When Commander Robert Peary ordered his team to make camp on April 6, 1909, he was not entirely certain that he had reached his objective. On his final expedition to the North Pole, the challenges of Arctic exploration were exacerbated by the complexities of terrestrial navigation.
Though history (initially) gave credit to Peary for being the first person to reach Earth’s northernmost point, one invaluable member of Peary’s party was long overlooked in the record books: a Black explorer from Baltimore named Matthew Alexander Henson.
Exhausted from weeks of travel across the stark expanse of the polar ice cap, Peary had struggled to recover after the shock of plunging into the frigid open water of a sudden fissure the day before. Undaunted, the team that included four Inuit hunters named Ooqueah, Ootah, Egingwah, and Seegloo pressed forward. Henson had also fallen in.
“Faithful old Ootah grabbed me by the nape of the neck, the same as he would have grabbed a dog,” Henson wrote in his memoir A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. “And with one hand he pulled me out of the water, and with the other hurried the team across.”
Perhaps in the confusion of enthusiasm for being so close to their goal, the team traveled north at a frantic pace for several more miles. As Peary struggled in the rear, they finally stopped for the night. “The Commander, who was about fifty yards behind, called out to me and said we would go into camp,” Henson wrote.
With just a few hours of sleep to regain his strength, on the morning of April 7, Peary made careful measurements to determine their exact location.
Peary’s claim of reaching the pole eventually fell under scrutiny. In fact, by the 1980s, even one of Peary’s financial backers, the National Geographic Society, determined Peary’s team may have fallen short in their goal.
Still, if Peary and his party did plant their flag at the North Pole, as they believe, which member of the team arrived there first? Some records suggest it would have been Henson.