He drove the sledges, built the igloos and spoke the language — and may have stood at the Pole before anyone.
On 6 April 1909, six men stood on the drifting sea ice of the Arctic Ocean, at the place Robert Peary declared to be the North Pole. Four were Inuit: Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah. One was Peary. The sixth was a 42-year-old Black man from tobacco country in Maryland who had gone to sea as a cabin boy at twelve. By his own account, Matthew Henson reached the spot first, ahead of Peary.
For eighteen years Henson had been the expedition's indispensable hand. He built and mended the sledges, drove the dogs, and spoke Inuktitut well enough to bargain, hunt and travel with the Inughuit of north Greenland. Peary came home to medals and honours. Henson came home to a job parking cars in Brooklyn, then 23 years as a clerk in the New York Customs House. It took his country almost eight decades to bury him like a hero.
From the Chesapeake to the ice
The lifeline
1866
Born 8 August in Charles County, Maryland, to free Black sharecroppers
c.1878
Orphaned, he ships out of Baltimore as cabin boy on the Katie Hines; her captain teaches him to read and navigate
1887
Hired by Robert Peary, met in a Washington hat shop, as his valet for a survey in Nicaragua
1909
Reaches what Peary declares the North Pole, on the seventh Arctic expedition they made together
1913
Appointed to the New York Customs House, where he works for 23 years
1955
Dies in New York, 9 March, aged 88, and is buried in the Bronx
By the numbers
The measure of him
7
Arctic expeditions with Peary, from 1891 to 1909
133
Dogs on the 1909 polar journey, with 24 men and 19 sledges, by Peary's count
23 yrs
Spent as a Customs House clerk after reaching the top of the world
79 yrs
From the Pole in 1909 to his reburial at Arlington in 1988
What he did
The deeds
1891
First Greenland expedition. He learns from the Inughuit how to drive dog teams, hunt and dress in furs, skills the expeditions came to depend on.
1890s
The expedition's craftsman. A trained seaman and carpenter, he built and repaired the sledges and handled the dogs and supplies on the trail.
1906
Farthest North. On an earlier attempt the party is driven back by open water, short of the Pole.
1909
The polar dash. Peary chose Henson for the final party. Whether they truly reached 90° N is still debated, because of doubts about Peary's navigation, but Henson was there for every mile Peary was.
1912
A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. His memoir of the expedition, published with a foreword by Peary.
Left out, then brought home
Recognition
In his lifetime
Peary got the lectures, the medals and the promotion to rear admiral
Henson worked parking cars, then as a federal clerk
Admitted to the Explorers Club only in 1937
A joint Congressional medal for the expedition members came in 1944, 35 years late
Today
Reburied beside Peary at Arlington National Cemetery on 6 April 1988
Awarded the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal, posthumously, in 2000
A US Navy oceanographic survey ship, USNS Henson, bears his name
His Inuit descendants in Greenland were traced and met his American family in the 1980s
The edge of the map
Cape Columbia
The 1909 party struck north onto the sea ice from Cape Columbia, at the tip of Ellesmere Island, on 1 March. Beyond it there is no land at all: only pack ice that grinds, splits into open leads and drifts under your feet while you cross it.
83° N
Cape Columbia, the northernmost point of Canada
~413 nmi
From the cape to the Pole, in a straight line
36 days
From leaving land, 1 March, to the claimed Pole, 6 April
"The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart. To me the trail is calling!"
— Matthew Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, 1912
