* List of the stories he appears in : - D 93288 : "The Empire-Builder from Calisota" (Lo$#11), from 1994, by Don Rosa.

 

* His biography :
     Matthew Alexander Henson was born on August 8, 1866.His parents died when he was a young boy. He went to sea when he was 12 years old, working as a cabin boy on the three-masted sailing ship "Katie Hines" (under Captain Childs). He became a clerk in Washington, D.C. after Captain Childs died.
   In 1888, Robert Edwin Peary hired Henson as a personal assistant for his expedition to Nicaragua, Central America. Because of Henson's skills (Henson was an accomplished mechanic, navigator and carpenter), resourcefulness and strength, Peary chose Henson to accompany him on all of his many expeditions in Nicaragua, Greenland, and Arctic.
Along with Peary and four Eskimos, they were the first people to reach the North Pole.
   Henson wrote A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, in 1912. US President William Howard Taft appointed Henson a clerk in the U.S. Customs House in New York City in 1913; he held the post until 1936, when he retired.
   He died on March 9, 1955.
   Henson was awarded a Congressional medal in 1944 for his work on the Peary expedition.
 

* His place in the Barks/Rosa stories universe :
     In, "The Empire-Builder from Calisota", Scrooge mets Peary in the Polar region, in 1909, during his expeditions.
In this story also appears an unnamed man (at least, he was unnamed in the French version of the story), who tells Peary he just hired new carriers. The man must be Matthew A. Henson, and the carriers must be the four Eskimos. On the picture above, he is of white skin wereas real Matthew was a Black man, but it may be a mistake of the colorist.
 

>>>Back to the real life's characters page
>>> Back to the main page