henson walked from his home in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore to get a job as a cabin boy on the merchant ship Katie Hines. The captain of the ship wasn't sure about hiring a twelve-year-old boy, but when Matthew told him that he was an orphan, Captain Childs relented.

Educated by Childs in in seafaring, math, history, and geography, Matthew Henson travelled to China, Japan, North Africa and the Black Sea, but when Captain Childs died, Henson gave up the sea—partially because the racism of some white sailors prevented him from furthering his career—and took a job as a clerk at a furrier in Washington, D.C. where he met Robert Peary, an officer in the U.S. Navy Corps of Civil Engineers.

Henson shared Peary's love of adventure, and so Robert Peary offered him a job as his personal assistant on an expedition to Nicaragua. Matthew Henson spent the next two years in Central America with Peary, honing his skills as a mechanic, navigator and carpenter. It was there that Peary, desperate to become the first man to reach the North Pole, offered Henson a job as a messenger at the League Island Navy Yard, with an eye toward having Henson available for future ventures. Henson accepted, and two years later, in 1891, Peary was granted  leave from the Navy to further explore Greenland and Henson joined him.

Henson accepted without hesitation, although it caused friction with his new bride, Eva Flint. Only married two months, Hensen left her to join Peary, and four others—including Dr. Frederick Cook and Peary's own wife—on an expedition of Greenland. Matthew Henson spent the next eighteen years travelling with Peary throughout the Arctic as the only remaining member of Peary's original team.

In Greenland, Henson's carpentry skills were used to construct a two-room house, dubbed Red Cliff House, which would serve as the expedition's headquarters. The following spring, Peary and his men left the camp, crossing Greenland from west to east to reach the northernmost point of the island. Henson was injured on the trip and returned to Red Cliff House.

At headquarters, there was conflict with another man, John Verhoeff, whom Peary declared insubordinate and had left behind on the expedition. Verhoeff resented a Black man taking his place on the team  and also resented the local Eskimo population. Matthew Henson, on the other hand, saw the value the native people had to offer, and quickly learned the Eskimo language, Arctic survival skills and local culture; this knowledge was vital in future expeditions.

In 1895, Henson, Peary and Hugh J. Lee finally discovered Greenland's northernmost point. Close to starvation because they couldn't find the food they'd hidden along the way under all the new snow, they continued onward, finally reaching the northern corner of Greenland. Peary had hoped to travel further, but the lack of food forced them to turn back and forced them to use the dogs that had once pulled their sleds as food.

Henson and Peary tried for the Pole several times over the next few years. In 1902, six Eskimo helpers died, the food ran out, and their progress toward the north was blocked by melting ice. In 1906 the team returned again, this time in a new ship, the Roosevelt, named for the new president, designed to cut through the ice. With this new ship, the expedition was able to get closer to the Pole than any other human being—within 174 miles—but melted ice blocked the final distance.

In 1908, they tried one final time, once more on the Roosevelt; with Peary in his 50s, and Hensen in his 40s, both men knew they were getting too old to continue much longer.

The men on the team knew that not all of them would reach the Pole, but Peary had stated from the beginning that "Henson must go all the way. I can't make it there without him." Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and 4 Eskimo men reached the pole on April 6, 1909, travelling four hundred and thirteen miles in sixteen days.

It took until July for the Roosevelt to free itself from the ice and head south. On August 17th the ship put in at Etah, Greenland where Peary and Henson heard some rather startling news: Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the same man who had been with Henson and Peary on an earlier Greenland trip, claimed that he had reached the Pole on April 21, 1908, a full year before Peary's party.

Henson interviewed the two Eskimo men that supposedly had gone with Cook. They admitted they had never gone more than 20 miles out on the icepack, and an examination of Cook's sledge showed it had hardly been used. It seemed obvious the Cook was telling a bold-faced lie.

But Cook took full advantage of the lie, and by the time Peary returned to the U.S., Cook had received several honors in Europe and his success was accepted by the public until the National Geographic Society investigated and determined Cook's claim was a hoax. A sea captain came forward and testified that Cook had paid him to produce sextant readings consistent with being taken at the North Pole. That, along with Matthew Henson's discoveries, lead to Cook being dishonored and Peary, eventually, honored as the first man to reach the North Pole.

Hensen, however, as a Black man, got little recognition at all. It wasn't until 1937—nearly thirty years later—that he got the credit he deserved. In that year he was made an honorary member of the famed Explorers Club in New York, and in 1946 he was honored by the U.S. Navy with a medal. His most-prized award, though, was a gold medal from the Chicago Geographic Society.

Matthew Henson died on March 9th, 1955, and was buried in a small plot at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In 1987, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Henson biographer, led a movement to have the remains of both Henson and his wife moved to lay adjacent to Robert Peary in Arlington National Cemetery, a more fitting location for an American hero.

On the seventy-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole, Matthew Henson was laid to rest near his old friend, Robert Peary, and on his tombstone is a quote from his autobiography:

The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart.

To me the trail is calling.

The old trail.

The trail that is always new.