Matthew Henson
The Black explorer who reached the North Pole with Peary and spent thirty years being forgotten
Matthew Henson was born in Maryland a year after the end of the American Civil War. Both parents died while he was a child, and at twelve he walked to Baltimore and talked his way onto a merchant ship as a cabin boy. The captain taught him to read and navigate. By his early twenties he was working in a Washington hat shop when a naval engineer named Robert Peary came in to buy a sun helmet and hired him as a valet for a survey in Nicaragua.
For the next two decades Henson went north with Peary again and again. He learned to speak Inuktitut fluently, which Peary never did, built and repaired the sledges, trained the dogs and hunted for the party. The Inuit who worked with the expeditions called him Mahri-Pahluk and considered him the one white man's companion who was really one of them.
On the final push in April 1909 Henson broke trail ahead of Peary, who was exhausted and had lost most of his toes to frostbite. By his own account Henson arrived at the spot first and waited. When they got home Peary was made a rear admiral; Henson was given a job as a messenger in a New York customs house, where he worked for the next thirty years.
Recognition came slowly. He was admitted to the Explorers Club in 1937, received a Congressional medal in 1944, and in 1988 was reburied at Arlington National Cemetery beside Peary.