Matthew Henson: The US' unsung Black explorer
While other explorers may claim credit for discovering the North Pole, an unsung and largely forgotten former sharecropper has as good a case as anyone.
Located just outside Washington DC in Montgomery County, Maryland, the 116-acre Matthew Henson State Park Stream Valley Park is a leafy, wooded oasis surrounded by suburban sprawl. As you enter, the hum of traffic soon fades away, and all hikers, joggers and bikers can see are grass and trees. A 4.2-mile paved trail gently curves through the forest, before an elevated wooden boardwalk carries it above a wetland. Birds chirp overhead, and deer and wild turkeys are a common sight.
You could walk this trail every day and never know who Matthew Henson was – unless you stopped at a certain trailside sign that displays a bulleted timeline of Henson's life:
• 1866: Born in Charles County, Maryland.
• 1879-1884: Joins the crew of the ship Katie Hines as a cabin boy and explores the world.
• 1887: Joins Robert E Peary to assist in the survey of Nicaragua for a possible canal.
Then, in the middle of this biography, there's a surprising detail:
• 1909: Reaches the North Pole with Peary and plants the American flag.
The sign is topped with a photograph of Henson wrapped in furs, a hood pulled over his head. His brow is soberly furrowed, and he wears a bushy mustache. His appearance fits the archetype of the polar explorer in every way but one: Henson was Black.
"As a kid growing up in school, I never heard of Matthew Henson," said JR Harris, who is also African American and serves on the board of directors of the Explorers Club, which has inspired some of the world's greatest adventurers. "A lot of people assume that Matthew Henson was somebody I looked up to back in the day, and that's just not true. All we heard was that the North Pole was discovered by Robert Peary."
Henson's life reads like a Victorian adventure novel. Born to a family of sharecroppers, Henson worked odd jobs before he joined the crew of a merchant ship and sailed to distant continents. His first mentor was one Captain Childs, who trained the adolescent Henson for a life at sea and even taught him to read. When Childs died in 1883, Henson again struggled to make a living – until a fateful encounter with Robert Peary in 1887. They first crossed paths at a haberdashery in Washington DC where Henson worked. Commander Peary, an engineer with the US Navy, was impressed with the young stock boy and he invited Henson to serve as his assistant on a survey mission to Nicaragua later that year.
The pivotal stage of Henson's career unfolded over an 18-year period starting in 1891, when he accompanied Peary to the Arctic Circle in search of the North Pole. As one of the last unexplored corners on Earth, the quest to physically reach the world's northernmost point had lured explorers for centuries – many of whom had fantasised about standing on top of the planet. Yet, the Pole's harsh weather and ship-crushing ice floes had repelled all human visitors, even the Inuit.
Peary was the established leader of these expeditions, raising money and organising teams. Henson accompanied Peary on every journey but one, spending years of his life in the field. In Greenland, Henson bonded with the Inughuit, the northernmost people in North America and part of the Greenlandic Inuit peoples; he learned to build igloos and sledges, and he became fluent in the Inuktun language. He hunted polar animals with a rifle, a life-saving skill when provisions ran low. Most impressively, Henson learned the art of mushing.
"He is a better dog driver and handles a sledge better than any man living, except some of the best [Inuit] hunters," Peary wrote of Henson. "I couldn't get along without him."
Over the course of seven attempts from 1891 to 1909, Henson was Peary's closest collaborator. The Arctic was unforgiving, and the two men nearly froze or starved on several occasions. Peary lost many of his toes to frostbite; Henson once broke through the ice and would have drowned had his Inuit friend Ootah not pulled him from the freezing water. The men weathered catastrophic storms and never-ending technical snafus. They refined their process again and again, until their final expedition in 1909. As supplies ran low and they were roughly 134 miles from the Pole, Peary ordered everyone in his 50-person party to return to their ship, except for four Inuits and Henson.
According to a Smithsonian article, several days later on 6 April 1909, after an arduous trek through the tundra, Henson allegedly told Peary that he had a "feeling" they were now at the Pole. Henson said that Peary then dug into his coat, pulled out a folded American flag sewn by his wife and fastened it to a staff that he stuck atop an igloo. The following day, Henson said Peary determined their location with a sextant, placed a note and the US flag in an empty tin and buried it in the ice. The men then turned back toward the ship to head home.
"Another world's accomplishment was done and finished," wrote Henson in his 1912 memoir, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. "And as in the past, from the beginning of history, wherever the world's work was done by a white man, he had been accompanied by a colored man."
Yet Henson's moment of glory was short-lived. For the next century, historians would be sceptical about Henson, who returned to the United States at the height of Jim Crow hostility. Peary wrote an effusive foreword to Henson's book, arguing that "race, color, or bringing-up, or environment, count nothing against a determined heart, if it is backed and aided by intelligence". Still, Peary gladly received most accolades for reaching the Pole, while Henson's name faded from the public eye.
Historians debate whether Peary's surveying was correct – plus there's dispute as to whether he was even the first explorer to get there – but most agree that he couldn't have ventured so far north without Henson, who fully embraced Inuit life and studied millennia-old survival skills. Henson adapted Inuit tools, such as fur garments and dog-driven sledges.
"The [Inuit] people really liked him," said Harris, who has himself embarked on scores of self-supported solo hikes in wilderness areas around the world. Like Henson, Harris has forged relationships with Indigenous people in remote locations and appreciates this early attempt at cultural anthropology. "Peary was kind of standoffish, and he appreciated that someone in his party could deal with the Inuit population and could establish good relations."
Still, it wasn't until 1937 that Henson was admitted as a member of the Explorers Club. He eventually received honours from presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D Eisenhower, but only towards the end of his life. Henson was ultimately interred at Arlington National Cemetery, where a special monument now stands, but it wasn't erected until 1988 – 33 years after his death. Today, a handful of landmarks are named after him: Matthew Henson State Park, several Maryland public schools and the USNS Henson, a 3,000-ton research vessel that conducts oceanographic surveying.
For decades, Henson supporters have kindled the memory of his achievement – and attempted to trace the full breadth of his legacy. His most passionate advocate was the late Dr S Allen Counter, a Boston-based neurologist and fellow member of the Explorers Club. Not only did Counter petition Arlington for the monument, but he discovered unknown branches of Henson's family tree in Greenland – several of his Inuit descendants are still alive today. He documented this lineage in his book, North Pole Legacy.
"The story resonated with my father for obvious reasons," said Philippa Counter, Allen's daughter. "They were both explorers. Henson was this unsung hero who didn't get recognised for going to the North Pole. He thought, 'This is a story I absolutely have to tell'."
Dr Counter passed away in 2017, but others have taken up the torch. The Explorers Club started a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, with JR Harris as its chair. In 2022, the Club posthumously admitted four new members: Seegloo, Egingwah, Ooqueah and Ootah, the Inuit men who accompanied Henson and Peary on their final expedition.
"In my opinion, they're all co-discoverers of the North Pole, all six of them," said Harris. "Those four guys are finally getting the recognition they deserve."
Meanwhile, in Brunswick, Maine, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum is currently moving buildings. The museum belongs to Bowdoin College, alma mater to both Peary and fellow Arctic explorer Donald Baxter MacMillan. Since it opened in 1967, the museum has showcased Henson artefacts, including archival photos, a sledge he built himself and a rare television interview from the 1950s. Patrons have always been welcomed with painted portraits of Peary and MacMillan, positioned side-by-side at the entrance. However, when the new space opens in May 2023, it will have an important addition: an enlarged photograph of Henson, dressed in his trademark furs, displayed next to them.
Rediscovering America is a BBC Travel series that tells the inspiring stories of forgotten, overlooked or misunderstood aspects of the US, flipping the script on familiar history, cultures and communities.
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