He began writing for a newspaper called Politiken (it’s still around today), and began working on the first of the nearly 30 books he would publish in his career as a bestselling author. Both Freuchen and Rasmussen almost died on the trip, but they became national heroes overnight for their accomplishment.įreuchen’s first wife died of the Spanish Flu in 1921, and he returned home to Denmark for a while. The First Expedition, in 1912, involved crossing a thousand kilometers across Greenland just to prove to Commodore Peary that the North Pole wasn’t separated from Greenland by a river. Thule served as the home base for seven expeditions between 19. They have aircraft, fighters, and radar listening posts, and it’s home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which I think is either something designed to provide early-warning detection against either Russkie ICBMs and/or Cylon Basestars. Today Thule is home to a friggin’ United States Air Force base. Freuchen’s grandson would become the first person of Inuit descent to be elected to the Canadian Parliament. He married an Inuit woman and had two children, who were given the alphebet-heavy names of Mequsaq Avataq Igimaqssusuktoranguapaluk and Pipaluk Jette Tukuminguaq Kasaluk Palika Hager. After he burned through all of his coal, the got smaller and smaller from all the condensation until it was so cramped that he could barely stand up.įreuchen lived here for like the next decade, learning fluent Inuit and accidentally becoming basically the world’s first and foremost expert on the native peoples of Greenland. At one point, his cabin was so could that his breath was turning to ice and lining the inside of the cabin. This motherfucker was wearing furs, leather, and wool to keep warm. And we are talking 1910, when you didn’t have windbreaker jackets and wetsuits and Gore-tek thermal shit. In Thule the daily mean temperature this time of the year is twelve degrees below zero. They met the Inuit, who were awesome, traded with the natives, learned the language, and then went on badass co-op hunting expeditions to spear walruses, whales, wolves, seals, polar bears, and other insane things. In 1906, at the age of 20, he and his buddy Knud Rasmussen sailed as far north as they possibly could, then got out of the ship and traveled 600 miles across the frozen wastes of Greenland on a damn dogsled just to see what was out there. ![]() ![]() He signed on with every Polar expedition he could, and became obsessed with exploring the uncharted wilderness of Greenland and the North Pole. He studied to be a doctor at some pretty swanky Danish schools, but order and structure and living indoors in the civilized world like a fucking chump wasn’t what Freuchen was put on this earth to do, and after getting in trouble quite a bit in school (he wrote in his awesomely-titled autobiography The Vagrant Viking something along the lines that “the first victims of my hunter’s instincts were my early instructors”) Freuchen peaced out and said fuck people, I’m going to go explore the damn wilderness. Peter Freuchen was born in Denmark in February 1886 (his birthday was exactly 130 years ago last Tuesday). ![]() After 30 hours trapped in a frosty tomb the size of a large suitcase this behemoth Dane escaped certain death by molding his own shit into a fucking knife and using it to carve through a solid wall of ice, then crawled another three hours back to base camp like something out of The Revenant meets Everest meets goddamn Shawshank Redemption. One time he was caught in a blizzard and ended up being buried alive in an inescapable cocoon of ice so tightly packed around him that he could barely move. ![]() He was also the fifth person to win the jackpot in the TV game show The $64,000 Question, published thirty books, founded two Adventurer’s Clubs, and his biography is called The Vagrant Viking. Lorenc Peter Elfred Freuchen was a 6’7” tall walrus-spearing, peg-legged, anti-Semite-clobbering Danish explorer and badass old-school 1900s explorer who wore a fucking awesome coat made of polar bear fur, rocked a seriously epic beard, rode a dogsled 1,000 kilometers across the Greenland ice cap in the 1910s, killed a wolf with his bare hands, escaped a Nazi death warrant at the height of the Third Reich, amputated his own fucking gangrenous toes with a pair of pliers (and no anesthesia), and starred in a goddamned Oscar-winning movie – which was based on a book that he wrote, and this guy was so over-the-top awesome that he played the fucking villain in a movie that was loosely based around his own autobiography.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |