Matthew Henson, a Maryland-born sailor with little formal schooling, became the most experienced member of Robert E. Peary’s Arctic expeditions, mastering the language and survival skills of the Inuit on whom the expeditions depended. On 6 April 1909 he was one of six men in the party that Peary said had reached the North Pole — a claim still debated — yet for decades he received a small share of the recognition that went to his white commander.
At a Glance
- Born
- 8 August 1866, Nanjemoy, Charles County, Maryland
- Died
- 9 March 1955, New York, New York
- Birth name
- Matthew Alexander Henson
- Known for
- Robert Peary’s 1908–1909 North Pole expedition; A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912); reinterment at Arlington National Cemetery (1988)
- Fields
- Exploration
- Era
- Turn of the Century
Early Life
Henson was born on 8 August 1866 near Nanjemoy in Charles County, Maryland, the son of Black parents who worked as sharecroppers in the years after the Civil War. Both parents died while he was a child, and he made his way to Washington, D.C., and then to Baltimore.
At about twelve he signed on as a cabin boy aboard the merchant ship Katie Hines. He spent roughly six years at sea, sailing to ports in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the ship’s captain, who took an interest in him, taught him to read and write and to navigate. When the captain died, Henson left the sea and returned to Washington, where he took work in a hat and clothing store.
Life and Work
In November 1887, while working at B. H. Stinemetz and Sons in Washington, Henson met Robert E. Peary, a U.S. Navy civil engineer preparing to survey a canal route through Nicaragua. Peary hired him as a valet, and on the roughly seven-month survey in the Central American jungle Henson earned his employer’s confidence. Henson’s seamanship and skill with his hands made him indispensable, and in 1891 Peary took him on his first expedition to northern Greenland. Over the next eighteen years Henson accompanied Peary on seven Arctic expeditions.
Henson became the expeditions’ most capable field hand. He learned the language of the Inughuit (Polar Inuit) of northwestern Greenland, and from them learned to build and drive dogsleds, hunt, dress in furs, and build igloos — skills on which the survival of the parties depended. On the 1893–1895 expedition he helped Peary remove large iron meteorites from Cape York, later sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Expeditions in 1898–1902 and 1905–1906 failed to reach the Pole. Between voyages Henson earned his living as he could, helping to prepare Arctic exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History and, after the long expedition of 1898–1902, working for about two years as a Pullman porter. During those years Henson also fathered a son, Anauakaq, with an Inuit woman, Akatingwah; Anauakaq’s descendants in Greenland were located by the Harvard neurobiologist S. Allen Counter in 1986, and Counter later brought Anauakaq, then in his eighties, to the United States to meet his American relatives and visit his father’s grave.
The final expedition sailed from New York in July 1908 aboard the Roosevelt and wintered off Ellesmere Island. In late February 1909 sledge parties set out from Cape Columbia across the sea ice, with support teams turning back in stages until only Peary, Henson, and four Inuit men — Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah — remained. On 6 April 1909 Peary took observations and declared that they had reached the Pole. By Henson’s own account he arrived at the camp first.
The claim was immediately contested by Frederick Cook, who said he had reached the Pole in 1908; Cook’s claim has since been widely discounted. Peary’s own claim has also been questioned. Because no one else in the party could navigate, his observations were never independently confirmed, and critics have argued from his records and reported speeds that he may have fallen short. Historians and navigators continue to disagree about whether the party stood at the geographic Pole or somewhere near it. What is not in dispute is that Henson was in the party and was essential to it.
Peary received a national hero’s welcome and promotion to rear admiral. Henson, often described in the press as Peary’s servant, received little. He published A Negro Explorer at the North Pole in 1912 and lectured, but spent the next two decades working as a messenger and clerk in the U.S. Customs House in New York, retiring in 1936. He had married Eva Flint in 1891; they divorced, and in 1907 he married Lucy Ross.
“The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart. To me the trail is calling! The old trail. The trail that is always new.”
Legacy
Recognition came late. The Explorers Club admitted Henson as a member in 1937, and in 1944 Congress awarded him a medal given to members of the Peary expedition. A 1947 biography written with Bradley Robinson, Dark Companion, brought his story to a wider audience, and Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower received him at the White House. He died in New York on 9 March 1955 and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
At Counter’s urging, President Ronald Reagan approved an exception to Arlington National Cemetery’s burial rules, and on 6 April 1988, the 79th anniversary of the polar claim, Henson and his wife Lucy were reinterred at Arlington with full military honors, near the grave of Robert and Josephine Peary. His monument there shows him with the four Inuit men who shared the final march. Henson’s story is now told not as a footnote to Peary’s but as evidence of how the achievements of Black and Indigenous people were written out of the heroic age of polar exploration.
Henson’s essential role in Peary’s expeditions, and the decades before he was recognized, show how the achievements of Black and Indigenous people were written out of the heroic age of exploration. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 8 August 1866 Born near Nanjemoy, Charles County, Maryland.
- c. 1879 Goes to sea as a cabin boy on the Katie Hines.
- November 1887 Meets Robert E. Peary in Washington and joins his Nicaragua survey.
- 1891 Sails on his first Arctic expedition with Peary, to northern Greenland.
- 6 April 1909 Member of the six-man party that Peary said reached the North Pole.
- 1912 Publishes A Negro Explorer at the North Pole.
- 1937 Admitted as a member of the Explorers Club.
- 1944 Receives a congressional medal awarded to members of the Peary expedition.
- 9 March 1955 Dies in New York City.
- 6 April 1988 Reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Sources and Further Reading
- Matthew A. Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912).
- Bradley Robinson with Matthew Henson, Dark Companion (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1947).
- S. Allen Counter, North Pole Legacy: Black, White, and Eskimo (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).
- Arlington National Cemetery, “Matthew Henson.” Link
- Russell N. Carney, “Matthew Alexander Henson,” EBSCO Research Starters, 2025. Link
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