Souls on Ice: Matthew Henson's `Negro Explorer at the North Pole' and Isaac Julien's `True North'

In 1891, Admiral Robert Peary chose black seaman Matthew Henson to accompany him on a series of expeditions to the North Pole. This paper interprets Henson’s memoir of his role in the sixth and successful 1909 expedition and... [ view full abstract ]

In 1891, Admiral Robert Peary chose black seaman Matthew Henson to accompany him on a series of expeditions to the North Pole. This paper interprets Henson’s memoir of his role in the sixth and successful 1909 expedition and black British filmmaker Isaac Julien’s 2004 environmental installation, which reimagines that trek from Henson's perspective. Though Peary often praised Henson’s technical skills, he chose to erase his contributions in post-expedition narratives to elevate white colonial and scientific superiority. He took Henson’s camera and photographs, refusing to return them: a clear symbol of who Peary believed should control both technology and representation. In Negro Explorer (1912) Henson seeks to reclaim his role. He suggests that his racial isolation from the Peary group during the trek created an alignment with the natural world, particularly the sound and movement of the ice, which in turn, produced the acute navigational sense that rendered him indispensable. I examine the tension between Henson’s desire to present himself at once as a modern subject— a “Man of Science” —and as someone closer to both nature and the “primitive” Inuit members of the crew. I use that tension to theorize how the emergence of the black modern subject in the long 19^th century (as mobile, as a generator of scientific knowledge) facilitates the emergence of the modern black environmental subject imagined in Julien’s later work.