A Negro Explorer at the North Pole

Matthew Henson spent more than twenty years at Robert Peary’s side, and in this 1912 memoir he recounts the expeditions that carried them across the Greenland ice toward the North Pole. An African American explorer who learned the Inuit language, drove dog teams, and built sledges, Henson was among the small party that stood at the pole in April 1909, yet recognition long went to Peary alone. His plain, vivid narrative records the cold, the hunger, the peril of the final march, and his own indispensable role in it. Booker T. Washington supplied a foreword. It remains a rare firsthand record of Black achievement in exploration, available as a free PDF and EPUB edition.