Brother to the Ice: A Novel of Matthew Alexander Henson

77 degrees 41 minutes North. Where the ice begins.

Book Two of The Compass and the Crucible, and the volume where Matthew Henson stops being a servant and becomes something the record has never quite known what to call.

Greenland. Smith Sound. Winters so long the sun does not come back for months, in a hut on a frozen shore with a handful of men and a stack of supplies that has to last.

He learns the language. He learns to build a sledge that holds, to drive dogs, to read ice the way a sailor reads weather. He learns it from the Inughuit, who are not scenery in this book and not helpers either, but the people whose knowledge makes the whole enterprise possible.

Peary himself wrote that Henson could handle a sledge better than any man living except the best of the Inuit hunters. That sentence is the whole tension of the trilogy in one line: the highest praise available, offered as a comparison to people the same men considered lesser.

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

Follows The Runaway and the Sea. Continues in Eighty-Seven North. Delivered as EPUB. No DRM.