Matthew Henson

Matthew Henson: The Man Who Got There First

"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." That is Matthew Henson's own account, given in a newspaper interview, of the final steps toward the North Pole in April 1909 — a claim that, if true, makes him rather than Robert Peary the first human being to stand at the top of the world. For most of the twentieth century, almost nobody was told.

An Orphan Who Went to Sea

Matthew Alexander Henson was born on 8 August 1866 in Nanjemoy, Maryland, to free Black sharecroppers who fled Ku Klux Klan violence to Georgetown, in what is now Washington, D.C., the following year. His mother died when he was seven; his father died soon after, and Matthew was sent to live with an uncle who provided several years of schooling before also dying. Henson attended a Black public school for six years, washing dishes each summer to help pay for it. At twelve, reportedly inspired after hearing Frederick Douglass speak of seizing opportunity, he made his way to Baltimore and signed on as a cabin boy aboard the merchant ship *Katie Hines*, which carried him to China, Japan, Africa, and the Russian Arctic. Its captain, a man named Childs, taught him to read and write at sea.

Meeting Peary

In November 1887, working in a Washington clothing store, Henson met Commander Robert E. Peary, who was outfitting for a surveying expedition to Nicaragua. Learning of Henson's maritime background, Peary hired him as an aide — and, impressed by his seamanship and resourcefulness, kept him on as a working partner rather than a servant for every Arctic expedition that followed. Over more than two decades and seven voyages north, roughly eighteen years of which were spent on actual expeditions, Henson became what both men called Peary's "first man."

Skills No One Else on the Team Had

Henson's value in the Arctic went well beyond loyalty. He mastered the Inuit language fluently enough that the Inuit gave him a name of his own, "Mahri-Pahluk," and he became, by the accounts of the expeditions themselves, the only non-Inuit member of the party skilled at driving and training dog teams in the Inuit manner. He built igloos for mobile shelter, repaired sledges, and solved the countless practical problems — clothing, tools, navigation aids — that kept an expedition alive in temperatures that killed carelessness quickly. He described his own role, in his 1912 memoir, plainly: "general assistant, skilled craftsperson, interpreter, and laborer." It was a precise description of an indispensable man.

The 1908–09 Expedition

On Peary's eighth and final attempt at the Pole, the party left Ellesmere Island in February 1908. As the support teams turned back one by one, the final push toward the Pole on 6 April 1909 was made by six men: Peary, Henson, and four Inuit assistants — Egingwah, Seegloo, Ooqueah, and Ootah. By this stage Peary, weakened by illness, frozen toes, and exhaustion, could no longer walk the distance and rode on a dog sled while Henson went ahead as scout. It was Henson, by his own account, who reached the vicinity of the Pole first and whose footprints marked the spot before Peary arrived; Henson planted the American flag. The claim to the Pole itself remains disputed — the National Geographic Society and a U.S. House subcommittee credited Peary's expedition, though a 1988 review of Peary's own notebook by the British polar explorer Wally Herbert found it lacking essential navigational data, reviving questions about whether the party fell thirty to sixty miles short.

Thirty Years of Being Overlooked

Peary returned to a knighthood-equivalent wave of American honors. Henson returned to near silence. He took a job at the U.S. Customs House in New York, reportedly on Theodore Roosevelt's suggestion, and worked there for roughly three decades while Peary's name went into textbooks and his own did not. Recognition, when it finally came, came late and slowly: in 1937 he became the first African American admitted as a life member of the Explorers Club; in 1944 Congress awarded him a duplicate of Peary's own silver Peary Polar Expedition Medal; in 1948 he was made an honorary Explorers Club member, one of only twenty named that year; in 1954 he was received at the White House, and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored him before his death. Howard University and Morgan State University awarded him honorary doctorates. He died in the Bronx on 9 March 1955, at eighty-eight, and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery — until 1988, when, after a campaign by neuroscientist S. Allen Counter and a petition to President Reagan, his remains and his wife Lucy's were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery with full ceremonial honors, alongside Peary's own grave.

Family, North and South

Henson married Eva Flint in 1891; the marriage ended in divorce in 1897 after years of separation during his expeditions. In 1907 he married Lucy Ross; they had no children. During his years in the Arctic, Henson also took an Inuit partner, Akatingwah, and fathered a son, Anauakaq, born in 1906 — a relationship, like Peary's own with Inuit women, that reflects the exploitative power dynamics common to these expeditions. Henson never saw Akatingwah or Anauakaq again after 1909. Counter located Anauakaq, by then an elderly man, in 1986, and arranged a 1987 visit to the United States during which he met American relatives and visited his father's grave shortly before his own death that year.

Why Matthew Is Called a Genius

Whatever "genius" means for Henson, it is not the genius of the theorist but of the craftsman and linguist under pressure that no rehearsal can simulate. He arrived in the Arctic as a self-taught sailor with a grade-school education and left it as the only non-Inuit member of Peary's parties who could speak the language fluently, train a dog team the Inuit way, and build a shelter that would hold through a storm — skills that took years of genuine cultural apprenticeship to acquire and that, by every account including Peary's own, no other outsider on these expeditions matched. That is a real and specific gift: rapid, disciplined absorption of an entirely foreign survival culture, deployed under conditions where a wrong guess killed you. The honest complication is that Henson's story is inseparable from the racism that suppressed it: for thirty years after a feat that may have made him first to the Pole, the credit went almost entirely to a white commanding officer, and Henson's own skill was treated as service rather than achievement. His talent was never in doubt among the men who depended on it in the field; what took decades was the country's willingness to say so out loud.

Legacy

Matthew Henson's name now marks a lunar crater, a Greenland glacier, a Navy survey ship, a GPS satellite, a Maryland state park, and — posthumously, in 2000 — the National Geographic Society's own Hubbard Medal, the honor Peary received in his lifetime. The recognition arrived roughly a century after the walk that earned it, but it settled a case that should never have needed one: that the expedition's most essential man was not its commander.

Achievements

• Cullum Geographical Medal
• Hubbard Medal
• Recorded as explorer, writer and traveler