S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neurobiologist and explorer who reclaimed the reputation of Matthew A. Henson, a black explorer on Robert E. Peary’s 1909 expedition to the North Pole, and tracked down his descendants in Greenland, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, his daughter Philippa Counter said.
Dr. Counter, a member of the Explorers Club, combined a scientific career with travel to the four corners of the earth. At Harvard Medical School, which he joined in 1970, his research on nerves and muscle synapses led him to such far-flung destinations as Ecuador, to study the neural damage caused by lead-glazing in the village of La Victoria, and China, to study acupuncture.
One of his interests — discovering the cause of widespread hearing loss among the Inuit of Greenland — dovetailed with a historical mystery he hoped to solve. While dining with Swedish colleagues in the late 1970s, he was told that both Peary and Henson, Peary’s main assistant on all but one of his Arctic expeditions, had left descendants in northern Greenland, the product of their relationships with Eskimo women.
Dr. Counter, who had been fascinated by Henson since childhood and had written extensively on the contributions of black Americans in remote places, made it his mission to track down their sons and descendants.
In the summer of 1986 he traveled to northern Greenland, where his questions about “kulknocktooki,” or “dark-skinned people,” and the man known as “Miy Paluk” (“Matthew, the kind one”), led him and an interpreter to a remote settlement of some 30 people in the Inglefield Bay Area.
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There, an old man emerged from a wooden house and said: “You must be a Henson. You’ve come to find me.” It was Anaukaq, the son of Henson and Akatingwah, his Eskimo companion. Anaukaq was now 80 and the father of five sons, with 22 grandchildren.
“One of the great moments of my life was walking into that village,” Dr. Counter told The Boston Globe in 1986.
Anaukaq mentioned a childhood friend he called his cousin, who lived 90 miles to the north. Dr. Counter, traveling by helicopter and boat to Qaanaaq, the northernmost nonmilitary settlement in the world, met a white-skinned Eskimo, who also greeted him with the words “You must be a Henson.” This was Kali, the 80-year-old son of Peary and his Eskimo companion, Alakaseena.
“These men said that they had never been to the land of their fathers, and before they died they would like to physically touch a member of their fathers’ families,” Dr. Counter told the journal New Scientist in 2008. He arranged for Anaukaq and Kali, along with several of their sons and grandchildren, to visit the United States in 1987 and meet their American relatives in a get-together he called the North Pole Family Reunion. Anaukaq died later that year.
Dr. Counter, who wrote about his Greenland expeditions in “North Pole Legacy: Black, White and Eskimo” (1991), also came up with an answer to the deafness question. By administering hearing tests and accompanying the Inuits on seal hunts, he determined that their hearing loss was not caused by a virus, bacterial infection or diet, but rather by repeated exposure to rifle blasts that destroyed the hair cells of their inner ears.
He recommended common earplugs, but the Inuit hunters needed to hear the sound of cracking ice and the barking of their sled dogs. He got around this problem by seeking out a new type of earplug, a cone-shaped insert attached to a headband that a shooter could press into service shortly before pressing the trigger.
Samuel Allen Counter Jr. was born on July 8, 1944, in Americus, Ga., and grew up in Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach, Fla. His father managed several businesses. His mother, the former Anne Johnson, was a nurse.
In 1965 he graduated with a degree in biology from Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State College (now Tennessee State University), a historically black college.
He studied neurophysiology and earned a doctorate in communication from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1970 before joining Harvard Medical School. He later earned a medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, where he studied audiology and deafness.
His marriage to Ann-Charlotte Hogstadius ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Philippa, he is survived by two other daughters, Olivia and Maya Counter; a sister, Jean Powell; and a half brother, Timothy Daniels.
In 1981, with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president at the time, Dr. Counter created the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations. As the foundation’s director, a position he held until his death, he helped found Cultural Rhythms, an annual festival of the performing arts.
Having found Anaukaq, Henson’s son, Dr. Counter set about reclaiming the father’s reputation. Long described as Peary’s valet, Henson was actually much more: He was an expert navigator who spoke Inuit, drove sled teams with a skilled hand and knew how to build snow shelters.
In his 1912 memoir, “A Negro Explorer at the North Pole,” Henson recalled Peary explaining to the members of his expedition why Henson would be making the final five-day push to the Pole with him, quoting him as saying: “He must go with me. I cannot make it without him.”
On April 6, 1909, it was Henson who led the way to the goal line. Peary, his toes frozen, had to be transported in a sled, Henson wrote. Arriving 45 minutes after his assistant had reached the spot, Peary announced: “89 degrees 57 minutes! The Pole at last!” — and then rebuffed Henson’s congratulatory handshake.
“I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles,” Henson told The New York Times in 1955. “We went back then, and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.” Henson died later that year at 88.
Most historians now agree that the Peary expedition fell short of the North Pole. But for decades the deed shone bright, and on that momentous day the participants basked in glory. Recalling the moment in his memoir, Henson wrote, “As I stood there at the top of the world and thought of the hundreds of men who had lost their lives in the effort to reach it, I felt profoundly grateful that I, as the personal attendant of the commander, had the honor of representing my race in the historic achievement.”
The expedition brought honor and acclaim to Peary, but little to Henson other than two minor military awards and a messenger’s job at the New York Customs House, an injustice that Dr. Counter helped redress. In 1988 he successfully lobbied President Ronald Reagan to move the remains of Henson and his wife, Lucy Ross Henson, from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
There, on April 9, 79 years after Henson stood in triumph with Peary, Dr. Counter addressed a gathering of relatives and admirers.
“We are assembled here today to right a tragic wrong, to right the record,” he said. “Welcome home, Matt Henson, to the company of your friend Robert Peary. Welcome home to a new day in America. Welcome home, brother.”