What’s an explorer to do after their last mountain has been climbed? That’s the question that haunts Wanderlust, Reid Mitenbuler’s fine new biography of Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen, whose intrepid career was cut short by a gruesome injury, forcing him to reinvent himself several times over.
Outside of Denmark, Freuchen isn’t quite a household name, yet his daring adventures still have the ability to chill readers today. In the 1920s, he explored Greenland, then a Danish colony, and set up a remote trading post among the indigenous Inuit.
Standing nearly 2m tall, hulking and heavily bearded, Freuchen looked like a boy’s dream of a polar explorer.
Yet, as Mitenbuler shows, for a man of his background and era, Freuchen was extremely open-minded and eager to learn about other cultures. He married an Inuit woman and raised a family with her. Long-haired and relaxed in photos, he would “eventually inspire a groovier generation of Danes to nickname him ‘the greatest hippy in polar history’”.
He wasn’t afraid to push back – at one point, he brusquely tells Denmark’s king, “I know the land better than you do.”
The accounts of Freuchen’s explorations of Greenland are gripping, with harrowing detail about how unforgiving the elements were. The hardship of the Inuit people scraping by at the top of the world is difficult to imagine – such as the rare use of infanticide to save babies from slow, brutal starvation.
Mitenbuler shines at evoking the raw, deadly beauty of Greenland a century ago, with vivid descriptions of Freuchen’s lonely time spent in a remote cabin so cold his exhaled air condensed on to the walls, “slowly forming a cake of ice that squeezed around him from all directions”. One poor doomed soul has his mind “go bad like ham in an unsealed can”.
But Freuchen’s luck ran out during an expedition where he became trapped alone in an ice cave. Legend has it he actually escaped by using his own frozen bodily waste as a makeshift knife.
Wanderlust shows how far one might go to survive. “Perhaps one could get used to cutting off toes,” Freuchen joked, but he was ultimately left crippled by his ordeal.
The biography remains fascinating even as it leaves the ice behind. Freuchen wanders through the first half of the 20th century as a lusty, opinionated figure, brushing shoulders with movie stars and US presidents. Once his injury cut short any possibility of Arctic exploration, Freuchen pivoted, writing novels that drew on his love for Inuit culture, as well as several entertainingly recounted dalliances with Hollywood film-making.
Unlike some famous explorers, he couldn’t coast entirely on his name, having to endure humiliations such as editing a trade magazine extolling the glories of the margarine industry.
As World War II dawned, he refused to bow to the Nazis, offering his remote island farm as a sanctuary for Jewish refugees until he had to flee.
He lived at the tail end of the great era of exploration, when so much of the world was unknown. One flaw in this otherwise exceptional account is the lack of maps of his Arctic adventures; any book about an explorer should mark the paths they took.
It is his human quality that makes Freuchen feel more approachable than many explorer icons, his tendency to assimilate rather than dominate. He seems almost modern, at times a bit of a prophet – as early as 1931, he told the New York Times that “The climate of Greenland is changing.”
He lived long enough to watch his world change, too. In his final visits to his beloved Greenland, a blandly modern American military base sprang up, so bloated and plentiful that its personnel threw a slightly damaged brand new car on a tyre fire to dispose of it rather than repair it. “Much simpler to throw it away, sign a requisition and get a new one,” Freuchen was told. For a man who nearly died countless times on that same island where the Inuit treasured every resource, it must have been a jarring return.
Wanderlust captures both the sweep of rapidly moving history and one man’s restlessness, and reminds us that journeys never truly end.
Wanderlust: An eccentric explorer, an epic journey, a lost age, by Reid Mitenbuler (HarperCollins, $39.99)
