Matthew Henson and the Start of His Adventures

As a young man, Matthew Henson boarded his first ship, the Katie Hines, working as a cabin boy. The ship was headed for China as part of the China trade. Once he returned from his first voyage he continued to work as "an able-bodied seaman" sailing to North Africa, Spain, France, Manila and Japan. Upon Henson's return to Washington, D.C. from a voyage in 1888, he met Robert E. Peary while working in a hat shop. Elysa Engelman romanticizes Henson's life before meeting Peary as working for a fur storage company, when in Henson's own account in A Negro at the North Pole, he places their initial meeting in a hat shop.

During this meeting, Peary asked Henson to join him on his next expedition to Nicaragua as his personal servant because as Floyd Miller states in his book Ahdoolo! The Biography of Matthew Henson, Peary "observed a quiet dignity" about Henson. The relationship between the two men was a lasting one, through twenty-two years of expeditions to and from the Arctic the pair were together for the final march of the North Pole Expedition. Unfortunately it would be many years before the world would know how much Henson did on the last march.



Image Caption: This photograph titled "Mat. Henson, of Peary crew, on boat deck with unidentified crew member" appears to have been taken on the Roosevelt in 1906 by a photographer from the Bain News Service, courtesy of the Library of Congress.