The most interesting man in the frozen world
J. Oliver Conroy
Anyone who still knows of the Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, who died in 1957 after a rich life that included expeditions to map Greenland and master the Inuit language, probably remembers him for one of two reasons. The first is a striking black-and-white portrait that the photographer Irving Penn took of the peg-legged and bearded Freuchen in his older years: Freuchen, his 6 feet and 5 inches draped in a massive animal-fur coat, towers over his third wife, Dagmar, who sits beside him in an elegant Coco Chanel-style suit.
The second is a survival story famed in the annals of Arctic exploration. In 1923, Freuchen was caught in a blinding snowstorm and forced to shelter under an overturned sledge. Awakening to discover that he’d been trapped by ice and snow, and with his shovel inconveniently outside, he formed a chisel from his own frozen excrement and used it to tunnel to freedom.
Yet to recall Freuchen only for these claims to posterity is to short-change an extraordinary man, as the writer Reid Mitenbuler shows in an engrossing and delightful new biography, Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age.
An explorer, anthropologist, reporter, novelist, actor, screenwriter, and even game show winner, Freuchen led an intrepid 71-year life across continents, cultures, and eras. He experienced the twilight of a great age of exploration, nomadic Indigenous ways of life now gone from the world, Nazi-occupied Europe, and mid-century Hollywood and brushed up against historical figures including Paul Robeson, Leni Riefenstahl, Herbert Hoover, Jean Harlow, and Walter Winchell. He was also an anti-fascist, an early supporter of Indigenous rights and the American civil rights movement, and an environmentalist who, as early as 1931, warned of the Arctic’s warming climate.
Drawing on historical records, interviews, and Freuchen’s own prodigious writing, Mitenbuler, the author of well-received popular histories of the bourbon industry and Hollywood’s golden age of animation, gives a lively and comprehensive history of Freuchen’s life and rapidly changing times. Somewhat surprisingly, Mitenbuler devotes almost no time to Freuchen’s childhood or early family life, not necessarily a bad thing given that this is often the least interesting part of a biography, and skips to what Freuchen himself would probably consider the effective beginning of his life.
In 1905, Freuchen, a middle-class boy who’d grown up loving the outdoors and “reading explorers’ memoirs the way a later generation would read comic books,” dropped out of medical school and impulsively joined an expedition to northeast Greenland by the renowned explorer and ethnographer Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen. He quickly fell in love with the land and its people and would go on to spend much of the first half of his life in Greenland, managing a trading post and leading dogsled expeditions with his friend and fellow explorer Knud Rasmussen.
In his descriptions of Arctic life, Mitenbuler thrills at the visceral and vivid, as does the reader. We learn that kiviaq, an Inuit delicacy made from the fat of a small bird pickled for a year in a seal carcass, tasted like “licorice and overripe cheese.” Freuchen calls the agony of snow blindness like “red-hot knives stuck into my eyes.”
Wanderlust skillfully evokes a time and place that feel impossibly romantic and epic compared to our own but also shot through with danger, hardship, and the grotesque. Freuchen lived through the final years of an era when answering a newspaper ad might lead to a great adventure and people still risked their lives for the sake of charting a few inches on a map.
Yet it was also a time when dogs often became explorers’ food as well as their transportation. Prolonged isolation could bring a madness as dangerous as starvation or exposure, and dying men might record their final moments in a few terse words on a greasy scrap of paper. For the Inuit, who were haunted by the constant specter of Arctic famine, it was as bad or worse, with young Inuit widows sometimes choosing to kill their children rather than leave them to slow deaths of starvation.
The book’s accounts of turn-of-the-century Inuit life and customs are particularly fascinating, and Freuchen’s initial interactions with the people then called Eskimos are poignant and sometimes comical. The Inuit took a frank and casual attitude to sex and marriage, for example. As Mitenbuler relates, Inuit men leaving for long hunts sometimes encouraged Freuchen to make full use of their wives. On some occasions, he did.
Freuchen eventually married an Inuit woman, Navarana, and raised two Inuit Danish children. Navarana’s heartbreaking death of the Spanish flu, as well as Freuchen’s loss of a leg to frostbite, eventually forced him to reconsider his life in Greenland, though that is hardly the end of the story.
Unlike many other explorers (who tended to die young), Freuchen had a remarkable second act, as Wanderlust relates. He married twice more, became a successful novelist, worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter and technical adviser to adventure films, and was hired by Pan Am as a brand ambassador. (The airline paid him to fly around South America for free as the early equivalent of a social media influencer.)
During the Second World War, he smuggled Jews and political dissidents from Germany, was arrested and briefly imprisoned for helping the Danish resistance shelter British commandos, and once insulted Hitler to a Nazi propaganda minister’s face — in Germany. (Throughout his life, Freuchen would also often falsely claim to be Jewish to embarrass people he’d heard make antisemitic remarks.)
In fact, Freuchen was possessed of a remarkable conscience sometimes startlingly ahead of his time. He was a — fairly self-aware — critic of colonialism, an anti-racist avant la lettre, and an early animal rights activist. (He organized a campaign to ban foie gras from Denmark and, unlike Ernest Hemingway, loathed bullfighting.) A social democrat in the Scandinavian mold, Freuchen came to prefer many aspects of Inuit communal governance to European capitalism, though his trips to the Soviet Union left him skeptical of Stalinism at a time when other European leftists were all too credulous.
Mitenbuler has an occasional tendency to overapologize for the political incorrectnesses of an earlier time. He also likes to interject parenthetical asides into the narrative, which can be distracting and take the reader out of the story. For all his verve, he also very occasionally forces a turn of phrase that feels tin-eared: A person “said yes faster than saints pass through the gates of heaven”; something “lacked granular specifics” or is “just the result of a young man trying to impress some ladies”; a man’s eyes are “as big as dinner plates.” But these are minor faults in a good book.
Fans of nonfiction explorer literature — such as Alfred Lansing’s classic, Endurance, Eric Newby’s hilarious A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and more recent work by David Grann and others — will enjoy this excellent account of an extraordinary man.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.