These are links to my
restored media articles
written about Matt Henson, available for your research
and enlightenment.
I highly recommend the 1909
George Borup letter to his
father that was subsequently
published in the New York Times.
It's a remarkable view of the
Peary expedition from one of
it's most enthusiastic members.
Borup captured the essential
details of arctic travel,
hunting, and survival.
The 1910 Boston American story
is the first, and possibly
the only, time Henson spoke of
any discord with Peary. Yet it
is not fully reliable since
Henson refutes the tone of words
attributed to him brilliantly in
a letter to Hampton's Magazine.
As Henson said - "That is all
newspaper talk" - true then
as it is today. What seems to
have occurred was that Peary
intended to camp near the Pole
but only go forward to it
without Henson; accompanied by
his 2 Eskimos.
Henson, who broke trail, had 18
years of practice playing the
favorite game of expeditions-
"How far did we travel today?"
He was exceptionally keen at
this since: 1) he broke trail,
2) he had regular feedback of
distance along the way from the
team's sextant readings, 3) the
final stretch to the Pole was
flat and smooth. When he
left Bartlett's
farthest approach Henson knew it
was some exactly 133 miles to the Pole.
By keeping track of each march
from there, he knew when it was
time to stop.
Apparently Henson learned from
the Eskimos (Boston American,
1910) that Peary was going
to stop short of the Pole, then
go on ahead without Henson. This
advantaged Peary since he would
not have to share the polar
achievement with another
American. But Matt outwitted him,
as told to
Lowell Thomas in the
1939 interview. Matt stopped to
make camp so close to the Pole
that when Peary sledged ahead
with his 2 helpers his sextant
readings proved that the Pole
was located back where Matt was
camped.
Only Peary & Henson knew
precisely what happened, but the
story that emerged was that
Henson broke trail straight to
the Pole within the limits of
accuracy of a sextant. He got
there first, he was forever the
co-discovered of the North Pole.
Peary had shouldered an enormous
burden of responsibility for the
expedition; he was a veritable
one-man band leader who did
everything from raising funds to
designing the ship Roosevelt
that made his goal possible. One
has to read his last work
Secrets of Polar Travel,
1917, to appreciate the span and
depth of his engineer's mind.
Peary was a man of singular
brilliance who combined the
skills of a mechanical engineer,
an athlete, and an iron fisted
leader. There has never been
another arctic explorer on a par
with him.
The 1909 expedition was the
masterful coordination of
talents & skills combining Capt.
Bartlett, Matt Henson, Donald
MacMillan, Peary, and an entire
village of Eskimos with huskies
that would pull a sledge until
they died of exhaustion. There
has never been anything to equal
their accomplishment. In fact,
in the 1960s a group thought
they could better Peary by
cruising to the Pole on
snowmobiles. Their disastrous
attempt made but 100 miles over
the arctic ocean before they
were beaten - declaring that
what Peary had done was
impossible.
Such naive first attempts serve
to make us appreciate why Peary
needed 18 years for his long
learning curve to find a
solution to the Polar problem.
He had to design and build a
special ship, develop equipment,
learn the food & fuel
requirements, etc. In the end it
took a small private army to
blaze the trail over a deadly
frozen ocean. It required man
and dog to exhaust themselves
traveling in wind-chills (a term
not yet invented in 1909) of 100
degrees below zero, traveling
over ice not fully frozen that
felt like a sheet of rubber, and
gradually starving as they
expended more energy than could
be replaced with food. Thus when
Peary reached his goal on April
6 he was exhausted from the
marathon physical effort, the
strain of responsibility, as
well as from the mental energies
he had focused for so long.
Henson & Peary will forever
be credited with being the
first humans to reach an axis of
the Earth. Their Inuit
descendants are proud of this
great link to the past. Henson &
Peary Inuit families still hunt,
still dog sledge in Greenland.
Their legend lives on.
V.R. March, 2009 |
