Back in Cambridge, several members of the North Pole Family Reunion Committee, including Henson relatives and others, joined me in forming a new committee to oversee the reinterment. I was chosen to chair the committee, and John H. Johnson was elected honorary chairman. The “Matthew Alexander Henson-Arlington National Cemetery Reinterment Committee” met weekly to discuss every aspect of the project, including the possible dates for the disinterment and reinterment, guest lists, the program, the invitations, the headstone funds, and so on. Because the military was to be involved, officials at Arlington took responsibility for organizing the memorial ceremony. But the committee would be responsible for planning the memorial service.
My next task was to arrange for the return of the Amer-Eskimo Hensons to the United States to participate in the ceremony. The experience of the North Pole Family Reunion helped, but the requirements of obtaining special visas, arranging helicopter and air force flights and American accommodations were no less exhausting than the first time around. Committee members, students especially, also helped with the voluminous paperwork involved in getting the Amer-Eskimo Hensons back down to the United States.
A few weeks later, Costanzo wrote to say that the burial site next to Peary had been approved along with my request for full military honors. Lucy could also be buried next to Matthew. I would have to return to Washington to discuss the memorial service and the design of the headstone.
The committee decided that the monument should be as large as the current regulations would allow. I recommended a five-foot-high, four-foot-wide, one-foot-thick slab of polished black Vermont granite, with gold lettering and an attached three-foot-square gold-colored brass plaque with Henson’s face in bas-relief. Both Arlington National Cemetery and the reinterment committee approved.
I spent the next several weeks drawing the design for the bas-relief, checking it over each night before I went to bed. For the facial bas-relief, I drew from the classic photograph of Henson in his Eskimo anorak. Just beneath the face on both sides of the bronze plaque, I included a globe showing the “American route” to the Pole, with a bronze star at the top.
I also felt that Henson would have wanted the Eskimos who traveled with him and Peary to the Pole included on the monument as well. For the Eskimos, I selected a photograph of them standing with Henson on a mound of ice at the North Pole, with an American flag in the background.
Last, I thought there should be a dramatic depiction of the struggle to reach the North Pole that included Peary and the other five men on the last leg of the journey. The opposite side of the headstone would read:
MATTHEW ALEXANDER HENSON
Co-Discoverer of the North Pole His Beloved Wife Lucy Ross Henson
As I have mentioned, one of the memorable statements attributed to Peary and etched in Latin on his monument reads: “I shall find a way or make one.” For Henson’s headstone, I selected the last statement in his book of 1912: “The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart/To me the trail is calling/The old trail/The trail that is always new.”
When I completed my drawings and proposal, I submitted them to the committee for review. They were approved unanimously. None of us, however, was prepared for the cost of high-quality headstones and caskets. The cost of the headstone alone would run into the tens of thousands of dollars. The cost of disinterment, transportation of the remains, and new caskets would also be in the thousands. I had already committed a substantial amount of my own money to the effort, but we needed more help to cover the rest. Unfortunately, the Henson family was in no position to help defray such expenses. But our honorary chairman, John H. Johnson, offered a contribution that made possible the reinterment and the monument we hoped for.
We chose April 6, 1988, as the date of the reinterment—the seventy-ninth anniversary of the North Pole discovery.
Rev. Peter J. Gomes would serve as our reinterment ceremony minister. Col. Guion S. Bluford, America’s first black astronaut in space, agreed to deliver a memorial salute. Bluford, like Henson, was an explorer of uncharted worlds. John H. Johnson was selected to deliver the memorial address. Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women and an old friend of Lucy Henson (who belonged to that organization), was asked to eulogize Lucy during the service. I was asked to deliver the eulogy for Matthew. Hampton University, a traditionally African-American university in Virginia, offered to provide the ceremonial band and choir.
Meanwhile, the Vermont granite cutters and the company making the bronze bas-relief rushed to meet our deadline. Several models of the bas-relief were sent to the committee for review and modification before final approval.
My court appearance in New York City was nothing short of bewildering. My attorney, a young Harvard graduate, ran into stronger-than-expected opposition from the three Woodlawn attorneys, one of whom was a Yale graduate who seemed eager to carry out the traditional rivalry of Harvard and Yale. The two men fought in legal-ese and postured for what seemed an eternity, both in and out of the courtroom. After listening to all the arguments, the judge, who happened to be black, ruled that he saw no reason why Matthew and Lucy should not be removed from Woodlawn and reinterred in Arlington. The Woodlawn lawyer tried to appeal the ruling, but to no avail. As he spoke, the judge looked over at me and, almost imperceptibly, nodded his head. In a silent expression of gratitude, I nodded back.
To represent the family at the ceremony, the Amer-Eskimo Hensons chose Mahri-Pahluk’s oldest living grandson, Avataq; his youngest grandson, Kitdlaq; Ajako and his oldest son, Jens; and Magssanguaq, the ten-year-old son of Avataq and Anaukaq’s favorite little hunter.
As he had been promised, Magssanguaq got to travel to America. After he and his family arrived at McGuire Air Force Base, we proceeded by train to Washington. It was now Magssanguaq’s turn to stare at the new world. He was glued to the window of the train. Large lakes and boats astounded him—not to mention all the cars, igloos, and people.
In the days before the ceremony, Magssanguaq and his family toured the nation’s capital. We took him and the family to the Cherry Blossom Festival, watched a large parade, and, to the family’s extreme delight, saw a circus.
At the Air and Space Museum, the Eskimos were particularly interested in the Black Aviators section. But over at the Museum of Natural History, Magssanguaq and Avataq were utterly surprised to see life-size models of Polar Eskimos in kayaks.
“They look so real!” Magssanguaq said.
“Yes, but their kayaks are poorly built,” said Avataq. Seeing their culture represented in lifelike mannequins behind glass was very strange to them. It gave them a chance to evaluate and criticize an exhibit about which they as Eskimos were the authorities.
On a visit to the Washington Zoo, Magssanguaq saw seals in captivity for the first time. He was mesmerized by their antics. Instinctively the hunter, he several times raised an imaginary gun, took aim, and “fired” at the seals.
April 6 arrived quickly, but with everyone and everything in place. At noon on that day, we were picked up by limousines and driven to the administration building at Arlington, where everyone on the program gathered for the preceremony check. The assembled group included the Greenlandic Hensons, Olive Henson Fulton, the honorary pallbearers, John H. Johnson and Col. Guion Bluford, Rev. Peter Gomes, and Superintendent Costanzo.
At 1:45 P.M. the limousines and hearses left the administration building for the site. Some two hundred people, mostly family and committee members, awaited our processional in the private guest area. Across the road were another fifty or so invited guests and a platform filled with members of the press.
We walked the last yards to the grave, with the Henson family leading the way. When we reached the monument at two o’clock, the reinterment ceremony officially began.
Magssanguaq and I each took a rope on top of the velvet cloth and on cue unveiled the new monument. Everyone applauded. The cloth draping the Henson monument had also been used for the monument to the astronauts who died in t
he Challenger disaster.
Ushers led the family and other official participants to the site of the open graves, where Matthew’s and Lucy’s caskets were to be suspended on cords. We held our hands over our hearts while the military pallbearers, wearing dark navy dress uniforms and white caps, removed the caskets from the hearses and marched them to the graves.
Peter Gomes performed the act of committal. “We have brought the explorer home. For here is where he belongs. To all of us, and to the nation.”
I then stepped up on the platform next to Matthew Henson’s casket and delivered the eulogy. “Welcome home, Matthew Henson. Welcome to the hearts of black Americans, and persons of all races who beam with pride in the knowledge that you are finally here.
“May your presence here inspire generations of explorers yet unborn as they seek new horizons. Welcome home, Brother Matthew. Welcome home.”
After I had delivered the eulogy, ceremonial volleys from a twenty-one-gun salute echoed through the stillness of the cemetery. With the playing of “Taps,” the honor guard ceremoniously folded the U.S. flag that had covered Matthew Henson’s casket. The triangular, folded flag was then given to Comdr. Charles W. Marvin, the presiding navy chaplain, who presented it to Avataq.
“On behalf of the president of the United States, the nation is grateful for Matthew Henson’s service and patriotism,” the chaplain said to Avatak. “We present this flag to show our great appreciation for his faithful and loyal service.”
Following the initial ceremony, the memorial service began with welcoming remarks by Gen. Julius Becton, representing the president of the United States.
Next, Johnson delivered the memorial address:
Matthew Henson taught us all a great deal. He taught us to be independent. He taught us to achieve. He taught us to make the most out of whatever opportunities are before us, while trying at all times to improve those opportunities.
Henson was a proud man. He did not receive the recognition that he deserved, but he never complained. I remember reading about his speech to the Chicago Geographical Society in which he said he had only sought to serve—that he was not bitter—that he knew what he had done—and that he had his own particular kind of pride. And so I would say, the world is better for Henson. The world has a better feeling about achievement—about a man who was willing to pay the price—a man who once said nothing had ever been given to him. He had always earned it. Matthew Henson has earned the recognition he is receiving today.
“Today, a grateful nation salutes Matthew Alexander Henson,” Col. Guion Bluford said, “an Arctic explorer and a black American. May all future explorers follow in his footsteps.”
Kitdlaq represented the Hensons.
“We Hensons from Greenland are very proud and honored to be here among our relatives and other people from the United States on this very important day in the history of America. We are thankful from our hearts. We are sure the Eskimos Egingwah, Ootah, Ooqueah, and Seegloo would be very proud if they knew Matthew Henson was being buried here in Arlington. They are the Inuit who went to the North Pole with Peary and Henson. Thank you.”
The Hampton University band played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while the wreaths were placed at the grave.
The ceremony ended with the playing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
“Now the old friends are together again. They can talk about old times,” Kitdlaq said.
Welcome home, Matthew Henson.
EPILOGUE
The Controversy: Did Peary and Henson Reach the North Pole First?
Perhaps no other claim in the history of modern exploration has been so controversial as the 1909 announcement by navy commander Robert Edwin Peary that he, Matthew A. Henson, and four Polar Eskimos had reached the North Pole on April 6 of that year. Some questioned the navigational accuracy and validity of the distances Peary claimed to have covered. Others dismissed his claim because he did not have any “reliable” witnesses. Still others believed that Frederick Cook, Peary’s onetime assistant, had successfully reached the Pole a year earlier than Peary.
The dispute was never resolved. As a result, the widespread publicity surrounding the North Pole Family Reunion project in 1987 and the reinterment of Matthew Henson in 1988 sparked the controversy anew. Within months after the reinterment, articles appeared in national periodicals once again seriously questioning whether Peary and Henson had really made it to the North Pole.
The most direct challenge came from Dennis Rawlins, a Baltimore-based writer and longtime Peary critic. Rawlins claimed to have found a previously unexamined slip of paper in the National Archives with Peary’s actual 1909 calculations as well as references to it hidden among the private papers of former Johns Hopkins and American Geographic Society president Isaiah Bowman. Rawlins maintained that this evidence proved that Peary never got within a latitude 121 miles of the Pole. Even more contentiously, he argued that when Peary realized his navigational error, he faked his records to show that he had reached the actual Pole.
It was not the first time that Rawlins, who is not a field explorer or navigator, had made such accusations. As far back as 1970, Rawlins claimed to have found conclusive evidence that Peary had never reached the North Pole.1 Even though his alleged evidence of Peary’s “hoax” was later shown to be nothing more than unsubstantiated conjecture, his 1988 challenge was taken seriously by some. Most notably, Boyce Rensberger of the Washington Post gave Rawlins’s interpretation extensive coverage on several occasions, even after it had been questioned by professional scientists.2 In defense of Rawlins’s position, Rensberger quoted one expert, who said: “Rawlins has cracked a code that’s been sitting there for eighty years. I couldn’t be more convinced that he’s right.”3
A second, more widely publicized challenge to Peary’s claim appeared in an article by Wally Herbert, a British explorer, in the September 1988 issue of National Geographic. The magazine’s publication of this challenge (“Robert E. Peary: Did He Reach the Pole?”) came as a surprise to many because the National Geographic Society has long been viewed as the main bastion of Peary’s support. But when one considers the widespread interest in the topic, coupled with long-held suspicions that the society was “hiding” some of the facts in this case, it is understandable that the magazine’s editors would permit another point of view to be aired in that, their centennial year. Nevertheless, to some the article seemed to signal the official abandonment of Peary after nearly eighty years of steadfast support.
Many African Americans were also troubled by the new challenges to Peary and Henson’s claims. They could not help wondering whether it was pure coincidence that the new, “damaging evidence” against Peary just happened to surface some six months after the president of the United States had granted permission to reinter Henson in Arlington National Cemetery as “co-discoverer” of the North Pole. It was as if someone had said, “Okay, we’ll show you that neither of them made it.”
Wally Herbert, the author of the 1988 National Geographic article, had himself traveled to the North Pole in 1969, using back-up airlift support and airplane navigation for verification. Like Rawlins, Herbert had long held the view that Peary and Henson did not make it all the way to the exact Pole. In preparing for the article, however, he examined Peary’s written records of the 1909 expedition, which are housed in the National Archives in Washington.
Although Herbert found “no simple yes or no” answer to the question of whether Peary reached the pole, the tone of the article and the character of the evidence he puts forth leave no doubt about his verdict. “The burden of proof . . . generally lies with the explorer,” Herbert writes, and “Robert E. Peary failed to provide conclusive evidence that he had reached the North Pole.” Herbert places particular emphasis on Peary’s personal diary of the final expedition, which has “blank pages, an inserted leaf, and an incomplete cover title” and on “Peary’s astonishingly slack navigation.” He also expresses doubts about the distances Peary claimed to ha
ve covered on his final series of “marches” and subsequent return journey from the Pole.
In the end, Herbert characterizes Peary as a man so obsessed by his quest for worldly renown that he simply could not face the fact of his failure. “In all probability,” Herbert writes, “during those last five marches northward Peary was being driven not by the rational mind but by a conviction that the Pole was his and that he had the divine right to discover it and return to proclaim his achievement.”
I also contributed an article to the same one-hundredth anniversary edition of National Geographic in which Herbert’s essay appeared. Although my piece did not directly address the issue of Peary’s claim, I too had access to Peary’s diary and other expeditionary records in the National Archives. The conclusions I reached, however, were quite different from those of Herbert and Rawlins.
Herbert’s charge of “astonishingly slack navigation,” for example, rests heavily on the fact that Peary did not take longitude readings, or at least did not record them in his diary, during much of the 1909 expedition. As a result, Herbert hypothesizes, he was probably detoured from the actual Pole some “30 to 60 miles.”
What Herbert fails to point out is that Peary and Henson recorded navigational information in several places, not just in the small pocket diary on which Herbert bases his conclusion. Further, and more important, he does not sufficiently take into account the circumstances in which they found themselves. Racing against the elements, in constant danger of finding themselves marooned by a break in the ice, they could not afford to stop to take unnecessary measurements—and longitude readings were unnecessary.
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