Whether exploring the Arctic or fighting the Nazis, Peter Freuchen did it all.
Arktisk InstitutDanish explorer, author, and anthropologist Peter Freuchen.
The shortlist of Peter Freuchen’s accomplishments includes escaping an ice cave armed with his bare hands and frozen feces, escaping a death warrant issued by Third Reich officers, and being the fifth person to win the jackpot on the game show The $64,000 Question.
However, the life of adventurer/explorer/author/anthropologist Peter Freuchen can hardly be contained in a short list.
Freuchen’s life wasn’t just like a single Hollywood film — it could have been an entire franchise. An early expedition to Greenland in his younger years ignited a passion for Arctic exploration and a fascination with Inuit culture, which eventually inspired his writing and filmmaking.
By the late 1950s, Freuchen had penned more than 30 books, starred in a movie he wrote, gone on at least eight major Arctic expeditions, fought against the Nazis with the Danish resistance, lost a leg to frostbite, and become a national celebrity due to his game show win. To say he lived life to the fullest would, frankly, be an understatement.
How Peter Freuchen Went From A Medical Student To Renowned Adventurer
Peter Freuchen was born on Feb. 20, 1886, in Nykøbing Falster, Denmark. His father was a businessman and wanted nothing more than a stable life for his son. So, at his father’s behest, Freuchen enrolled at the University of Copenhagen and began to study medicine.
However, before long, Freuchen realized that a life indoors was not for him. Where his father craved order and stability, Freuchen craved exploration and danger.
So naturally, at 20 years old, he dropped out of the University of Copenhagen and began a life of exploration.
Arktisk InstitutPeter Freuchen was a staggering six feet, seven inches tall.
In 1906, he made his first expedition to Greenland. He and his friend Knud Rasmussen sailed from Denmark as far north as possible before leaving their ship and continuing by dogsled for over 600 miles until. It was a treacherous journey, along which Freuchen and Rasmussen came across the Inuit people.
The two explorers were deeply interested in the Inuit culture. They spent time among the people, learning their language and accompanying them on hunting expeditions.
The Inuit people hunted walruses, whales, seals, and even polar bears, but Freuchen found himself right at home. After all, his impressive stature made him uniquely qualified to handle taking down a polar bear, and before long he had made himself a coat out of a polar bear he’d killed himself.
Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock PhotoPeter Freuchen and Knud Rasmussen.
In 1910, Peter Freuchen and Rasmussen established a trading post, in Cape York, Greenland, naming it Thule. The name came from the term “Ultima Thule,” which to a medieval cartographer meant a place “beyond the borders of the known world.”
Shortly after, in 1911, Freuchen married an Inuit woman named Mequpaluk and had two children with her, a son named Mequsaq Avataq Igimaqssusuktoranguapaluk and a daughter named Pipaluk Jette Tukuminguaq Kasaluk Palika Hager.
Arktisk InstitutFreuchen and his first wife Mequpaluk at their home.
The post, meanwhile, would serve as a base for seven subsequent expeditions, known as the Thule Expeditions, that would take place between 1912 and 1933.
The Thule Expeditions That Caused Peter Freuchen To Lose His Leg
Between 1910 and 1924, Freuchen lectured visitors to Thule on Inuit culture, and traveled around Greenland, exploring the previously unexplored Arctic. One of his first expeditions, part of the Thule Expeditions, was embarked upon to test a theory that claimed a channel divided Greenland and Peary Land. The expedition involved a 620-mile trek across the icy Greenland wasteland that culminated in Freuchen’s famous ice cave escape.
Arktisk InstitutPeter Freuchen (second from left) with others in Greenland.
During the trip, which Freuchen claimed in his autobiography Vagrant Viking was the first successful trip across Greenland, the crew got caught in a blizzard. Freuchen attempted to take cover under a dogsled, but ultimately found himself completely buried in snow that quickly turned to ice. At the time, he hadn’t been carrying his usual assortment of daggers and spears, so he was forced to improvise — he fashioned himself a dagger out of his own feces and dug himself out of the cave.
“I moved my bowels and from the excrement I managed to fashion a chisellike instrument which I left to freeze,” he recalled in Vagrant Viking. “This time I was patient, I did not want to risk breaking my new tool by using it too soon. While I waited, the hole I had made filled up with fresh snow. It was soft and easy to remove, but I had to pull it down into my grave which was slowly filling up. At last I decided to try my chisel and it worked!”
Arktisk InstitutFreuchen stayed in Greenland for the better part of 15 years.
But the harrowing journey was not yet over. When he returned to camp, after crawling for three hours, he found that his toes had become gangrenous and his leg had been taken over by frostbite – a feeling which he described as “the most agonizing pains.”
Doing what any hardened explorer would do, Freuchen amputated the gangrenous toes himself (sans anesthesia) and had his leg replaced with a peg.
Arktisk InstitutPeter Freuchen with his daughter Pipaluk.
His leg was not the only loss he suffered, either. During this expedition — his fifth in Thule — he also tragically lost his wife Navarana after she constracted the Spanish flu. When the expedition came to a close in 1924, Freuchen returned to his native Denmark for a time, during which he began writing many of his books and getting involved in politics.
Peter Freuchen’s Prolific Career Outside Adventuring
Freuchen returned to Denmark in the late 1920s, following the fifth expedition, and quickly joined the Social Democrats movemene, during which he also became a regular contributor to Politiken, a political newspaper.
Arktisk InstitutPeter Freuchen sitting at his desk.
From 1926 to 1932, he served as the the editor-in-chief of Ude of Hjemme, a magazine owned by the family of his second wife, Magda Lauridsen.
Freuchen then involved himself with the film industry, contributing to the Oscar-winning film Eskimo/Mala the Magnificent, based on one of his own books. The research and writing process saw Freuchen briefly return to Greenland in 1932, this time financed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios. The film, directed by W. S. Van Dyke and starring Ray Mala, released in November 1933 and also featured Peter Freuchen acting in the role of the Ship Captain.
Notably, Eskimo was the first film to be shot in a Native American language. It released to rave critic reviews and even managed to win the first Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Box office performance, on the other hand, was fairly weak.
Arktisk InstitutFreuchen with film director W. S. Van Dyke.
In 1938, Freuchen, wanting to share his love of adventuring, founded The Adventurer’s Club of Denmark, an organization which still exists today. Of course, the onset of the Second World War one year later meant that exploring the world would have to wait — Freuchen was ready to fight back against the Nazis.
From Resisting The Nazis To Winning A Television Quiz Show
Wikimedia CommonsPeter Freuchen with wife Dagmar Cohn in the 1950s.
During World War II, Peter Freuchen found himself in the center of political drama. Freuchen never tolerated discrimination of any kind, and any time he heard someone express anti-Semitic views, he would approach them and, in all his six-foot-seven glory, claim to be Jewish.
He was also actively involved with the Danish resistance and fought Nazi occupation in Denmark. In fact, he was so boldly anti-Nazi that Hitler himself saw Freuchen as a threat, and ordered him to be arrested and sentenced to death.
Freuchen was arrested in France, but ultimately escaped the Nazis and fled to Sweden.
At some point in 1944, his marriage to Lauridsen had also been dissolved, and in 1945, Freuchen married the Danish fashion illustrator Dagmar Cohn.
Irving Penn/The Irving Penn FoundationA photograph of Peter and Dagmar Freuchen taken by famous photographer Irving Penn.
After the war, the two moved to the United States, where Freuchen continued his writing and later won the top prize on the American TV quiz show The $64,000 Question in 1956, thanks to his extensive knowledge of the world’s oceans.
One year later, Freuchen made one final voyage to the Arctic regions he had always loved. He died in Anchorage, Alaska, on Sept. 2, 1957, after which his ashes were scattered over Mount Dundas near Thule, Greenland, fulfilling his final wish to permanently rest in the land that had come to define his extraordinary life.
After learning about the unbelievable life of Peter Freuchen, read about the explorers who found a 106-year-old fruitcake in the Antarctic. Then, read about history’s greatest humanitarians.
