North Pole Legacy

by S. Allen Counter

  While we may never know exactly what happened in those last days, we do know that two Americans, one black and the other white, held the United States ensign at the top of our planet long before anyone else or any other nation. And in the minds of African Americans, at least, Matthew Henson was the “Co-Discoverer of the North Pole.”

  It was a sad moment for the Eskimos when they learned that Henson and Peary would leave Greenland, never to return. Ootah later told Danish explorer Peter Freuchen:

  “If it had not been for Mahri-Pahluk, Peary might have been quite another man. Because as both of them came from far away white man’s country, there were so many things they did not understand.

  “Mahri-Pahluk was the only man from Peeuree’s land who could learn to talk our language without using his tongue like a baby. If a strange man walks during the winter when everything is dark and some meet him, and ask who is there, the American will always answer so one is glad it is dark—because it is difficult not to laugh. But Mahri-Pahluk could talk like a full-grown, intelligent person. Besides, Mahri-Pahluk showed all his days that he did not look down upon people from up here. Therefore, he wanted to learn our ways and he sure did. Nobody has ever driven dogs better than he has. And not only swing the whip . . . whenever the sled broke down, he could fix it like any of us. He could repair the harness or make new ones—and none has ever made a snowhouse [igloo] faster and better and bigger than him.

  “But Mahri-Pahluk could also sing like us, dance like us, and his mouth was always full of stories none had heard before.

  “Therefore, we liked him, and we all felt sorry when we understood that we should never see him again. . . . But we will always tell our children about him and we will sing songs about him.”12

  In contrast to Matthew Henson’s legendary status among the Polar Eskimos, his treatment in America was one of “benign neglect” at best. Few men have given so much to the honor of their country and received so little in return. When Henson returned to America after the North Pole discovery, there was, to be sure, a small level of mainstream press coverage for “Peary’s colored servant.” But the America of 1909 found it hard to accept the fact that Peary had selected a black man over his five white assistants to share in the conquest of the North Pole.

  Peary’s decision to take Henson to the Pole certainly did not help his case when he returned home to find that Frederick Cook, the former assistant turned archrival, had laid claim to having discovered the Pole a year earlier. Cook took full advantage of the honor system that governed Arctic exploration, where a man’s word regarding his achievement was accepted as fact—unless that man happened to be black, or an Eskimo. Cook’s two Eskimo companions, Etookahshoo and Ahpellah, later told Danish officials that he had taken them on a circuitous trek around the islands of northwest Canada, not to the Pole. In fact, they reported, they had never traveled beyond the sight of land during the entire trip. There is no land within four hundred miles of the North Pole. The Eskimos added that they had spent most of the year holed up in an earthen shelter in northern Canada with plenty of food stores.13

  Henson also suspected that Cook’s claims were preposterous, not just because of the Eskimos’ testimony but because of other, earlier experiences with Cook that had proved him amateurish in the serious business of Arctic exploration. Nevertheless, the conflicting claims created a personal dilemma for Henson. Cook had treated and cared for Henson in his family’s home in New York back in 1892, when the latter had temporarily lost much of his vision to snow blindness. Henson never forgot this kind gesture and for a while found it difficult to criticize Cook publicly.

  Even when several international scientific societies sided with Peary and denounced Cook as a charlatan, many people refused to accept their verdict. Some still do. Compared to the pompous, if misunderstood, Robert Peary, the charming Dr. Cook would always be a more acceptable American hero.

  Eventually, however, Peary received the recognition he sought and deserved. Most of the leading scientific organizations at home and abroad acknowledged him as the “discoverer” of the North Pole, and the National Geographic Society of Washington gave him their highest award, a special gold medal struck in his honor. Henson, on the other hand, was completely ignored by the geographic societies and other prominent mainstream groups. In fact, it must have been very painful for Henson when the National Geographic Society skipped over him and gave their second highest award, another gold medal, to the white man on Peary’s North Pole expedition who, next to Peary, got closest to the Pole. That man was Robert Bartlett, who admitted that he never got within 130 miles of the Pole.

  Yet if white America ignored Henson, black America certainly did not. By the time the expedition returned to New York City on October 2, 1909, the New York newspapers had named Matthew Henson as Peary’s American companion at the Pole. Black leaders around the country who had been following accounts of Henson’s explorations sent him telegrams and letters of congratulations for “representing his race well” and organized a celebration in his honor.

  On October 19 a group of the most prominent black American intellectuals, politicians, and religious leaders from across the country gathered at the prestigious Tuxedo Club on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan for a special dinner to honor Matthew Henson’s achievement. There, amid speeches and great fanfare, they presented their hero with a gold watch and chain. The organizers and guests of this impressive affair included Booker T. Washington; the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.; John E. Bruce, noted publisher and author; Charles W. Anderson, the highest-ranking black civil service official in New York; Judge M. W. Gibbs of Arkansas; Assistant U.S. Attorney W. H. Lewis of Boston; and many other distinguished leaders. Seldom in the nation’s history has such a collection of African-American leaders come together to honor a single person. These men were to the black American community of their day what the highest U.S. government and cultural figures were to the white community. The New York Times of October 13, 1909, reported the affair under the heading: “DINNER TO MATTHEW HENSON: Leaders among Colored Race to Give Peary’s Aide a Watch and Chain.”

  Like Peary, Henson had at last achieved his goal: recognition from the leaders of his race. He had risen from the lowly background of a sharecropper with only six grades of schooling to a permanent place in history for his contributions to polar exploration.

  Unfortunately, Henson’s fame brought him nothing in the way of material reward. In fact, after twenty-three years of service to his nation and to Peary, he found himself without a job or even the prospect of employment. No one came forward to offer the black American hero even a minor position or appointment. For a time he tried to take advantage of the public interest in polar discovery by giving lectures on his North Pole journey with Peary, during which he would challenge Cook’s claims. But Peary, fearing that the publicity would cause his adversaries to continually raise the issue of Henson’s race, restricted his lecture activities and stopped Henson from showing his own photographs publicly.14 Henson later wrote, “In my letters [to Peary] I hoped for some understanding. . . . But no reply came until I signed for a series of lectures. When I had given my first lecture I received a telegram from Commander Peary warning me not to use the pictures. At once I sat down and wrote him another long letter. He never replied to it.”15

  On October 15, 1909, Peary wrote H. L. Bridgeman, secretary of the Peary Arctic Club (which had financed his polar expeditions) and the man who had paid Henson his salary:

  “My dear Bridgeman

  I have not happened to come across the so called Henson challenge to Cook [Cook’s claim of a North Pole discovery], though I note reference to it in the papers.

  While I can only infer from these references what the challenge really is, it strikes me that anything of the kind would be unwise for three reasons. It is likely to make a fool of Henson by giving him pronounced megalomania; it will put him in a position to be tangled up and made to say anything by emissaries of the Herald [newspaper], and it w
ill introduce into this matter the race issue.”

  During much of this time, Henson was working on his own book, which he entitled A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. Peary’s agreement with members of his expeditionary team precluded the writing of memoirs or other accounts of their Arctic experiences without his approval. After a year or so, as public interest in the subject waned, Peary decided that Henson could publish his book without stirring up too much controversy, but only after Peary had first reviewed the manuscript. Henson was the only member of the 1909 team granted permission to publish an account of the historic expedition. The book was not a best-seller.

  In 1912, deeply frustrated and jobless, Henson wrote Peary to request that he use his influence to help him find a job as a “chauffeur or messenger or some other position that I could fill. . . . I am in need of work.” Peary responded by writing the secretary of the treasury to recommend Henson for a federal position that carried a lifetime pension. Securing such sinecures was a standard practice among the explorers’ fraternity, a way to reward loyal assistants by providing them a measure of long-term security. At about the same time, some of Henson’s friends and black politicians were petitioning President William Taft on his behalf for a federal appointment similar to those traditionally given to European American heroes.

  About a year later, President Taft signed an executive order granting permission to appoint Henson to “any suitable position in the classified service.” Henson was appointed “messenger” in the federal customs house in New York. He remained at the customs house until his retirement in 1937 at the age of seventy. From then until his death in 1955, he and his wife Lucy lived mainly on his small pension of about one thousand dollars a year.

  When Peary died in 1920, Henson read about it in the New York papers and, according to a friend, got up, went into his bathroom for privacy, and ran the tap water to mask the sound of his weeping. In spite of their differences of race, status, and condition, Matthew Henson and Robert Peary had become so close during their years of struggle and hardship in the Arctic that they were more like brothers than just friends.

  Peary was given a hero’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The National Geographic Society purchased a magnificent monument to mark his grave. The monument, which was conceived by Peary before he died, is a giant white granite globe mounted on a broad-based pedestal, with a bronze star marking the North Pole. On the base, beneath the globe, is the inscription “ROBERT EDWIN PEARY DISCOVERER OF THE NORTH POLE.” Inscribed on another side of the base is a Latin line from Seneca, which his daughter called “his guiding motto”: Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam (I shall find a way or make one). The monument commands its own hill in the cemetery.

  President Warren G. Harding joined hundreds of other dignitaries at the Arlington ceremony. Officials of the U.S. government have said that Henson was also invited to the burial, but he cannot be seen in any of the scores of archival photographs taken of the ceremony that day. If Henson or any other black American was present at the burial ceremony, he must have been seated far away from the official guests.

  Yet Henson was not completely forgotten. In 1937, twenty-eight years after the North Pole discovery, he was made an honorary member of the famed Explorers Club in New York City of which Peary had once been president. He was the first and for decades the only black African American so recognized by the club. In 1946, he received a medal from the U.S. Navy in recognition of his contributions to the North Pole discovery. The same medal was given to all members of Peary’s 1909 expedition and did not single Henson out for reaching the Pole. Also, Morgan State College in Baltimore and Howard University of Washington, D.C., two predominantly African-American institutions, awarded him honorary master’s degrees. Dillard College of New Orleans, to whom he gave the Eskimo clothing he wore at the North Pole, named a hall after him.

  By his own account, however, his most prized possession was the gold medal he received from the Chicago Geographical Society. The Chicago award was the work of Henson’s old friend Donald B. MacMillan and Comdr. Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., president of the Zenith Radio Corporation and a longtime admirer. To Henson, this medal represented the ultimate tribute to an explorer: recognition by a geographic society. For the entire forty-six years between the discovery of the Pole and his death, he was virtually ignored by the National Geographic Society, a group that had honored and paid numerous tributes to Peary and the other white men on the North Pole expedition.

  In 1948 Matthew Henson was “rediscovered” by mainstream America when author Bradley Robinson wrote a biography titled Dark Companion. This marked the first time Americans were given a true picture of the role Henson played in the polar discoveries of Robert Peary. Robinson, the liberal son of a member of the Explorers Club, decided to write Henson’s story after learning of his crucial role in the conquest of the Pole through extensive interviews and research. Published at a time when American racial attitudes were becoming more enlightened, the book was well reviewed and became a big seller. Henson, now in his eighties, suddenly found himself the object of much attention. Newspapers and magazines interviewed him, and he made guest appearances on radio. He talked about his years in the Arctic and his contributions to the North Pole discovery. Although he had little contact with the Peary family after the admiral’s death and felt bitter about the way they had ignored him, he never spoke disparagingly about his old comrade. Throughout his life he would remain faithful to Peary’s memory and to their friendship, traveling nearly every year to Arlington Cemetery to place a wreath at Peary’s grave.

  Matthew Henson died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 9, 1955, at the age of eighty-eight. Thousands turned out for the funeral five days later at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., conducted the memorial service. In his eulogy, Powell told Henson’s widow Lucy and the large funeral gathering that the “achievements of Henson are as important as those performed by Marco Polo and Ferdinand Magellan.” His pallbearers included Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and other members of the Explorers Club.16

  No geographic society or Arctic club or any other group offered to help bury Henson among other American heroes in Arlington National Cemetery. With only a modest, fixed income to draw on, Lucy Henson buried her husband on top of her mother, Susan Ross, in the small plot they owned in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

  Matthew Alexander Henson (1909). Courtesy of the Explorers Club

  Comdr. Robert Edwin Peary in full Aŕctic gear (c. 1909). Peary Collection, National Archives

  Matthew Henson aboard Peary’s ship, the USS Roosevelt. This photograph is believed to have been taken in March 1909, shortly before Henson and Peary launched their final assault on the North Pole. Courtesy of Johnson Publishing Co.

  Ahlikasingwah and her baby, Kali, the younger of Robert Peary’s two Amer-Eskimo sons (c. 1907). From My Attainment of the Pole by Frederick Cook

  Akatingwah carrying a baby believed to be Matthew Henson’s son, Anaukaq (c. 1907). Peary Collection, National Archives

  Navy lieutenant Peary and his daughter Marie Ahnighito Peary (c. 1899). Peary Collection, National Archives

  Taking a break from cleaning a fresh supply of fish, members of Peary’s expeditionary team pose alongside their ship, the Kite, en route to northwest Greenland in 1891. Peary Collection, National Archives

  Matthew Henson (front row, center) and a group of Polar Eskimo villagers (c. 1900). Deeply interested in the ways of the native population, Henson was the only member of Peary’s expeditionary teams who learned to speak the Inuit language. Courtesy of the Explorers Club

  The 1891 North Greenland Expedition. Left to right: Frederick Cook, Matthew Henson, John M. Verhoeff, Eivind Astrup, Josephine Peary, Lt. Robert E. Peary, Langdon Gibson. Peary Collection, National Archives

  Portraits of the members of the 1891 expedition as they appeared in Robert Peary’s book, Northward over the “Great Ice.” What is perhaps most noteworthy about the arrangemen
t of the photographs is the implicitly equal status that Peary accorded to Henson.

  Dozens of sled dogs crowd the deck of the USS Roosevelt as it steams toward Cape Sheridan, the staging point for the historic 1909 assault on the North Pole. Courtesy of the National Geographic Society

  Matthew Henson and Polar Eskimos repair a sled used to transport food, supplies, and scientific equipment during the 1909 polar journey. Courtesy of the Explorers Club

  Particularly during the early stages of the 1909 expedition, the rugged Arctic surface caused repeated delays. Here, members of the team struggle to pull their supply sleds over a small ridge of jagged ice. Courtesy of the National Geographic Society

  Matthew Henson (center) and four Polar Eskimos at the North Pole, April 6, 1909. This photograph was taken by Comdr. Robert E. Peary. Courtesy of the National Geographic Society