A Negro Explorer at the North Pole

In 1909, a Black man from Maryland stood at the northernmost point on Earth. Matthew Henson had crossed ice fields and survived Arctic winters that had killed stronger men, not because the world believed in him, but in spite of it. Born to sharecroppers in the shadow of the Civil War, Henson met Commander Robert Peary in a Washington department store and spent eighteen years accompanying him on expeditions into the frozen unknown. Seven times they failed. On the eighth attempt, Henson was the first to plant the American flag at what they believed was the North Pole. This memoir, published in 1912, tells that story in Henson\'s own words: the brutal cold, the starving dogs, the Inuit guides who became his family, and the quiet dignity of a man who had to be twice as good to be half as acknowledged. Henson never complained about the racism that shadowed his achievements. He simply recorded what he did, and let history decide what that was worth. A remarkable document of American ambition, of Black achievement against impossible odds, and of one man's refusal to be erased.