Ninety North: A Novel of Matthew Alexander Henson

90 degrees 00 minutes North. The top of the world.

Book Four of The Compass and the Crucible, and the day everything the previous three volumes were built toward finally happens.

April 6, 1909. Six men and forty dogs on moving ice, at the end of a march nobody had finished. Henson is in the lead party. By most accounts he is the first of them to stand on the spot, planting a flag while Peary comes up behind, unable to walk the last stretch.I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world, Henson said. He was there. He had been there for twenty-three years getting there.

Then comes the return, and the part that matters more than the Pole. Peary stops speaking to him on the march home. The newspapers print one name. The honours, the lecture circuit, the National Geographic medals go to the commander. Henson goes back to New York and takes a job as a messenger in a customs house.

He went as far north as the earth allows, and came home two degrees above where he began.

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

Follows Eighty-Seven North. Concludes in True North. Delivered as EPUB. No DRM.