Matthew Henson

Matthew Alexander Henson was born on August 8, 1866, in Charles County, Maryland, approximately two years after the end of the Civil War, to sharecropper parents who died when he was young. Orphaned in childhood, he made his way to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a dishwasher before talking his way into a job as a cabin boy aboard a merchant ship captained by a man named Childs, who took a genuine interest in educating him. Over the next several years Henson sailed to China, Japan, the Philippines, North Africa, Spain, and France, receiving an informal but remarkably comprehensive education in navigation, languages, carpentry, and seamanship.

He met Robert Peary in 1887, when Peary hired him as a valet for a surveying expedition to Nicaragua. Peary quickly recognized that Henson's practical skills far exceeded the role of personal attendant, and Henson became his field partner across nearly two decades of Arctic exploration. The two men made seven expeditions together to the north, testing routes, learning from the Inuit people who inhabited the region, and enduring conditions of almost unimaginable hardship.

The Arctic Expeditions

Henson's contributions to the expeditions were not incidental. He learned to speak Inuktitut fluently — far more proficiently than Peary — and built deep relationships with Inuit communities whose knowledge and assistance were essential to the expeditions' survival and navigation. He became expert at driving dog sleds, constructing igloos, designing and repairing equipment, and reading ice conditions. Peary himself acknowledged that Henson was the most capable member of his teams and that the expeditions could not have functioned without him.

On April 6, 1909, the final push to the North Pole was made by a small party: Peary, Henson, and four Inuit guides — Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah. Henson reportedly reached the calculated position of the pole ahead of Peary, planted a flag, and greeted a breathless Peary with a handshake. Whether the party genuinely reached exactly 90 degrees north remains a subject of scholarly debate — navigational technology of the era made precise verification impossible — but the consensus of modern historians is that they came closer to the geographic pole than any previous expedition.

Recognition Denied and Deferred

When the expedition returned to civilization, Peary received the accolades. Henson's role was systematically minimized in public accounts, partly through the racial dynamics of the era and partly through Peary's own reluctance to share credit. Henson published his account of the expeditions in a 1912 memoir, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, but for decades received little institutional recognition. He worked as a parking garage attendant in New York City for most of his working life after the expeditions ended.

Late recognition trickled in slowly. In 1937, he was admitted to the Explorers Club. President Dwight D. Eisenhower invited him to the White House in 1954, two years before his death on March 9, 1955. In 1988, his remains were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery alongside his wife, in a grave near Peary's. The National Geographic Society awarded him its Hubbard Medal posthumously. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, a Maryland state office building, and a middle school in Baltimore bear his name. His life has become a touchstone in discussions of how race shaped the recording and celebration of American achievement.