Matthew Henson

Matthew Alexander Henson (August 8, 1866March 9, 1955) was an African-American explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on seven voyages to the Arctic over a period of nearly 23 years. They spent a total of 18 years on expeditions together. He is best known for his participation in the 1908–1909 expedition that claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole on April 6, 1909. Henson later said that he was the first of their party to reach the North Pole.

Henson was born in Nanjemoy, Maryland, to sharecropper parents who were free Black Americans before the Civil War. He spent most of his early life in Washington, D.C., but left school at the age of twelve to work as a cabin boy on a police sloop that patrolled the oyster fields of the Potomac River. He later worked as a salesclerk at a department store. One of his customers was Robert Peary, who in 1887 hired him as a personal valet. At the time, Peary was working on the Nicaragua Canal.

Their first Arctic expedition together was in 1891–92. Henson served as a navigator and craftsman, and was known as Peary's "first man". Like Peary, he studied Inuit survival techniques.

During their 1908–09 expedition to Greenland, Henson was one of the six men – including Peary and four Inuit assistants – who claimed to have been the first to reach the geographic North Pole. In interviews, Henson identified as the first member of the party to reach what they believed was the pole. The team's claim had gained widespread acceptance, but, in 1989, Wally Herbert published research that found that their expedition records were unreliable and indicated an implausibly high speed during their final rush for the pole, and that the men could have fallen short of the pole due to navigational errors.

Henson achieved a degree of fame as a result of participating in the expedition, and in 1912, he published a memoir titled A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. As he approached old age, his exploits received renewed attention. In 1937, he was the first African American to be made a life member of The Explorers Club; in 1948, he was elevated to the club's highest level of membership. In 1944, Henson was awarded the Peary Polar Expedition Medal, and he was received at the White House by Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. In 1988, he and his wife were re-interred at Arlington National Cemetery. In 2000, Henson posthumously was awarded the Hubbard Medal by the National Geographic Society. In September 2021, the International Astronomical Union named a lunar crater after him.

Early life and education

Henson was born on August 8, 1866, on his parents' farm east of the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, to sharecroppers who had been free people of color before the American Civil War. Matthew's parents were subjected to attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, who terrorized southern freedmen and former free people of color after the Civil War.

To escape from racial violence in southern Maryland, the Henson family sold the farm in 1867 and moved to Georgetown, then still an independent town adjacent to the national capital. He had an older sister S., born in 1864, and two younger sisters Eliza and M. Matthew's mother died when Matthew was seven. His father Lemuel remarried to a woman named Caroline and had additional children with her, including daughters and a son.

After his father died, Matthew was sent to stay with his uncle, who lived in Washington, D.C. (Georgetown was made part of Washington, DC in 1871.) The uncle paid for a few years of education for Matthew but soon died. He was remembered as the only non-Inuit who became skilled in driving the dog sleds and in training dog teams in the Inuit way.

Peary selected Henson and four Inuit as part of the team of six men who would make the final run to the Pole. Before the goal of reaching the North Pole was reached, Peary could no longer continue on foot and rode in a dog sled. Various accounts say he was ill, was exhausted, or had frozen toes. He sent Henson ahead as a scout.

In a newspaper interview, Henson later said:

Henson then proceeded to plant the American flag.

thumb|Illustration of Matthew Henson by [[Charles Alston]]

The claim by Peary's team to have reached the North Pole was widely debated in newspapers at the time, as was the competing claim by Frederick Cook. The National Geographic Society as well as the Naval Affairs Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives both credited Peary's team with having reached the North Pole.

Later life

thumb|right|upright|Photograph of Henson in civilian clothing, taken from his 1912 book A Negro Explorer at the North Pole

In 1912 Henson published a memoir about his arctic explorations, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. In this, he describes himself as a "general assistant, skilled craftsperson, interpreter, and laborer."

He later gained renewed attention. In 1937, Henson was admitted as a member to the prestigious Explorers Club in New York City, and in 1948 he was made an honorary member, of whom there are only 20 per year. In 1944 Congress awarded him and five other Peary aides duplicates of the Peary Polar Expedition Medal, a silver medal given to Peary. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored Henson before he died in 1955.

Henson died in the Bronx, New York, on March 9, 1955, at the age of 88. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery and survived by his wife Lucy. After her death in 1968, she was buried with him. In 1988, both their bodies were moved for reinterment at Arlington National Cemetery, accompanied by a commemoration ceremony. They had no children.

During the extended expeditions to Greenland, Henson and Peary both took Inuit women as "country wives" and fathered children with them. With his concubine, known as Akatingwah, Henson fathered his only child, a son named Anauakaq, born in 1906. Anauakaq's children are Henson's only descendants. The existence of Henson's and Peary's descendants first was made public by French explorer and ethnologist Jean Malaurie who spent a year in Greenland in 1951–1952.

S. Allen Counter, a neuroscientist and director of the Harvard Foundation, had been interested in Henson's story and traveled in Greenland for research related to it. Learning of possible descendants of the explorers, he tracked down Henson's and Peary's sons, Anauakaq and Kali, respectively in 1986. By then the men were octogenarians. He arranged a visit for them the following year to the United States, where they met American relatives from both families and visited their fathers' graves. Anauakaq died in 1987. He and his wife Aviaq had five sons and a daughter, who have children of their own. While some still reside in Greenland, others have moved to Sweden or the United States.

Legacy and honors

thumb|Henson's grave in [[Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S.]]

thumb|250px|Entrance of the site of the former Matthew Henson Public Housing Project.

On October 19, 1909, Henson was the guest of honor at a dinner ceremony held by the Colored Citizens of New York, where he was honored by toasts and given a gold watch and chain.
In 1937, The Explorers Club, under its "polar" President Vilhjalmur Stefansson, invited Henson to join its ranks.
In 1940, Henson was honored with one of the 33 dioramas at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago.
In 1945, Henson and other Peary aides were given U.S. Navy medals for their Arctic achievements.
In 1948, the Explorers Club awarded the explorer its highest rank of Honorary Member, an honor reserved for no more than 20 living members at a time.
In 1954, Henson was invited to the White House.
Before his death in 1955, Henson received honorary doctoral degrees from Howard University and Morgan State University.
On May 28, 1986, the United States Postal Service issued a 22 cent postage stamp in honor of Henson and Peary; they were previously honored in 1959, but not by name.
In 1988 Henson and his wife Lucy were reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery, with a monument to his exploring achievements, near Peary's grave and monument. Many members from his Inuit descendants (Anauakaq's children) and extended American family attended.
In October 1996, the United States Navy commissioned USNS Henson, a Pathfinder-class oceanographic survey ship, named in honor of Matthew Henson.
In 2000, the National Geographic Society awarded the Hubbard Medal to Matthew A. Henson posthumously. in Pomonkey, and elementary schools named for him in Baltimore and Palmer Park, Maryland.
The Henson Glacier (Greenland) was named after him.
In 2008–2009, a 100th anniversary expedition to the North Pole was undertaken in honor of Henson by Dwayne Fields.
In 2009 at larger-than-life statue of Mathew Henson and his lead sled dog, King, was created by John J. Giannotti. It stands in front of the Camden Shipyard & Maritime Museum, located at 1910, S. Broadway, Camden, NJ, in the Waterfront South Historic District. A plaque on the base of the statue commemorates a ship called the Kite. Stones brought back on the Kite from one of the Henson-Peary explorations were used to build part of the former Church of Our Saviour. This historic structure is now home to the museum and the Mathew Henson Arctic Explorer Room.
In October 2020, the previously named Columbus GPS Block III satellite was renamed after the launch as Matthew Henson.
In September 2021, on the proposal of an intern at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, a crater at the south pole of the Moon, located between Sverdrup and de Gerlache craters, was named Henson after him.
S. Allen Counter's book, North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo (1991), discusses the explorations, as well as Peary and Henson's "country wives" (Inuit women) and their part-Inuit descendants, and historical race relations. He made a film documentary by the same name, shown on the Monitor Channel in 1992.
Donna Jo Napoli's young adult novel, North, is set against Henson's life and role in polar expeditions.
In 2012, the German artist Simon Schwartz published a graphic novel about Henson, entitled Packeis (pack ice), which won the Max & Moritz Prize for the "Best German-language Comic Book." The novel was published in English as First Man: Reimagining Matthew Henson in 2015.
In the graphic novel Sous le soleil de minuit, published in 2015 by writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Rubén Pellejero, Henson helps Corto Maltese in his Alaskan adventure in 1915.
Henson's story is featured in Kevin Hart's Guide to Black History on Netflix.
Henson is named in response to the question "Who was the first man to set foot on the North Pole?" in Stevie Wonders song Black Man on the album Songs in the Key of Life.
His life and the polar exploration is retold in the 1948 radio drama "Arctic Autograph", a presentation from the Destination Freedom series, written by Richard Durham.

Notes

External links

"Matthew A. Henson", at ArlingtonCemetery•org, an unofficial website (archived page)
, website by Bradley Robinson (son of 1947 biographer)
People: "Dr. S. Allen Counter", Intercultural Issues, 2005–2009, Harvard Foundation, Harvard University
The Matthew Henson Earth Conservation Center

Early life and education

Later life

Legacy and honors

Notes

Further reading

External links