Peter Freuchen: The Arctic Adventurer Who Dug Himself Out of an Ice Cave with a Frozen Dagger of His Own Making
- Daniel Holland
- Feb 19, 2023
- 6 min read
If you were to gather the life stories of the world’s great adventurers and attempt to rank them by sheer improbability, Peter Freuchen would still land somewhere near the top. This was a man who once dug himself out of an ice cave using a tool fashioned out of frozen excrement, who survived frostbite so severe he amputated his own toes, who escaped a Nazi death warrant, and who later became the fifth person to win the jackpot on the American game show The $64000 Question. In many biographies, those details alone would be enough to stand as the entire narrative. For Freuchen, however, they barely scratch the surface.
Born in Denmark in 1886, Freuchen grew up under the watchful eye of a father who hoped his son would choose something safe and respectable. The elder Freuchen was a businessman who believed the world made most sense from behind a desk. Young Peter, however, felt the pull of the outdoors from an early age. He enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to study medicine, trying to mould himself to his father’s expectations, but sitting in lecture halls only sharpened the sense that he belonged anywhere but indoors.
The Adventure Begins
By 1906, at the age of 20, he abandoned medical school and set his sights on Greenland, then one of the least understood and least mapped regions on earth. He joined forces with his friend Knud Rasmussen and boarded a ship bound for the Arctic. When the vessel could go no farther north, the two men disembarked and continued across the frozen landscape by dogsled for more than 600 miles. Here Freuchen first lived with Inuit communities, traded with them, hunted alongside them, and learned their language. It was an education far removed from the one offered in Copenhagen, and it was one he never forgot.
Freuchen was not an inconspicuous presence in Inuit settlements. Standing 6 feet 7 inches tall and built like a man designed to carry freight, he became known for his ability to handle the harsh conditions with formidable ease. The Inuit hunted walrus, seals, whales, and occasionally polar bears, and he joined them in all of it. One famous photograph shows Freuchen later in life wearing a massive white coat. The caption usually includes the fact that he had killed the bear himself and turned it into outerwear. It was the sort of detail he offered with matter of fact pride rather than bravado.
In 1910, Freuchen and Rasmussen founded the Thule trading post at Cape York, Greenland. The name came from the ancient term Ultima Thule, the place medieval cartographers imagined as lying beyond the borders of the known world. For Freuchen, it was an apt title. Thule became the launch point for seven Arctic expeditions conducted between 1912 and 1933. Over those years he lectured visitors about Inuit culture and explored regions of Greenland no Westerner had crossed. His curiosity was relentless and his capacity for endurance soon became legendary.
One early mission during the Thule period was intended to settle a geographic theory. Some believed that a channel separated Greenland from Peary Land in the far north. Freuchen and his team set out to prove or disprove it, embarking on a 620 mile trek across ice and rock where storms could swallow a man in minutes. It was during this journey that he survived his most famous ordeal.
The Shit Dagger
As he recounted in his autobiography Vagrant Viking, Freuchen was caught in a blizzard and attempted to shelter beneath a dogsled. Snow piled quickly, solidifying into ice until he was trapped in what was effectively a frozen vault. He carried no knives or spears. Everything he might normally use to cut his way out was elsewhere. Freuchen always insisted that survival is not a matter of strength alone but of invention. So he improvised. He shaped a frozen tool out of his own faeces, waited for it to harden in the extreme cold, and used it to carve out an escape tunnel. It was the kind of story almost too absurd to believe, yet it remained one of the accounts he repeated most often.
The ice cave was only the beginning of his difficulties. By the time he returned to camp, several toes had turned black from gangrene and the frostbite was spreading. There were no doctors for hundreds of miles, no anaesthetic, no medical equipment beyond the basics. So Freuchen did what he felt he had to do. He amputated the gangrenous toes himself and later had the entire leg replaced with a peg. For most explorers, such an injury might have ended their career. For Freuchen, it simply meant learning to walk again and then carrying on.
In the late 1920s, Freuchen returned periodically to Denmark and developed an interest in politics. He joined the Social Democrats and contributed regularly to Politiken, one of the country’s major newspapers. He also became editor in chief of Ude og Hjemme, a magazine owned by the family of his second wife. His writing career soon expanded, reaching the film world when he helped create Eskimo/Mala the Magnificent, a feature based on one of his books. The film won an Academy Award for Best Editing in 1934.
Fighting Fascists
As the 1930s turned into the war years, Freuchen’s life took a more dangerous turn. A lifelong opponent of racial discrimination, he refused to tolerate anti Jewish rhetoric and often confronted those who expressed it. Friends recalled that he would stand to his full height and tell the speaker that he was Jewish, daring them to repeat their prejudice. Whether said for dramatic effect or in genuine self identification, it was a stance that did not go unnoticed.
When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, Freuchen involved himself in the resistance movement. He worked against Nazi operations and helped hide those the regime targeted. His activities eventually drew the attention of Adolf Hitler, who approved a warrant for his arrest and execution. Freuchen was captured in France but managed to escape, making his way to Sweden and eventually to safety.
Amid all this turbulence, he also managed to build a family life, though one marked by both joy and loss. He married three times. His first wife was Mequpaluk, an Inuit woman he met during his early years in Greenland. They married in 1911 and had two children with characteristically long traditional names. Mequsalq Avataq Igimaqssusuktoranguapaluk was their son, and Pipaluk Jette Tukuminguaq Kasaluk Palika Hager their daughter. Mequpaluk died in the 1921 Spanish Flu pandemic, a tragedy that left Freuchen devastated.
He married again in 1924, this time to the Dane Magdalene Vang Lauridsen, whose father was the director of the national bank. Their marriage lasted two decades before ending in divorce. In 1945, after escaping the Third Reich, Freuchen met fashion illustrator Dagmar Cohn, who would become his third wife. They moved to New York City, where she worked for Vogue and he joined the New York Explorers Club. A painting of him still hangs there, surrounded by trophies of distant expeditions.
The Final Years
Despite losing a leg, despite the political turmoil he faced, despite the landscapes that tested every part of him, Freuchen continued writing. His final book, Book of the Seven Seas, was completed only three days before he died in 1957 at the age of 71. His ashes were scattered over Thule in Greenland, closing the circle on an extraordinary life that began and ended in the region he loved most.
Peter Freuchen’s legacy today is a mixture of genuine admiration and quiet disbelief. He lived a life that reads almost like a tall tale, yet every episode seems to be backed by diaries, eyewitness accounts, photographs, and a long bibliography of his own works. Every chapter is shaped by the same spirit. If a situation was impossible, Freuchen would find a way through it. If a moment was dangerous, he treated it as a challenge. If a path seemed too far, he simply extended the map.
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