What a Life!

I adore this image of Danish Explorer Peter Freuchen (1886-1957) and his third wife Danish fashion illustrator, Dagmar Cohn (1907–1991).

Freuchen spent many years living with the Polar Inuit in Thule, Greenland as the home base for a series of seven expeditions between 1912 and 1933.  His first wife was an Inuit woman Navarana Mequpaluk who accompanied him on several of his expeditions. They had a son and a daughter.  Navarana died in the 1921 Spanish Flue pandemic. Freuchen wanted her buried in an old church graveyard in Denmark but was refused because she was not baptised. Freuchen buried her himself.

By my criteria Freuchen is a true explorer because he not only undertook remarkable journeys –disproving a claim of Robert Peary’s - he gave lectures sharing stories of Inuit culture and strongly criticized the Christian church which sent missionaries among the Inuit without understanding their culture and traditions.

Freuchen lost a leg to frostbite in 1926 yet later in life he fought for the Danish Resistance, was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis but then managed to escape to Sweden. 

After World War Two he worked as an editor, an author, a campaigner, a movie star and film director. In 1956 he was the winner of $64000  on the US TV show The $64,000 Question. What a life!