As the globe shrank and railroaded steam and rail at the turn of the 20th century, the race was on for the last great prizes of exploration, and for the world's rapidly diminishing list of untouched extremes, the geographic North Pole was at the top, literally and figuratively.
The first to reach the pole will guarantee undying glory and fame, not to mention great financial rewards. The stage is set for drama and a cast of larger-than-life characters is assembled, but no one can anticipate the plot twists and (still) unresolved controversy that will unfold. Central to the story was Matthew Henson, although he is rarely cited by name. Born in Maryland to a family of free black farmers a year into the Civil War, Henson became a first-rate world explorer at a time when African Americans faced intolerable social restrictions.
Fleeing racial violence when he was still an infant, Henson's family sold his farm and settled in Washington, DC. Henson's parents died when he was a boy, and by the age of 13 the uncle left in his care could no longer afford him. Keep it. For a time, Henson worked and slept in a restaurant. One of the regulars was an old sailor named Baltimore Jack, whose stories sparked Henson's wanderlust. Walked 40 miles to Baltimore, talked to a dock as a cabin boy on a schooner Katie Haynes. Henson spent the next six years at sea, traveling Europe and North Africa and calling ports in China, Japan, the Philippines, and the Russian Arctic. The ship's captain took Henson under his wing and taught him the art of sailing in addition to the traditional academic subjects. His natural instincts and aptitude revealed through these lessons would prove invaluable in the next phase of his life.
After Captain Childs dies at sea, Henson returns to Washington and takes a job as a clerk in a gentleman's clothing store. One spring day in 1887, a dapper young naval officer, in search of a sunhelmet, stopped by for an expedition to Nicaragua, where he was tasked with surveying a suitable route for the transcontinental canal.
It was Robert E. Perry is a tough and ambitious man, driven to make his name as an explorer of faraway lands, and totally unencumbered by the reality that the indigenous peoples have lived for centuries in many of the places he sets out to discover. However, Perry's surveying skill and relentless self-promotion earned him interesting assignments from the Naval Corps of Civil Engineers. The Nicaraguan template included an allowance for valet parking, and the store owner recommended 20-year-old Henson, whose unusual resume combined the skills of an able sailor with a fleeting knowledge of fine men's clothing. Perry offered him the job at once, beginning an unlikely partnership that would span nearly 30 years and bring both men farther north than anyone had ever gone—perhaps even as far as the Pole itself.
Matthew Henson in Inuit fur. Wikimedia Commons
Henson was ambitious in his own way, and during his two years in Nicaragua he graduated from Perry's valet to his most trusted assistant surveyor. Peary kept himself apart from Henson, but as they sailed home from the tropics, he and Henson shared his dream of exploring the high Arctic and asked him to join him on his next expedition to Greenland, in 1891 and 1892.
In Greenland, Henson learned to drive a sled and handle dogs in the manner of the Inuit and began to learn their language, a difficult tongue which he would master on five subsequent expeditions. Traveling with the mission surgeon d. Frederick Cook and two other Americans, Henson and Peary, explored the Greenland Ice Sheet, where Henson once again proved indispensable. "He's a better dog driver and can handle a sled better than any man who lived, except some of the best Eskimo hunters themselves," said Perry.
After a barn tour that raised about $20,000 (Perry's lectures culminated with Henson leading a dog team on stage) they returned to Greenland in 1893 with a well-supplied team of 13, but their run was aborted the following spring after only 125 miles. They spent the rest of the season caching supplies on the ice for a tryout the following year. Only Henson, Perry, and Hugh Lee remained in that ordeal, an 86-day ordeal that ended with Henson and Perry Lee dragging the last few miles on a sled piled high with the carcasses of dogs they had killed for food.
In 1898 they returned with a new goal - the pole itself. They remained in the Arctic until 1902 and made several attempts, each of which was thwarted in various ways: an unstable ice pack, shortages of supplies, and in the worst failure, the death of six fellow Inuit. In 1905, Henson and Perry set out again with a new icebreaker ship named after US President and major explorer Teddy Roosevelt. The ship made it possible to get ever closer to the North Pole by sea, to the northern tip of Ellesmere Island at 83 ° north latitude. In the spring of 1906, they pushed north through the sea ice but stopped far from the pole. Upon their return, Perry claimed a new "far north" of 87°06'. This record, like many of Perry's claims, has been in dispute ever since (an entry in his diary placed the party 36 miles south, at 86°30'). But it was enough to secure funds for another expedition.
Donald Baxter Macmillan, George Borup, Thomas Jocho and Henson pose for a photo on the ship Roosevelt. Wikimedia Commons.
While sailing north in the summer of 1908, Perry told Henson that this would be his last attempt at the pole. The famous explorer was 52 and feeling his age. He would depend more than ever on Henson, who was ten years his junior and at the height of skill and experience. They sailed as far north as possible and covered the winter in ice, using the time to prepare for their final journey. They left little to chance, with a major expedition drawing heavily on Inuit work and knowledge. according to National Geographic appearance From Henson, Roosevelt's collection included 22 Inuit men, 17 Inuit women, 10 children, 246 dogs, 70 tons of Labrador whale meat, the meat and blubber of 50 walruses, hunting gear, and tons of coal. Also on board were seven Americans, all experienced explorers, but only one of them—Henson—had any facilities in the Inuit language. He was indispensable, not only for his friendly relations with the Inuit, but also for his vast experience, skills in building sled dogs, training men, and handling dogs. Perry didn't travel light, and Henson made it all work.
When the pressure for the pole came, the members broke into small teams that leapt off one another, pushing forward to leave supplies and their stronger dogs for the next group. Henson was a frequent captain, reliable to get around well. One by one, each team would drop out, finally leaving Perry and a select group to make the final attempt at the North Pole. Obviously, the final was the Tour of Glory - dangerous and difficult, to be sure - but the most coveted situation is the same. Berry made his intentions clear. He said, “Henson has to go all the way. I can't get there without him.”
The final stop was 174 miles away. Henson and Berry pressed on with four Inuit men, Ota, Igingwa, Siglow, and Okeh. Bob Bartlett, the Roosevelt captain who led the last relay, estimated that the group would need eight days to cover the distance. They did it in five, stopping only briefly to rest and feed the dogs. Even after an exhausted Berry is forced onto one of the sleds, they crack him up.
The Polar Party, April 7, 1909. From left: Ooqueh, Ootah, Henson, Egingwah, Seeglo. Photo by Robert Peary, Wikimedia Commons.
Henson was almost always at the front of the pole, breaking through the lane. On April 6, 1909, Henson stopped at what he believed to be the pole, then backed off a short distance. When Perry arrived 45 minutes later, Henson told him, "I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world." Berry stew. He had ordered Henson to stop and wait for him to reach the pole. "Oh, he was jumping crazy," Henson recalled years later.
Peary sighted the sextant and decided to camp within three miles of the pole, then planted the stars and stripes on top of his igloo. Of that moment, Henson wrote, "As the flag blew and flew with the wind, I felt great joy and elation. Another world had been done and accomplished, and, as in the past, from the beginning of history, wherever the work of the world was by a white man, it was accompanied by a colored man."
Within minutes, they were all fast asleep. Perry woke up four hours later and wrote on loose paper, "Pole at last!!!" Then, without waking Henson, he skied 10 miles north and took another set of notes which, he said, showed him he was beyond the pole. Tensions between the two men boiled over as they pushed south towards the safety of the land. "Since we knew we were at the pole," Henson later wrote, "Captain Peary seldom spoke to me." "It almost broke my heart...that he would get up in the morning and run off the drive home without even knocking the ice for me, as was the custom."
When they reached Ellesmere after a 17-day return march, they were met with terrible news. Dr. Frederick Cook, a surgeon on two of his previous expeditions to Greenland, claimed to have reached the pole almost a year earlier, on April 21, 1908.
Cook had left Greenland for the pole in February 1908 with two Inuit companions, and reappeared 14 months later with a whale from Tale. Cook's story—which broke in the papers just a week before Peary announced his conquest of the pole to the world's media—was that a thaw left the party stranded on the uninhabited island of Devon, where they had waited nearly a year for the sea ice to return. They can go back to Greenland. Henson didn't believe it for a minute. He knew Cook well, considering him "not fit for a hard day's work. In fact he is not up to average." Henson quickly tracked down the two Inuit teens who were with Cook. They said they never ventured more than a few miles of land.
Cook's tale unraveled in rather startling fashion, and in the hype surrounding him, it turns out he also faked a photo of himself atop a mountain. McKinley. That news prompted a sourdough crew to climb the summit in 1910 and Reclaim Alaska's honor. Cook later went into the oil business in Oklahoma and was imprisoned for mail fraud. Even so, he has his defenders.
When the competing claims of Cook and Peary were broadcast in newspapers around the world, most veered to Peary's side. At the time, few doubted that Peary and Henson had reached the pole, although researchers in the 1980s concluded that they may have missed the pole by about 60 miles. That study, by British explorer Polar Wally Herbert, prompted a push New York times to issue a noticeable correction 79 years after Perry's claim splashed across its front page (File times He paid Perry $4,000 for the exclusive rights to his story.) Steiger's investigation was commissioned by the National Geographic Society and published in their journal, but was not satisfied with its conclusions. The Society has supported Perry from the start and is in no mood to stop. They commissioned a new study the following year, confirming Perry's claim.
To this day, a review of five sources will likely result in five different opinions - each with its own body of evidence. What we can say for sure is that Roald Amundsen first flew over the North Pole in 1926 in a speedboat, making him the first person to reach both poles. The first to get there over the ice was the snowmobile Ralph Plastead who did it in 1968 on a bet. Wally Herbert was the first to reach the pole by dog sled - the one from Perry's debunking study - in 1969.
While many believe that Perry knowingly falsified his commute records, there is no evidence that Henson was in it. Nor is there any question of the wit, skill, wit, and enthusiasm he brought to all of his explorations. However, while Berry was publicly praised, given a life pension and made a fortune on the lecture circuit, Henson quietly went to work as a civil servant. It was not until 1937 that Henson's contributions were honored with membership in the famous Explorer's Club in New York City. In 1944, Congress gave Henson a replica of the same medal it had awarded to Perry in 1909.
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