The Runaway and the Sea: A Novel of Matthew Alexander Henson

38 degrees 27 minutes North. Where it starts.

Book One of The Compass and the Crucible, a five-volume novel of the life of Matthew Alexander Henson, the man who went as far north as the earth allows and came home two degrees above where he began.

He was five years old when his mother died, and he spent eighty years learning what a child of five keeps. Not a face. The face goes first, and no grieving on earth will hold it. Hands. A voice with the words worn off it. The exact weight of being carried by one person and nobody else.

Maryland after the war. A freedman's field that will not feed a family. A father whose hands are ruined for everything but work, and a boy who walks out of a house that has stopped being one.

He walks to Baltimore. He finds the harbour, and a ship called the Katie Hines, and a captain who does something almost nobody in his life has done: teaches him. Navigation, mathematics, the whole wide country of books. Henson goes to sea at twelve and comes back literate, capable, and unwilling to be small.

This is the volume before the ice: the making of the man, and the chance meeting in a Washington hat shop that sends him north for the next twenty-three years.

Narrative history in his own voice, anchored to the documented record. Thirty-five chapters.

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