In the Margins

In the 19th century, reaching the North Pole was like landing on the moon.

It was a big deal, and everyone wanted to be first.

In 1909, Commander Robert Peary and his former colleague Dr. Frederick Cook each claimed to have reached the North Pole first.

Their feud was the center of a heated public debate and a congressional hearing.

But overlooked in this now famous controversy was a polar explorer unlike any other.

A Black man named Matthew Alexander Henson.

So why isn't he a household name?

Matthew Henson was born in Nanjemoy, Maryland in 1866 to freeborn sharecroppers.

Reconstruction era America was incredibly dangerous for Black people, especially in the South.

Between the Black Codes and Jim Crow, Black people were under threat by the state and by vigilantes like the KKK.

From early on, Henson learned to survive.

He hid in the bushes as the KKK night riders rode through town.

Orphaned at a young age, Henson ran away, according to some accounts, to the docks of Baltimore, Maryland, at around 12 years of age.

Although Henson didn't have much formal schooling, he joined Captain Childs aboard his Katie Hines as a cabin boy, a massive three mast ship which traveled the world.

Childs encouraged Henson to read and write, and nurtured his desire for adventure.

When Captain Childs died in 1887, one biographer says Henson could not find a single crew who would treat him equally as a Black man.

And so he quit sailing.

He turned to odd jobs, loading cargo, serving as a messenger, and working in a hat store.

In the spring of 1887, an ambitious Navy lieutenant and civil engineer Robert Peary, visited the very hat store where Henson was working.

Peary mentioned to the store owner that he needed someone to join him on his next adventure surveying the jungles of Nicaragua, and Henson was the right man for the job.

Although Peary hired Henson as a servant on the journey, Henson made it clear that he was already a highly capable explorer.

He could hunt and was skilled at leading laborers who had joined this dangerous expedition through the unmapped jungle.

After Nicaragua, Peary set his sights on the North Pole, a pursuit that consumed the next 20 years of both their lives.

But Peary's invitation to the Arctic came with a warning.

According to Floyd Miller's biography, Ahdoolo, Peary called Henson a "son of the equator" and warned that Henson would have more trouble in an Arctic setting than a white man.

Henson's response to Peary was resolute.

Henson: "I'll go north with you, sir, and I think I'll stand it as well as any man."

At the time, explorations were most often led by aristocrats and military servicemen like Peary.

European and American explorers were obsessed with being the first White men to discover land previously navigated by Indigenous communities.

But the journey to the top of the world was deadly.

In fact, in the 19th century, nearly a thousand people tried to reach the North Pole and most of them never returned.

We now know today that the North Pole is a fixed point in the middle of a frozen ocean, always at 90 degrees north latitude.

But at the time the North Pole was shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.

Until about 1891, many explorers thought you could simply walk there from Greenland.

But the reality was far more complicated.

On Henson and Peary's first trip to the Arctic, they enlisted the help of Inuit guides.

Arctic expeditions were impossible without the help from the native peoples living there, who frequently joined expeditions in exchange for goods.

The Inuit were shocked to see Henson.

They held their arms next to his, happy to see their skin tones were so similar.

Henson was the first Black polar explorer they had ever seen after decades of White men.

Henson became known as "Matthew the Kind One" to his Indigenous teammates.

They invited him to dinner, taught him their language, how to train dogs, how to build igloos, and how to use reindeer and polar bear skins for outerwear.

Meanwhile, Peary, like many White explorers of his time, treated Indigenous people as a means to an end.

While fundraising for his polar expeditions, Peary took a group of Inuit from Greenland, including children, to be studied at the American Museum of Natural History like specimens.

Between 1891 and 1909, Henson and Peary made seven successful trips to the Arctic, but barely survived.

The Arctic boasts temperatures at 50 degrees below freezing, Arctic storms, cracks in the ice, and polar bears.

Peary lost eight toes.

They had to eat their own dogs, and one time Henson saved Peary from a charging musk ox.

But they also learned valuable information.

For example, their 1891 expedition established that Greenland was actually an island, and also not the best way to get to the Pole.

In their sixth trip in 1906, they hit 87 degrees north, just three degrees short of their goal.

It was the furthest north anyone had ever gone.

Two years later, on July sixth, 1908, Henson and Peary left aboard the icebreaker steamship the Roosevelt from Hempstead Bay, New York to great fanfare.

This would be their final attempt.

Before they left, there were reports that a former colleague of Peary's, Dr. Frederick Cook, had left on his own North Pole expedition, but no one had heard from Cook in months.

The Roosevelt's Arctic team consisted of 50 men and 246 dogs.

They sailed to Ellesmere Island, the northernmost point of Canada, and docked the Roosevelt on September 5th, 1908.

Henson led and translated for the Inughuit support team, which consisted of men, women, and children who wintered with the crew at Cape Sheridan to make clothes and hunt for food.

Months later, at 6 a.m on March 1st, 1909, the expedition team began a long march over the final 280 miles.

The 50 men were split into smaller scouting units who took turns etching pre-made pathways into the ice for the rest to follow.

For the last 134 miles, Peary carefully selected a group of six men himself, Henson and four Indigenous crew: Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah.

The path ahead was exceptionally dangerous.

They had never gone this far and didn't know what to expect.

They traveled by sledge and by foot over constantly moving ice floes and dangerous ice ridges.

Henson was awed by the perilous landscape.

These last miles almost killed them.

At one point, Henson fell into the freezing water before Ootah saved him.

But Henson persisted to their final destination, scouting ahead of Peary.

Peary, whose remaining toes were frostbitten, couldn't walk.

His team carried him on a sledge as they followed Henson's footsteps.

On April 6th, 1909, Peary caught up to Henson, laid himself on the Arctic ground, and used his sextant to confirm the measurements.

Here is the thing.

Peary had sent every other person who knew how to use a sextant back to base camp.

So Henson, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah relied fully on Peary to let them know when the journey had truly ended.

This would be a problem later on.

After taking his measurements, Peary, to Henson's surprise and disappointment, said nothing.

Henson: "From the time we knew we were at the pole, Commander Peary scarcely spoke to me.

It nearly broke my heart."

Peary ignored Henson's outstretched hand and instructed the team to raise the stars and stripes at the North Pole.

On the brutal 17 day return journey, Peary barely spoke to Henson.

These two men had spent 20 years risking their lives together.

But despite their incredible accomplishment, Henson and Peary's decades long partnership shattered in a single moment.

To make matters worse, not long after the return to the Roosevelt, they met two Indigenous men who claimed to have already completed an expedition to the North Pole with Dr. Frederick Cook, who wasn't lost after all.

What followed was a highly publicized battle and a congressional hearing over whether Cook or Peary first reached the North Pole.

Both men submitted evidence from their journey, including their calculations.

In Jim Crow's America, Henson was not considered an equal witness, even as a polar explorer with decades of experience.

Peary had not given Henson his own sextant.

He sent back researchers who had access to verify his final calculations, a prejudiced act of hubris that jeopardized their claim.

Even so, the congressional committee ruled in Peary's favor 4-3 and cemented his title as the first man to the North Pole.

While newly promoted to Rear Admiral Peary received fame and honor, Henson was parking cars.

All Henson got for his efforts was a gold watch and a chain.

He was also excluded from the prestigious Explorers Club, of which Peary became president.

Most news articles about the expedition referred to Henson simply as Peary's servant or didn't mention him at all.

The Black community, however, immediately rallied around Henson and demanded recognition.

The colored citizens of New York held an honorary dinner for him in 1909.

In 1912, Henson turned his journals into a book edited by his wife, Lucy.

Surprisingly, Peary wrote the foreword.

Over the years, Peary occasionally defended Henson as a skilled explorer, but never at the expense of his own legacy.

Henson's published account asserted that his footprints, not Peary's, were the first to reach the top of the world.

At a banquet dinner held in his honor, Henson told the crowd: "When I went to Greenland, they said I would never come back.

They told me that I could not stand the cold, that no Black man could.

I said I would die if necessary to show them.

I survived, all right.

And here I am.

Henson was recommended for a job in 1913 by President Taft as a clerk at the New York Customs office, where he was able to receive a modest pension.

In 1937, the Explorers Club finally inducted Henson, 17 years after Peary had died.

In 1988,the National Geographic Society, a major sponsor of Peary's expeditions, concluded that Peary's evidence did not prove that he made it to the Pole.

Though the Peary expedition went further north than anyone up to that point.

In 2022, Seegloo, Egingwah, Ooqueah, and Ootah were admitted into the Explorers Club Society of Forgotten Explorers.

In 1955, Henson passed away.

His name is still honored within the Black community, with several schools named after him.

And in 1987, after public support from Harvard scholar and fellow Black explorer Dr. S Allen Counter, Henson's remains were moved near Peary's at Arlington Cemetery, where his body rests to this day.

Matthew A. Henson, the orphaned cabin boy born in the first generation of free Black children, pushed the limits of that freedom to the very ends of the earth.