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The discovery of the North Pole is one of
the noblest stories in the history of exploration. It is a story of the
battle of two invincible Americans against the terrible elements of the
Arctic; a battle which lasted eighteen years and left one of the
Americans, a steel-willed man of grit, a cripple for life. It is a human
story filled with tragic suffering, pathos and humiliation. And it is
noble, because these two Americans, who made the last great discovery in
the Northern Hemisphere, were a white man and a Negro.
When Peary and Matthew Henson, America's greatest Negro explorer, went
to Greenland in 1891, the quest for the North Pole was just taking form
in Peary's mind. It grew into a determined challenge between these men
and the elements in the subsequent expedition and the many that
followed, until eighteen years later, on the seventh expedition, Peary,
a tired man of fifty-three, crippled by the amputation of his toes ten
years previously, and Henson, the great Negro, stood side by side at the
apex of the earth.
Bradley Robinson, 1947
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