North Pole Promise

North Pole Promise tells the story of a secret legacy of two famous explorers: Commander Robert Peary and Matthew Henson—one white, one African American, who, with four Inuit assistants discovered the North Pole in 1909. Peary and Henson returned to the US shortly after—the white Peary to acclaim, the African American Henson to obscurity—never to go to the Pole again. They each left behind sons, fathered with indigenous Greenlandic Inuit women. In the 1980s, on a research trip to Greenland, Dr. Allen Counter was introduced to two men in their eighties—the surviving “Amer-Inuit” sons—one from each explorer. Dr. Counter, an explorer himself, tells of discovering the fate of those children and ultimately honoring them and their illustrious forebears on the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole.