He broke the trail to the top of the world — and then spent thirty years behind a clerk's desk.
On the morning of 6 April 1909, six men halted their dog sledges on the drifting sea ice at the top of the world. Four were Inuit — Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah. One was Robert Peary, who by then could no longer walk and rode the sledge. The sixth, sent ahead to scout and break trail, was Matthew Alexander Henson: born on a Maryland farm the year after the Civil War, to parents who had been free Black people before it; orphaned young; at sea as a cabin boy at twelve. Peary called him his "first man." He was the only member of the party who could build a sledge, drive a dog team and speak with the Inughuit in their own language.
Peary came home to an admiral's rank and a nation's newspapers. Henson came home to a messenger's job at the U.S. Customs House in New York, where he worked for the best part of thirty years. He was eighty-eight when he died in the Bronx in 1955. It took another thirty-three years for his country to bury him with honours.
Maryland to ninety degrees north
The lifeline
1866
Born 8 August at Nanjemoy, Charles County, Maryland, to free-born sharecroppers
1878
At twelve, ships out of Baltimore as cabin boy; Captain Childs teaches him to read
1887
Meets Robert Peary across a shop counter in Washington; hired for Nicaragua
1891
First Arctic voyage; learns sledge, dog team and language from the Inughuit
1909
6 April: with four Inuit companions, breaks the last trail toward the Pole
1955
Dies in the Bronx at 88; reinterred at Arlington in 1988
By the numbers
The measure of him
7
Voyages to the Arctic with Peary, across nearly 23 years
18
Years of his life spent out on expedition
413
Nautical miles of drifting pack ice from Cape Columbia to the Pole
79
Years between that march and his burial at Arlington, in 1988
What he actually did on the ice
The work
1887
Hired as a valet for Peary's canal survey in Nicaragua — and kept on, after Peary saw what he could do with a boat, a tool and a crew.
1891–1906
Craftsman of the expeditions. He built and repaired the sledges, worked as carpenter and blacksmith, and was remembered as the only non-Inuit in the party who could train and drive a dog team in the Inuit way.
Language
He learned to speak Inuktitut fluently — hiring, trading and interpreting for the expeditions. The Inughuit of northern Greenland called him Mahri-Pahluk.
1906
Farthest North. By Peary's reckoning the party reached 87°06′ N — further, it was claimed, than anyone had yet gone.
1909
The last march. With Peary riding the sledge, Henson went ahead to scout. He planted the American flag on the spot they took for the Pole — and, by his own account, overshot it and walked back into his own footprints.
1912
A Negro Explorer at the North Pole — his own memoir of the ice, published three years after the march, in which he describes himself as "general assistant, skilled craftsperson, interpreter, and laborer."
A necessary caveat: whether Peary's party stood exactly at the Pole is disputed. A 1989 reassessment of Peary's records by the polar explorer Wally Herbert found them lacking essential data and concluded the men may have fallen 30–60 miles short. What is not disputed is who was breaking the trail.
Left off the record, then returned to it
Recognition
In his lifetime
Peary was made a rear admiral; Henson was found a clerkship
Nearly thirty years at the U.S. Customs House in New York
The press told 1909 as one man's story; his part shrank to "servant"
Not made a member of the Explorers Club until 1937 — 28 years after the march
Since
1944: Congress votes him a duplicate of the Peary Polar Expedition Medal
1948–54: raised to the Explorers Club's highest membership; received at the White House by Truman and Eisenhower
1988: reinterred with his wife Lucy at Arlington National Cemetery
2000: awarded the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal, posthumously
2021: the International Astronomical Union names a lunar crater Henson
Where the road north began
Nanjemoy, Maryland
He was born on his parents' farm in the tidewater country east of the Potomac, in Charles County, Maryland — a household of free people of color in a state still learning what emancipation meant. Night riders made the county unsafe for such families; in 1867 the Hensons sold the farm and moved to Georgetown, at the edge of Washington. Within a dozen years the farm boy was on the open sea, and within twenty-five he was on the polar ice.
1867
The year the family sold up and left Charles County
12
His age when he went to sea as a cabin boy
38° N
Nanjemoy's latitude. He aimed his life at ninety
"I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot."
— Matthew Henson, interviewed late in life
