There are a few reasons that I wanted to tell Matthew Henson’s story in I, Matthew Henson. First of all, because he did a great thing. He accompanied Commander Perry to the North Pole in the 1909 expedition that was at that time viewed as the most successful expedition to the North Pole. Secondly, he’s African American and I do tend to focus on African Americans in my work. He’s a Marylander and I’m from Maryland. So those are three reasons that I wanted to focus on him.
Also, the centennial of the expedition is coming up in 2009 so I wanted to do a work that would mark the centennial of the 1909 North Pole Expedition. Matthew Henson, as I said, was born in Maryland and he was orphaned at an early age and wound up walking to Baltimore’s Harbor because he worked in a restaurant and had heard sailors talk about the ships coming and going, and he wanted to be a sailor.
He walked to the harbor and found work as a sailor, traveled around the world for several years before his captain died, and he wound up as a clerk at a story in Washington — grounded, so to speak. He was working as a clerk at this men’s haberdashery when Commander Perry came in, buying hats for this Nicaraguan expedition. It so happened that Perry also needed a manservant and he inquired of the owner, and the owner recommended Matthew Henson for the job.
Matthew Henson signed on right away. When he got to Nicaragua, he proved himself to be really helpful to Perry. He was really meant to just be cooking and laundering Perry’s shirts, but when the chain man fell ill on the expedition, Henson became the chain man. From that point on, he became indispensable to Perry and accompanied him later on the North Pole expedition.
