Matthew Henson

Matthew Alexander Henson was born on August 8, 1866, in Charles County, Maryland, to freeborn Black sharecroppers ^[1]. The family lived in a region where the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black residents in the years after the Civil War, and they eventually moved to Washington, D.C., in search of safety and work ^[2]. Henson lost both parents while still a child and was raised for a time by relatives in the capital.

At about the age of twelve he walked to Baltimore and signed on as a cabin boy aboard the merchant ship Katie Hines ^[1]. Its captain, Childs, took an interest in the boy, taught him to read and write, and trained him in navigation, carpentry, and seamanship during voyages that reached China, Japan, North Africa, and the Russian Arctic ports ^[2]. When Childs died, Henson returned to shore work, eventually taking a job as a clerk in a Washington hat store. That modest position changed his life: in 1887 a young Navy civil engineer named Robert E. Peary came in to buy a sun helmet and, hearing of Henson's sea experience, hired him as a personal assistant for a canal survey in Nicaragua ^[1].

Henson proved indispensable in Nicaragua, and when Peary turned his ambitions toward Greenland, he brought Henson along. Beginning with the 1891 to 1892 North Greenland expedition, Henson joined every major Arctic journey Peary organized over the next eighteen years ^[3]. While other expedition members rotated in and out, Henson became the constant.

What set him apart was his relationship with the Inughuit, the polar Inuit of northwestern Greenland. Henson learned their language more fluently than any other member of the expeditions, hunted with them, and absorbed their techniques for building sledges, driving dog teams, and surviving on the ice ^[3]. The Inughuit called him Mahri Pahluk, and many regarded him as the most capable of the Americans ^[4]. Peary himself acknowledged that Henson could handle a sledge better than any man on the team except the Inuit hunters themselves.

The apprenticeship was brutal. On the 1898 to 1902 expedition Peary lost most of his toes to frostbite, and Henson helped carry him back across the ice ^[2]. A 1905 to 1906 attempt aboard the ship Roosevelt pushed to a record farthest north before dwindling supplies and open water forced a retreat. Each failure refined the system of relay teams and supply caches that would carry the final attempt.

The expedition that defined Matthew Henson's biography left New York aboard the Roosevelt in July 1908. From winter quarters at Cape Sheridan on Ellesmere Island, the party moved to Cape Columbia and set out across the frozen Arctic Ocean in late February 1909 ^[3]. Peary organized the march as a pyramid: support divisions broke trail and hauled supplies, then turned back one by one as the group narrowed toward the goal.

For the final push Peary chose Henson and four Inughuit men, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah ^[4]. Henson, breaking trail ahead of Peary, later wrote that he arrived at the spot first and awaited the commander. On April 6, 1909, the six men stood at what Peary's observations placed at or near 90 degrees north, and Henson planted the American flag ^[1]. In his own account he called himself the first man to sit on top of the world.

Controversy followed immediately. Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the Pole a year earlier, and later analysts questioned whether Peary's navigation could have placed the party exactly at the Pole ^[5]. Whatever the precise final position, the achievement of the 1909 party remains one of the great feats of polar travel, and Matthew Henson's achievements as its most experienced ice traveler are not in dispute among historians of exploration ^[3].

The years after 1909 treated the two men very differently. Peary received medals, promotion to rear admiral, and a congressional pension. Henson, a Black man in segregated America, was largely ignored ^[2]. He wrote a memoir, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, published in 1912 with a foreword by Peary and an introduction by Booker T. Washington, but it earned him little money ^[6].

For most of the next three decades Henson worked as a clerk at the United States Customs House in New York, a position arranged in 1913 through the intervention of President William Howard Taft ^[1]. The man who had driven dog teams across the polar sea spent his working days filing papers.

Recognition arrived slowly. The Explorers Club in New York admitted him as a member in 1937, its first Black member ^[4]. In 1944 Congress awarded Henson and the other surviving members of the Peary expedition duplicate silver medals ^[1]. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored him at the White House during the last years of his life, and in 1948 the Geographic Society of Chicago presented him a gold medal ^[2].

Henson married twice. His first marriage, to Eva Flint in 1891, ended in divorce, strained by his long Arctic absences ^[2]. In 1906 he married Lucy Ross, a bank clerk from New York, and the couple remained together until his death, living for many years in Harlem ^[1].

Henson and Lucy had no children together, but during the expeditions Henson fathered a son, Anaukaq, with an Inughuit woman named Akatingwah ^[4]. Peary likewise fathered children in Greenland. The American descendants of both men knew little of their Greenlandic relatives until researchers, most prominently the Harvard scientist S. Allen Counter, traced the families in the 1980s and brought Anaukaq and Peary's son Kali to the United States in 1987 to meet their American kin ^[4]. Henson's Greenlandic descendants number in the dozens today, and several have themselves worked as hunters and travelers in the far north.

Henson retired from the Customs House in 1936 and lived quietly in New York with Lucy ^[1]. Interviews and honors punctuated his final two decades as journalists and historians began to reexamine his role. The writer Bradley Robinson published a biography, Dark Companion, in 1947, based on long conversations with Henson, and it introduced his story to a new generation ^[6].

He died in New York City on March 9, 1955, at the age of 88, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx ^[1]. Lucy Henson died in 1968 and was buried beside him. In 1988, following a campaign led by S. Allen Counter and with the approval of President Reagan, the remains of Matthew and Lucy Henson were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, close to the monument of Robert Peary ^[4]. Members of Henson's Greenlandic family attended the ceremony.

Among Matthew Henson facts that surprise modern readers, perhaps the most striking is how long full credit took: nearly a century passed between the 1909 expedition and some of his highest honors. In 2000 the National Geographic Society posthumously awarded him the Hubbard Medal, the same honor Peary had received in 1906 ^[5]. The United States Navy had earlier named an oceanographic survey ship USNS Henson in 1996, and a crater on the Moon's far side region was left unnamed, but a Maryland state park, numerous schools, and a Baltimore public school all carry his name ^[2].

Historians now treat Henson not as Peary's servant, the label newspapers of 1909 used, but as co-discoverer and the expedition's essential technician: the man who built and repaired the sledges, spoke for the party among the Inughuit, and broke trail on the final march ^[3]. His memoir remains in print, and his life is taught as a case study in both polar exploration and the history of Black achievement in America.

For readers asking what Matthew Henson is famous for, the answer runs deeper than a single date on the ice. He demonstrated that mastery of Indigenous knowledge, not brute endurance alone, made polar travel possible, and his patient decades of unrewarded skill make his eventual place at Arlington one of American exploration's most meaningful corrections ^[4].