A Negro Explorer at the North Pole

by Matthew Henson

Overview

Seven times had Robert Peary and Matthew Henson attempted to reach the fabled North Pole. Seven times they failed. In 1908, following years of frustration, they gather a crew of Inuit guides and set sail from Greenland, hopeful that the eighth voyage will end in discovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9791222087689
Publisher:	The Polar Press
Publication date:	03/26/2023
Sold by:	StreetLib SRL
Format:	eBook
File size:	262 KB

About the Author

Matthew Henson (1866-1955) was an African American explorer. Born in Maryland to sharecropper parents, Henson was raised in a family of free Black Americans and spent the majority of his youth in Washington, D.C. At twelve, he left school to work as a cabin boy but soon returned home to a job as a salesclerk at a local department store. There, he met Robert Peary, an explorer who soon hired the ambitious young man as his valet. In 1891, they embarked on their first Arctic expedition, with Henson serving as a navigator and craftsman. He became an expert in Inuit survival techniques, which served their crew well on a 1908 expedition to Greenland. Together with four Inuit assistants, Peary and Henson became the first men to reach the geographic North Pole. In 1912, Henson published A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, a memoir of his life as a pioneering African American. In 1937, he became the first Black man to be made a life member of the prestigious Explorers Club. He was honored by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and was reinterred alongside his wife at Arlington National Cemetery in 1988.