Sometimes a piece of cardboard tells a larger, and more complicated, story.
These matching PSA 4s of Robert Peary and Matthew Henson come from the 1910 T118 World’s Greatest Explorers set, issued by the American Tobacco Company in packs of Hassan Cork Tip cigarettes. The unnumbered checklist runs only 25 cards and is heavy on the polar explorers who dominated headlines at the time: Peary, Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, Sir John Franklin. It also includes outliers such as David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Henry Hudson and pioneering mountaineer Annie Smith Peck.
The cards are larger than standard tobacco cards, and their colorful portraits and scenic backgrounds make them look like miniature paintings. More than a century later, they remain inexpensive compared with sports cards of the same era, despite their age, artwork and history.
The Peary and Henson cards have always seemed to belong together. One year before the set was issued, Peary, Henson and four Inuit men made the final push across the Arctic ice toward what they believed was the North Pole. On April 6, 1909, they planted the American flag and claimed one of the great prizes of the age of exploration.
Peary came home an international celebrity, was promoted to rear admiral and was honored around the world. Henson received some recognition, particularly from Black communities, but was shut out of most of the honors given to Peary and the expedition’s white members. He spent most of his remaining working life as a clerk at New York’s Customs House.
Henson had worked alongside Peary for more than two decades. He was an expert dog handler and sled driver, spoke the Inuit language, built and repaired equipment, and built the relationships with Indigenous people that made the expedition possible. On the final approach, he traveled ahead as trailbreaker and later maintained that he arrived before Peary, reportedly telling him, “I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world.”
Whether the party reached the precise geographic North Pole remains disputed. Incomplete navigation records and drifting Arctic ice have kept historians arguing ever since. What isn’t seriously disputed is that Henson was indispensable, and that racism denied him anything close to Peary’s recognition.
That’s what makes this set so interesting to me. Its subjects were chosen by Albert Operti, an artist who had sailed with Peary to Greenland in 1897 and knew the explorers’ world firsthand. In 1910, while America celebrated Peary, Operti put Henson on the same 25-card checklist, with his own portrait and the same design, in a set called The World’s Greatest Explorers.
Recognition from everyone else came painfully late. Henson was admitted to the Explorers Club in 1937 and received the Peary Polar Expedition Medal in 1944. In 1988, more than three decades after his death, he and his wife were reinterred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, near Peary. In 2000, National Geographic posthumously awarded him its Hubbard Medal.
I like seeing these cards displayed together. Peary’s card represents the history Americans were originally taught, and Henson’s helps complete it. Separately, they are two beautiful tobacco cards from one of the hobby’s most interesting early non-sport sets. Together, they tell a story about courage, partnership, controversy and race, and about how long history can take to give everyone their proper place.
