North Pole Legacy

by S. Allen Counter

  A terse letter that Eva wrote to Robert Peary in June 1896 reflects the lack of communication between Henson and his wife as well as Eva’s growing impatience.

  Dear Sir,

  I hear you are going to Greenland again. Will you please inform me when you expect to go and how long you are going to stay and oblige yours truly

  Mrs. Eva Henson

  1240 Rodman St,

  Phila. Pa

  p.s.

  as Matt says he is going with you again.

  Henson later accused his wife of infidelity in his absence. She and her family in turn accused him of negligence. The relationship became so bitter that Henson wrote Peary on April 5, 1897, saying that he would like to stay in Greenland “for five or ten years . . . anything to get away from this town.”

  Peary and Henson returned to Greenland that summer to collect the last and largest of the Inuit’s sacred meteorites, which the Eskimos called “The Woman.” When they returned to the United States in October 1897, Eva requested a divorce. Henson agreed, and their relationship ended that year.

  The years between 1897 and 1902 were the toughest for Henson and Peary. Determined to reach the North Pole, they remained in the Arctic for four uninterrupted years of exploration. During this time they developed the first map of the northern boundaries of Greenland and for the first time traveled out on the Arctic Ocean, reaching a record 84° 17′ north. But they did not attain their goal.

  In the summer of 1900, Josephine Peary made an unplanned visit to the Thule area aboard a relief ship. To her utter surprise, she found Ahlikahsingwah with a part-white baby that was said to be Peary’s. It was probably Anaukaq-Hammy, Robert Peary’s first-born Amer-Eskimo son. A woman of great stoicism and devotion to her husband, Josephine accepted the painful reality of the child and kept her marriage intact.

  From 1902, when the expedition returned to the United States until 1905, Matthew Henson worked at a variety of odd jobs, first as a porter on the New York Central Railroad and later as a janitor in New York City. Although the cross-country train rides appealed to his love of travel, and his work in New York kept him close to friends, Henson could find little satisfaction in the mundane routines of workaday life. At one point he did seek a job with his old employer, the American Museum of Natural History, but he was unsuccessful. He could only find work as a janitor.

  In the summer of 1905 Henson and now “Commander” Peary returned to the Arctic, where they undertook preparations for their historic spring 1906 assault on the North Pole. Though they managed to get as far as 87° 6′ north, a new record, delays at open water and dwindling food supplies forced them to turn back about one hundred miles short of their goal. The failure of the expedition crushed both men. Peary, at age fifty, and Henson, forty, knew they were getting too old for the rigors of Arctic work. They also knew that the public was becoming less interested in and tolerant of their misadventures.

  Returning to New York in the late fall of 1906 on the badly damaged Roosevelt, Peary and Henson agreed to make one final attempt to reach the North Pole the following year. Peary then set out to raise money for the expedition while Henson remained on the docked ship, directing repairs and readying equipment. It was during this period that Henson proposed to Lucy Jane Ross, whom he had been courting for two years while he was a tenant at her mother’s house on West 35th Street. Not long before the Roosevelt set sail for the last time, Matthew and Lucy were married in a quiet ceremony, with only Lucy’s mother and a few friends present.

  On June 21, 1908, Henson wrote to Peary.

  Mr. Peary, Dear Sir

  I am going to ask you for a raise in wages as I think that 40 dollars a month is rather small to maintain a family. I have never asked you before as I did not have any encumbrance. I would like to have sixty dollars a month if that is not asking too much of you.

  Respt.

  M.A. Henson

  Peary split the difference and agreed to pay Henson “$50 a month and keep.” In the interest of the greater mission, Henson accepted.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Struggle for the Pole

  On July 6, 1908, after a year’s delay for repairs to the USS Roosevelt and amid much fanfare, Henson and Peary departed New York for a final attempt at the Pole. President Theodore Roosevelt was on hand to see the men off, declaring that if any man could succeed, it would be Peary. This time Peary had his finest hand-picked team: Dr. John W. Goodsell, a physician from Pennsylvania; Donald B. MacMillan, an instructor of mathematics and physical training at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts; Ross G. Marvin, professor of engineering at Cornell University; George Borup, a recent graduate of Groton and Yale and an outstanding athlete; Robert Bartlett, the ship’s captain; and Matthew Henson, the most experienced Arctic explorer in the group other than Peary.

  By the first week of August the expedition had reached Etah, where they took on Eskimo helpers and collected enough coal and freshly killed seal, walrus, and narwhal to last through the winter. The Roosevelt then headed farther north, struggling against the barriers of Kennedy and Robeson channels like a modern icebreaker, finally reaching its destination—Cape Sheridan on the northernmost tip of Ellesmere Island, Canada—on September 5, 1908. There the expeditionary team disembarked and prepared for the relay assault on the Pole. Henson and the other men were busy all winter, hunting for musk-ox, deer, and arctic hare, and readying the equipment for the journey north. Team member Donald B. MacMillan would later say that Henson, “with years of experience equal to that of Peary himself, was indispensable to Peary and of more real value than the combined services of all four white men. . . . He made all the sledges, he made all the camp equipment, he talked the language like a native.”1

  On February 18, 1909, Henson, accompanied by a group of Eskimos and laden with supplies, left the Roosevelt for Cape Columbia, which had been selected as the jumping-off point for the strike at the Pole. When they reached the tip of the cape, Henson and the Eskimos set about building several large igloos that would serve as a base camp. Then they waited until the entire team could be assembled at “Crane City,” as the encampment was named.

  On the morning of March 1, 1909, Peary ordered Henson and three Eskimos to take the lead in breaking the trail north to the Pole. For an entire month the Americans and their Eskimo assistants acted as relay teams, setting up caches of supplies along the trail that would support the journey to the Pole and back. Henson and Bartlett did most of the trailbreaking, with Peary’s and Marvin’s sled teams following.

  The American members of the team knew that they could not all accompany Peary to the Pole. Eventually someone would be selected to make the final leg of the journey, and the choice would be made by Peary alone. Donald MacMillan would later say that Peary had remarked to him before they even left the ship that “Henson must go all the way. I can’t make it without him.”2

  There were, of course, a variety of considerations weighing in Henson’s favor, beginning with his uncommon skills and long experience as an Arctic explorer. For twenty years he had used his talents to support Peary’s ventures, proving his loyalty time and again. He knew Peary better, perhaps, than any man living: his likes and his dislikes, his virtues as well as his idiosyncrasies. He also shared one of Peary’s most intimate secrets, knowledge of the children Peary had fathered with the Eskimo woman Ahlikahsingwah. Henson and Peary undoubtedly saw their Amer-Eskimo sons when they returned to Etah in 1908, but Henson never breathed a word of this in public, then or ever.

  No matter how much he may have deserved the honor of sharing in the discovery of the North Pole, however, Henson himself did not count on it. He remembered that on the historic march across Greenland in 1895, when he had literally saved the lives of Peary and Hugh Lee, Peary had promised both men that they would be with him if he ever reached the Pole. Now there was no Lee, only Henson. But as Henson well knew, even if Peary still intended to keep that pledge, any decision was subject to change out on the treacherous and unforgiving polar ice. Inj
ury, illness, anxiety, or a dozen other things could force a complete rearrangement of even the best-laid plans.

  MacMillan and Goodsell were the first to turn back, after ferrying supplies to 84° 29′. MacMillan most likely would have been permitted to travel farther north, but he had injured his heel. Borup and his Eskimo assistants took the next leg, to 85° 23′, then returned to the ship behind MacMillan and Goodsell.

  The ranks of the expeditionary team were thinned further on March 27, when Peary ordered Marvin back after reaching 86° 30′ north. At that moment, Henson later recalled, his “heart stopped palpitating, I breathed easier, and my mind was relieved. It was not my turn yet, I was to continue onward and there only remained one person between me and the Pole—the Captain [Bartlett].” In keeping with his reputation for being a gentleman, Henson “went over to Marvin’s igloo to bid him good-by.” According to Henson, “In his quiet, earnest manner, he [Marvin] advised me to keep on, and hoped for our success; he congratulated me and we gave each other the strong fraternal grip of our honored fraternity and we confidently expected to see each other again at the ship.”3

  Unfortunately, the anticipated reunion would never take place. Marvin’s two Eskimo companions, Kudlooktoo and “Harrigan” (a nickname given Inighito by Peary’s group because of his frequent attempts to sing the popular song of the same name), returned to the ship without Marvin, saying that he had fallen through thin ice and drowned out on the Arctic Ocean. Henson, the only man aboard the ship who could speak their language well enough to interrogate them, believed their plausible story. Some years later, however, it was learned during a confession at a Christian confirmation that Marvin had been killed on the return march when he apparently became emotionally distressed after suffering a seriously frostbitten foot and threatened Kudlooktoo and Harrigan for not carrying him on the sled.

  The version of the story told among the Polar Eskimos today is that Marvin treated their people brutally and even tried to get Harrigan, the younger of his two companions, to leave Kudlooktoo behind on the ice when their food ran low. Rather than leave his fellow Eskimo out to die, Harrigan shot and killed Marvin, and the two men buried his body under the snow and ice. It is ironic that both Peary and Henson (who knew the tribe even better) had always described the Polar Eskimos as an innocent, childlike people who were incapable of violence. Yet as early as their first expedition in 1891, they had encountered the threat of violence from some of the natives. It is even more ironic that the only other violent incident recorded on the entire North Pole expedition of 1909 occurred aboard ship during the tense months they wintered in Cape Sheridan, waiting for the spring journey to the Pole. This incident involved Harrigan, who was severely beaten by one of the more irascible members of Peary’s crew who had tired of his “practical jokes.” Harrigan protested this physical assault to Peary, but he and his men laughed the matter off and gave the angered Eskimo a cloth shirt to calm him down and make him forget the incident. Apparently, he did not forget about it. He had learned his violence well from the kahdonah.

  Bartlett broke camp on March 27, and Henson followed about an hour later. After six days of “marches” over treacherous ice, each involving up to fourteen hours of travel from start to rest, the group reached 87° 46′ 49″ north. It was at this latitude, on April 1, that Henson learned for certain that he had gotten the call. Peary ordered Bartlett back to the ship, leaving Henson as the only other American on the final leg of the historic journey. Recalling the occasion, Henson wrote: “I knew at this time that he was to go back, and that I was to continue, so I had no misgivings and neither had he.”4 Bartlett would later say, however, “I don’t deny that it would have been a great thrill to have stood at the peak of our globe. . . . It was a bitter disappointment. I don’t know, perhaps I cried a little. But . . . Henson was a better dog driver than I.”5 As a kind of consolation prize, Peary let Bartlett travel on five or six miles to 88° north, putting him farther north than any other European explorer had traveled. Peary later explained his decision by saying that “in view of the noble work of Great Britain in artic exploration, a British subject [Bartlett was a Canadian from Nova Scotia] should, next to an American, be able to say that he had stood nearest the Pole.”6 Henson recollected that “Captain Bartlett was glad to turn back when he did. He frankly told me several times that he had little expectation of ever returning alive.”7

  Under pressure to defend his choice of Henson, Peary later wrote that “Henson was the best man I had with me for this kind of work, with the exception of the Eskimos.” At the same time, however, he undercut that explanation by asserting that “Henson . . . would not have been so competent as the white members of the expedition in getting himself and his party back to land” because “he had not as a racial inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett or Marvin, MacMillan or Borup. . . . I owed it to him not to subject him to the dangers and responsibilities which he was temperamentally unfit to face.”8

  What prompted Peary to offer such a fundamentally racist rationale for his decision? Did Peary really believe that the man who had spent close to twenty years traveling around the Arctic with him could not find his way back to land—the man who had brought him home safely so many times before? And what about the Eskimos? Did their “racial inheritance” preclude them, too, from following the trail back home on their own?

  Perhaps Peary simply intended to mollify those critics who derided his choice of a black man as codiscoverer of the North Pole. Some have speculated that an editor or ghostwriter inserted the statement to make Peary’s decision more palatable to the reading public. Still others have suggested that the reason Peary chose Henson in the first place was because he knew a black man would never be accorded equal recognition for discovery of the North Pole. The implicit, though glaring, racism of his subsequent explanation was thus consistent with his intentions.9

  Whatever one may conclude about Peary’s rationale for his decision, his reasons at the time were clear to every man on the expedition, including the Eskimos. As MacMillan, who later became a famous Arctic explorer in his own right, wrote in a 1920 article for National Geographic: “And the Negro? . . . With years of experience equal to that of Peary himself . . . clean, full of grit, he went to the Pole with Peary because he was easily the most efficient of all Peary’s assistants.”10

  After Bartlett and his Eskimo team turned back, Henson, Peary, and four Eskimos—Ootah, Seegloo, Egingwah, and Ooqueah—were all left alone on the frozen Arctic Ocean, more than three hundred miles from land and more than one hundred miles from the Pole. For the next five days they raced toward their goal, rarely sleeping, and stopping only long enough for Peary to take readings on his chronometer-watch and sextant and to make depth soundings through the Arctic ice. His calculations confirmed those of Henson who, knowing the distance and direction they had to travel and the average distance covered per march, judged from dead reckoning that they were heading in a straight line toward the Pole.

  The almost reckless pace of the final thrust toward the Pole was dictated as much by fear as by anticipation. The men knew that they could freeze to death, that they could fall through the thin ice at any moment and drown or die of hypothermia. Perhaps most terrifying of all, they faced the possibility that a large lane of water would open like a river and leave them stranded on the other side to starve to death.

  What happened during the last few days is a matter of some dispute. Peary reported that it was he who broke trail and reached the Pole first. Yet after the expedition returned to the United States, Henson said that it was he, Ootah, and Seegloo who first reached the point they later determined to be the North Pole. In fact, Henson maintained that he reached the Pole some forty-five minutes ahead of Peary after inadvertently disobeying the commander’s orders to stop short of what they judged to be the actual spot. There he was to wait so that Peary could travel on alone and lay claim to the honor of being the first person to stand at the North Pole.

  According to Hens
on, Peary became so angry with him for denying him this long-awaited privilege that he refused to speak to him all the way back to the ship. “It was my boy Ootah who disclosed to me that Peary was to leave me behind in the final few miles of the Pole,” Henson recalled, and with Egingwah he witnessed “the disappointment of Commander Peary when a few miles from camp, his observations told the lieutenant that he had overstepped and gone past the Pole, which we had reached the night before. Our camp itself was practically situated at the ‘top of the earth.’ For the crime of being present when the Pole was reached Commander Peary has ignored me ever since. . . . It nearly broke my heart on the return journey from the Pole that he would rise in the morning and slip away on the homeward trail without rapping on the tent for me as was the established custom. . . . On board ship, he addressed me a very few times. When we left the ship he did not speak. I wrote him twice and sent him a telegram, but received no reply from him.”11

  After studying the personality of both men from documents spanning some fifty years, I would not be surprised if the aggressive and self-assured Henson deliberately charged ahead to beat his old friend and boss to the Pole. Henson might well have reasoned that since he and Peary lived in separate worlds back home anyway, why should he not go for the glory that would be known only among his race back in the segregated America of 1909? After all, this was clearly their last polar expedition. Moreover, at that moment—and for the first time in their twenty-three-year relationship—they were equals. It was no longer them against the world. It was man to man. Peary was crippled and weak. He had lost all but two of his toes to severe frostbite some years earlier and found walking very difficult, especially on the jagged ice trail. He later admitted, in fact, that he had traveled the last hundred miles of the expedition on a sled driven by his Eskimo assistants. Henson, on the other hand, traveled on foot with the Eskimos all the way to the Pole, driving the sled with all the scientific equipment. Ironically, while one of the prevailing “scientific” theories of that period held that dark-skinned people could not tolerate the Arctic climate and conditions, Henson never suffered a permanent injury in all his years in the Arctic.