The first person to set foot at the North Pole… Matt Henson Monday.
Matthew Alexander Henson was born August 8, 1866 in Nanjemoy, Maryland. His parents died while he was still a boy and he studied for six years at the N Street School in Washington, D.C. At the age of 12 years, he moved to Baltimore where he found employment as cabin boy under Captain Childs on the steamship Katie Hines, bound first for China. Henson traveled widely aboard the Katie Hines, proving himself not only to be a capable seaman but also a talented linguist.
Back in Washington D.C. in 1887, working as a store clerk, Henson first met Robert E. Peary, who hired him as a “body-servant“ for a surveying trip in Nicaragua. Henson showed his skill and capacity again in this new environment and his responsibilities grew in turn over the course of the trip.
Matthew Henson apparently made an impression. As Peary planned for his North Greenland Expedition in 1890, he called on Henson once again. This time they were heading North…
Henson wrote in his autobiographic account of the 1908-1909 North Pole expedition, "A Negro Explorer at the North Pole":
"There is an irresistible fascination about the regions of northernmost Grant Land that is impossible for me to describe. Having no poetry in my soul, and being somewhat hardened by years of experience in that inhospitable country, words proper to give you an idea of its unique beauty do no come to mind. Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness. It never seems broad, bright day, even in the middle of June, and the sky has different effects of the varying hours of morning and evening twilight from the first to the last peep of day… Artists have gone with us into the Arctic and I have heard them rave over the wonderful beauties of the scene, and I have seen them at work trying to reproduce some of it, with good results but with nothing like the effect of the original."
The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum
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