Eighty-Seven North: A Novel of Matthew Alexander Henson

87 degrees 06 minutes North. The closest anyone had ever come, and not close enough.

Book Three of The Compass and the Crucible. A decade of ice took his commander's toes, his own marriage, and every record on the map. The accounting is this volume.

April 1906. Henson writes a date and a position in a notebook: 87 degrees 06 minutes North. Farther than any human being has been recorded going. And then they turn around, because the food is gone and the ice is breaking up behind them, and a record is not the Pole.Between 1898 and 1906 the expeditions take a toll that is easy to list and hard to feel. Peary loses eight toes to frostbite and keeps going. Henson's marriage does not survive the years away. Men die. Ships are crushed. The Inughuit who make the work possible pay in ways the expedition accounts never tally.

This is the middle volume, and the hardest kind of story to tell: the one about the attempts that fail. Nobody remembers second place at the top of the world. This book is about what second place costs.

Thirty-eight chapters. Narrative history in Henson's own voice, anchored to the documented record.

Follows Brother to the Ice. Continues in Ninety North. Delivered as EPUB. No DRM.