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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. Deirdre C. Stam, "Introduction to The Explorers Club Edition," Matthew A. Henson's Historic Arctic Journey: The Classic Account of One of the World's Greatest Black Explorers, Globe Pequot, 2009, pp. 3–6 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. To promote a lecture tour, Henson later said he was the first of their party to reach the North Pole but there is no evidence for this.
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. Burial Detail: Henson, Matthew A (Section 8, Grave S-15-1) – ANC Explorer 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.
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 A. Henson website, 2012, accessed October 2, 2013 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 live 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. Henson attended a Black public school for the next six years, during the last of which he took a summer job washing dishes in a restaurant. His early years were marked by one especially memorable event. When he was 10 years old, he went to a ceremony honoring Abraham Lincoln, the American president who had fought so hard to preserve the Union during the Civil War and had issued the proclamation that had freed slaves in the occupied Confederate states in 1863. At the ceremony, Matthew was greatly inspired by a speech given by Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and renowned orator, the longtime leading figure in the Black American community. Douglass called upon Black people to vigorously pursue educational opportunities and battle racial prejudice.
At the age of 12, the youth made his way to Baltimore, Maryland, a busy port. He went to sea as a cabin boy on the merchant ship Katie Hines, traveling to ports in China, Japan, Africa, and the Russian Arctic seas. The ship's leader, Captain Childs, took Henson under his wing and taught him to read and write.
After that, for more than 20 years, their expeditions were to the Arctic. Henson traded with the Inuit and mastered the Inuit languages; they called him Mahri-Pahluk. Stephanie Schorow (AP), "Descendant of Black man and Eskimo woman are unique" , in Daily News (Bowling Green, KY), May 17, 1992 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. He was a skilled craftsman, often coming up with solutions for what the team needed in the harsh Arctic conditions; they learned to build igloos out of snow, for mobile housing as they traveled. His and Peary's teams covered thousands of miles in dog sleds and reached the "Farthest North" point of any Arctic expedition until 1909.
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 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 proceeded to plant the American flag.
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. Others remained doubtful. A reassessment of Peary's notebook by British polar explorer Wally Herbert in 1988 found it "lacking in essential data", thus, renewing doubts about Peary's claim.
During the following decades, Admiral Peary received many honors for leading the expedition to the Pole, but Henson's contributions were largely ignored. In 1909 he was honored at dinners within the black community. Henson spent most of the next 30 years working on staff in the U.S. Customs House in New York, at the suggestion of Theodore Roosevelt.
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."Vote Grants Medals to Peary Aides", New York Times, January 20, 1944. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored Henson before he died in 1955."President Greets Last Survivor of Peary Arctic Dash", New York Times, April 7, 1954.
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.
During the extended expeditions to Greenland, Henson and Peary both took Inuit women as "Concubinage" 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. After 1909, Henson never saw Akatingwah or his son again; other explorers sometimes updated him about them. 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. People: "Dr. S. Allen Counter" , Intercultural Issues, 2005–2009, Harvard Foundation, Harvard University, accessed October 1, 2013. 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.Dr. S. Allen Counter, "North Pole Legacy: Black, White, and Eskimo" (1991; Invisible Cities Press, reprint 2001). 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, "Ahnahkaq [sic] Henson, 80, Dies; A Son of Explorer With Peary" , New York Times, July 12, 1987. others have moved to Sweden or the United States.
Several Inuit family members returned to Washington, D.C., in 1988 for the ceremony of reinterment of Henson and his wife Lucy at Arlington National Cemetery. Counter had petitioned President Ronald Reagan for this honor to gain recognition of Henson's contributions to Arctic exploration. Counter wrote a book about his finding Anauakaq and Kali, his research on Henson's life and contributions, historical racial relations, and the Inuits' meeting with Henson and Peary relatives in the United States, entitled North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo (1991). The material was adapted and produced as a film documentary by the same name.
Henson is believed to be a great-great-granduncle of actress Taraji P. Henson.Tucker, Neely (October 6, 2011). Henson, spent most of her summers as a child in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, a small town between Rocky Mount and Roanoke Rapids. It is about an hour and a half from Raleigh, North Carolina and 45 mins from the Virginia state line. "The real Taraji Henson" . The Washington Post.
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