Matthew Hensonthe WorkbenchISTP

On 3 April 1909, on the frozen sea north of Ellesmere Island, a block of ice slid out from under Matthew Henson's feet and he went into the water. He was 42, and three days short of the place the expedition would call the North Pole.

His gloved hands could not grip the ice. Before he could call out, a man named Ootah had him, by Henson's own account, “by the nape of the neck, the same as he would have grabbed a dog.” With one hand Ootah pulled him out. With the other he hurried the dog team across.

That is how Workbenches tend to talk about nearly dying. His boots were pulled off, the ice was beaten out of his bearskin trousers, and they went on.

Henson was born in Charles County, Maryland, on 8 August 1866, to parents who had been free before the Civil War. At 12 he went to sea as a cabin boy. In 1887 he was working in a clothing shop in Washington when a naval officer named Robert Peary hired him. He worked at Peary's side for the next twenty-two years, most of them spent going north.

Peary made the plans. Henson made them work. He built the sledges and mended them, drove the dogs, and learned the language of the Inughuit, the people of far northwest Greenland, along with their way of traveling on ice. He summed up the arrangement in one flat sentence: “These sledges have been designed by Commander Peary and I have done the work.”

On the last march north he broke trail, going first so the others could follow. It is the job Workbenches are handed most often: the front of the line, where the problems show up first. When Ootah's sledge broke, Peary caught up, had words, and went on, leaving the two of them on the ice to mend it.

On 6 April the six of them reached the spot Peary judged to be the Pole: Peary, Henson, and four Inughuit men, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah. Henson said he got there first, as the man breaking trail usually does.

Back on the ship, he wrote, almost three weeks went by without Peary speaking a word to him. Then came an order to make a couple of sledges and mend the broken ones, and a hope that he was feeling all right. “Not a word about the North Pole or anything connected with it.”

There was enough wood for three. He made them, and repaired the rest.

Peary claimed the Pole and was later made a rear admiral. Henson went to work at the New York Custom House in 1913 and stayed more than twenty years.

Before that, in 1912, he had done the most practical thing left to him. He wrote his own account of the expedition, sledges, dogs, Inughuit names and all.

He died in New York in 1955, at 88. Peary's name went on the Pole. Henson made sure Ootah's hand went into the record too.