Peter Freuchen called himself a ‘vagrant Viking’ but that only begins to tell his story
STORY BY MICHAEL ENGELHARD
Explorer Peter Freeman and his wife Dagmar in a studio portrait. Photo by Irving Penn
In 1947, when the untested Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl consulted with Peter Freuchen at The Explorers Club in New York about his imminent Kon-Tiki voyage, the giant Dane’s blue-gray eyes lit up: “Damn it boys! I should like to go with you!” To Heyerdahl, Freuchen looked “big as a barn door and bristling with beard…like a messenger from the open tundra. It is as though he were going about with a grizzly bear on a lead.”
Native Greenlanders called the craggy, six-foot seven-inch daredevil Petersuaq—“Peter the Great”—and he hurled harpoons and hunted ice-bears with the best of them. He’d caught the Arctic bug while studying medicine in Copenhagen, after watching a student revue about polar explorers. In 1906, he quit school and sailed to Greenland with the ethnologist Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen as stoker on a steamer where “the air was thick, the food repulsive, the language foul.”
Freuchen seemed to have nine lives and quickly began using them up.
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