True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  But the heart-warming outcome cannot obscure the weight of phoney histories and racial expectations that bore down on the expedition. Again and again peculiarly charged incidents occurred. There was the discovery of a white man left behind in Greenland by Peary’s rival Dr Frederick Cook, squalid and demoralised, the very image of the danger involved in ‘reverting’ to the primitive. Mister Kurtz, he alive. There was the adoption and ‘uplifting’ of a favoured Eskimo child by the ship’s company. Henson wrote:

  After this boy was washed and scrubbed by me, his long hair cut short, and his greasy, dirty clothes of skins and furs burned, a new suit made of odds and ends collected from different wardrobes on the ship made him a presentable Young American. I was proud of him, and he of me. He learned to speak English and slept underneath my bunk.

  Most of all, subtly disruptive of the vested interpretation of polar exploration, as later hostile commentary made clear, there was the suggestive presence of Henson himself. He was trusted implicitly by Peary, who had no time at least for the racial nostrum about black susceptibility to cold; he was liked by the other white team members, who never resented his selection for the final dash to the Pole (‘he was a better man than any one of us’, wrote Donald MacMillan); in dealings with the Inuit he spoke with full American authority, and acted as a patron to them in his own right. ‘My boy Ootah’, he calls one of the four hunters who accompanied him and Peary at the last, although Ootah was ‘a married man, of about thirty-four years’ – transferring a Southern mode of address to a different racial relationship. And yet, in some senses, Henson clearly occupied a position between whites and Inuit. His chief value to Peary, on whom he was the only expedition member to be personally dependent for money and encouragement, was as a mediator with the natives. Because of his rare mastery of the language, and his still rarer standing as an outsider equal to the demands of a hunter’s life, he functioned as a bridge to the skills and support which the expedition required. Innovating equipment from the Inuit models, hiring and firing, he forged connections which Peary (a spikily obstreperous navy type, with a moustache slightly wider than his head) could not. This is why ‘Mahri-Pahluk’ is remembered with a greater warmth than ‘Peuree’. By the single standard of Inuit life, he proved himself a thorough mensch.

  Notice, though, Henson’s careful choice of vocabulary, in case it should be thought his good relations with the Inuit were in any sense natural. He had made the same temporal trip as his colleagues, this passage from his Negro Explorer at the North Pole makes clear, and made the same automatic return to his twentieth-century identity afterwards:

  I was to live with a people who, the scientists stated, represented the earliest form of human life, living in what is known as the Stone Age, and I was to revert to that stage of life by leaps and bounds, and to emerge from it by the same sudden means. Many and many a time, for periods covering more than twelve months, I have been to all intents and purposes an Esquimo, with Esquimos for companions . . . enjoying their pleasures, and frequently sharing their griefs. I have come to love these people.

  Despite the mutual respect, and the love, Henson had his own reasons for insisting on the distinction between him and them. Elsewhere he describes them as having ‘all the characteristics of the dogs, including the dogs’ fidelity’ – making their loyalty to him their overriding virtue, much as Peary’s praise for Henson himself stressed Henson’s willingness to put his energies at Peary’s service. The modern eye, like Dr Counter’s, detects a cause for Henson’s sympathy in his own experience of discrimination and racial injustice back in Jim Crow-racked Maryland and Virginia. While this must be true, it does not abolish the structural inequalities of the relationship, any more than Peary’s observation that, at the conquest of the Pole, ‘not individuals alone but races were represented’, with its pleasing picture of human unity, means that the three contingents (‘Caucasian, Ethiopian, and Mongolian’) were of equal importance. To some extent, Henson reinscribed the tones and values of the white–black relationship on the black–Inuit one.

  Dr Counter’s new gleanings of information throw some parts of the story, previously bowdlerised by the conventions of 1909, into ironic relief. It now looks likely, for example, that Henson reached the Pole several hundred yards ahead of Peary, an act of lèse-majesté which Peary punished with a grim silence lasting the entire return journey across the sea ice to Cape Columbia – day after day. It seems certain, too, that the sole casualty of the expedition, Professor Marvin, was actually murdered by the Inuit responsible for getting him home when his supporting party turned back on the polar trek. They had resented his contemptuous attitude. We also discover that John Verhoeff, killed by a fall on an earlier Peary expedition and blandly described by Henson as ‘a good friend of mine’, was in truth a Kentucky yahoo who called Henson ‘by the most vulgar of American racial epithets’, and occasionally threatened to shoot him. And of course every characterisation of the Inuit is coloured in retrospect by the new knowledge that desire figured in the encounter. We know what Henson isn’t saying: that the locals the explorers liked did not always sleep beneath the bunks. We read: ‘never for an instant does the odor or appearance of an Esquimo’s habitation suggest the rose or geranium. The aroma of an East Side lunch-room is more like it’ (Negro Explorer), and must now reflect immediately that Anaukaq’s mother Akatingwah lay beside Henson, skin to skin, mingling the human smells of Greenland and America. A lost intimacy hides beneath the lines. Did bed abolish hierarchy, as it can, or only prove how closely it clings in a close embrace?

  There are hints that Henson was himself far more irascible and impetuous than the received accounts acknowledge. But Counter does not so much uncover the truth about Henson as illuminate the bind a black man of achievement faced at the beginning of the century. He could not ever afford to show anger, or any other ungoverned feeling that might disturb his standing with his patron Peary, on whom his access to achievement entirely depended. His ambitions had indeed to be expressed within the frame of loyalty; and he could cultivate self-respect only as an unvoiced certainty about himself, hoping all the while that the geographical victory over the Pole, when it came, would provide a marker of success too factual to be disputed. Whatever carping whites said, he would still have done it. Dr Counter prints as his epigraph a magazine verse that Henson copied into his journal: ‘Only Remembered By What I Have Done’. The pressure must have been intense. Not responding to provocation was an art every black American with a sense of self-preservation had to learn; but Henson was extraordinarily isolated while he practised it, spending more than ten years in total on Peary’s various Arctic ventures, without the relief of black company in which defences could be dropped. There were only whites and Inuit. It must have been a considerable compensation to be Mahri-Pahluk, admired for your jokes and prowess, as well as honest reliable Matthew.

  The same pressure marks the writing of Negro Explorer, which Peary first tried to block because it further exposed him, in the controversy with Frederick Cook over polar precedence, to the charge of picking unreliable witnesses for his feat. The only people who had seen him hoist the Stars and Stripes at 90°N were four savages and a black man. This was the book by the black man, and it might make matters worse. Though Negro Explorer in fact sank without trace, Henson was thus compelled to reckon with reputations at every step, in a practical way that went beyond the usual codes of restraint when writing up an expedition. He wrote well, or his ghostwriter did. The book’s style was fresh, vernacular and plain, with the high flights secured by humour. But the book was forced into the time’s mould of approved feeling, a Teddy Roosevelt manly swagger. You can hear ecstatic cries of ‘Bully!’ from time to time in the background, and Henson presents himself as a diligent soul, proud to be allowed to be 100 per cent American. Here is the Polar Moment itself in his account, chequered with Peary’s favourite phrases:

  Another world’s accomplishment was done and finished, and as in the past, from the beginning of
history, wherever the world’s work was done by a white man, he had been accompanied by a colored man. From the building of the pyramids and the journey to the Cross, to the discovery of the new world and the discovery of the North Pole, the Negro had been the faithful and constant companion of the Caucasian, and I felt all that it was possible to feel, that it was I, a lowly member of my race, who had been chosen by fate to represent it, at this, almost the last of the world’s great work.

  Accompanied: such a politely passive word. Henson conceded humble terms for his participation. Only the fact of his participation was non-negotiable, a sideways claim to dignity. Elsewhere in snatches the book quietly declares an explorer’s vocation for him. More than the accident of Peary’s patronage was involved. ‘Imagine gorgeous bleakness, beautiful blankness’: paradoxical phrases that are the authentic signs of seduction by the snow.

  Dr Counter’s revaluation of Henson is not the first. The tide of opinion began to move in his favour, after long neglect, in 1947, with the publication of Dark Companion, a novelised biography based on the white author’s long conversations with Henson shortly before the latter’s death. Honourable, but lushly embarrassing to read now, Dark Companion instated Henson as a hero for the period of early civil rights activism that was then just beginning. A more racially integrated story could not be imagined. Despite the slurs and jeers of racists, Henson had been the embodiment of American virtues everyone could applaud; a black Huck Finn in his youth, prone to staring into the eyes of wise old sea captains, he had grown into an ebony Abe Lincoln. Dr Counter naturally writes with a far more assertive sense of black history, and of the separate strand of American culture to which Henson belonged. He wants Henson to have participated in the polar discovery, not as a ‘lowly’ brand of American patriot, nor as an imitation white, but as a representative of the African-American experience, his active presence at the Pole a marker for ambitions that need not exist on anybody else’s terms.

  Hence the last and largest unconscious irony of his book. Insofar as his primary intention is to vindicate Henson, Counter uses the Inuit, with the very best intentions, in a time-honoured manner: as human mirrors for American actions. Returned from Greenland, he sends Anaukaq an African-American flag of his own design that he uses to instil in black schoolchildren a pride in their history. Then, forming a committee and industriously raising funds, he sets about fulfilling Anaukaq and Kali’s wish to visit the graves of their fathers. By the time it happens, the modest visit has become ‘The North Pole Family Reunion’, with a packed itinerary including a soul food breakfast with the American Hensons, and numerous presentations. (The Peary family were less willing to play, to Kali Peary’s hurt.) Dr Counter shows America to them: he exhibits them to America. Though he has told the appalling story of the Inuit group brought to America in 1897 under Peary’s auspices, who sickened and died and had their skeletons displayed in the Museum of Natural History, his revulsion does not alert him to similarities, nor lead him to question his self-appointed role as guardian of the Henson heritage. Admittedly, Anaukaq, Kali and the family groups they brought with them were not boiled. Instead they were exposed to the gamut of American modes of public glorification, from the Ronald Reagan presidential missive (‘truly proud of their legacy of heroism and accomplishment’) to pulpit oratory in the Abyssinian Baptist Church (‘Peacemaker, peacemaker. Learn how to be fair . . . You don’t need to have a PhD degree’). To all of which Kali and Anaukaq responded with polite thanks. Their principal function, among all these American reference points, is as testimony, living truth. Dr Counter, who narrates the whole journey in detail, seizes eagerly on signs that all the participants share the same celebratory purpose. ‘We had all’, he writes, ‘become one big family.’ And as the Greenlanders depart, he comments with amazing innocence, ‘Ten-year-old Aviaq, who was already beyond her years in maturity, had grown tremendously. Entering the plane she sported new sunglasses, watches, and other gifts she had received . . .’

  This was not the end of the affair. It is everywhere apparent that Matthew Henson’s scandalous public neglect after the Pole was won rankles with Dr Counter, and not just as a historic wrong. He feels the pang, as if it were happening today, of Peary’s gold medals from the geographical societies – while Henson made do with a lacquered steel medal from the Colored Commercial Association of Chicago, and a silver loving-cup courtesy of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce. So he sets out to rectify the shame. No sooner have the Inuit flown away than he is designing a grand memorial for Henson and getting him re­interred in Arlington National Cemetery. Bands play. Speeches are made. Retrospective honours are conferred as if the past was revisable; Dr Counter wishes to heal it, and acts then as if it has been healed. But this very American grant of absolution has the unmistakeable effect, as he writes on, of dissolving the past as well, most notably in the eventual naming of the Henson–Peary relationship as a friendship, with every qualification dropped, and, one has to say, the reality of 1909 disappearing into a haze, lost as soon as found.

  In 1912, Booker T. Washington contributed an introduction to A Negro Explorer. Henson was needed as a hero, he wrote, because ‘a race which is doing all the fundamental things for the first time . . . needs for its own encouragement, as well as to justify the hopes of its friends, the records of the members of the race who have been part of any great and historic achievement’. That style of black pride has gone, the idea of black Americans as trainees under tutelage replaced by an appreciation of the ‘fundamental things’ that they had done for centuries. But there remains – a testimony to the disappointments of the twentieth century – a need to welcome, as Washington put it, any achievement. The other histories entwined in the story give way to this need; and Dr Counter elevates Matthew Henson to a black hall of fame generously indifferent to the incompatability of different successes. And yet terribly susceptible to later disgrace. Henson’s reputation is proudly placed alongside those of Mayor Marion Barry, Colonel Guion S. Bluford (an astronaut, prominent at Henson’s new graveside) and Bill Cosby.4

  (1992)

  HUNTFORD’S NANSEN, HUNTFORD’S SCOTT5

  Fridtjof Nansen could hardly have been more different from Robert Falcon Scott, knocked off his pedestal by Roland Huntford in 1979. Blond, athletic, a Viking in an aerated Jaeger suit, Nansen selected himself as a polar explorer because he actually possessed the requisite skill-set, rather than being nominated for heroism by a bureaucratic patron with polar fantasies. He grew up a junior ski champion in the Christiania (Oslo) of the 1880s with the wilderness of Nordmarka ‘within view of his very own doorstep’, so that mountain and glacier, snow slope and crevasse were the stuff of local geography and long experience, instead of sublime fairy tales. He drew on a social environment of immense mobility and applied intelligence, compared to the sticky hierarchies of Edwardian Britain. The personnel roster of the Fram reads like a daydream about the ideal, multi-skilled workforce: an electrician who was also a gymnast, a forester/mechanic/mental health nurse who had patented a potato-picking machine. Before Nansen did his exploring he made a foundational discovery about the structure of nerve tissue; afterwards he was a diplomat, an international negotiator, the father of the League of Nations’ ‘Nansen passport’ for refugees. His was a career of verified achievements and consequential engagements with the world – vitiated only by an internal restlessness that emptied each achievement in turn of the possibility of happiness. He gave one of the bleakest definitions of polar endeavour: ‘The struggle for nothing, in nothing, about nothing.’ In private life he was an unhappy Don Juan.

  Compared to the British version of the same period, this is polar heroism with a richly different hinterland, both geographical and personal. But while Roland Huntford is an extraordinary chronicler of early twentieth-century polar exploration, he is not necessarily a very illuminating judge of it. He is the most implacable sniffer-out of evidence: the Fates (or the Furies) seem to have appointed him to be the bloodhound on the trail
of the ‘heroic age’ – the years of competition over the final geographic prizes of the Arctic and Antarctic which came to a ragged end with the First World War. He also has a great power of re-creation. Detail in his hands turns back into drama. The high points of his books are invariably the journeys themselves, expert syntheses of accounts by the different participants which move at an utterly convincing daily pace; so that dead expeditions become open-ended enterprises again, and you wonder what will happen even if you know perfectly well. Nansen, no exception, rises to its peak with its rendering of the explorer’s sixteen-month ski run across the Arctic pack ice with Hjalmar Johansen, from the ice-locked ship Fram to the shores of Franz Josef Land. The two men scored a new record for north latitude; plastered layers-deep in seal grease by the end, constantly adapting their equipment as they went, they demonstrated that unsupported Norwegian know-how could master the chaotic environment which had thwarted huge naval forays for a century. It was the central event of Fridtjof Nansen’s life, and it is hard to see how any better justice can be done to it as a feat than Huntford has here. This sort of integrated retelling, in the flexible third-person of biography, of events previously fissured by different memories, will surely be Huntford’s lasting contribution to the literature of adventure.

  But his immediate fame is as polar history’s chief iconoclast. Some unambiguous respect is due to him here. Now that our picture of Captain Scott has been permanently altered by Huntford’s work, it is growing difficult even to imagine the interlocked pieties which guarded Scott’s reputation before Scott and Amundsen was published. Huntford had to move a mountain of mystification aside. In a way his own judgement of Scott’s character was secondary to the process of opening the figure of Scott up to the possibility of truth. Whatever you think of the replacement Huntford proposed for the idol, for that artificially smoothed and unanimous set of voices from the past that characterise myth he had substituted the dissonant buzz of witnesses, which reminds us that the past was just a moment like this one.