It’s no secret that I’m humanity’s biggest fan. Our species is awe-inspiringly relentless, while at the same time possessing the ability to stoop from our role as apex predators to help other species survive. We are the unstoppable, tough-as-nails big brothers of Earth. We can take almost any hit and we’ll still keep fighting. The only thing that can stop us is age, but thanks to education and history we can continue our struggles across the centuries through our descendants. We are indomitable, yet seem to possess infinite compassion.
A recurring theme in science fiction is that of a sentient computer or alien observing humanity and deciding that we are too dangerous to remain. This motif comes from our tendency to focus on bad news, letting the good go unnoticed. Even now, many think that our species is a toxin on Earth, a plague that can achieve nothing but destruction.
If an alien dropped out of the sky in front of me right now and demanded that I explain why humanity should be allowed to continue existing, I would tell them all of this. Let’s say this is a skeptical alien, and it asks that I provide an example to support my opinion.
I would look no further than Peter Freuchen, Exemplar of Humanity.
Born in Denmark in 1886, Peter Freuchen grew to immense standing, both intellectually and, as the image at the top of this article shows, physically. Measuring in at six feet and seven inches, he was a towering man. At various points in his life he was a polar explorer, an activist anthropologist, a writer, an actor, an anti-nazi resistance leader, an Oscar-winner, and the fifth winner of the game show The $64,000 Question.
Freuchen originally studied to become a doctor, but apparently found the confines of civilized life to be grating. He joined a polar expedition in 1906, when he was only twenty years old, one that sailed as far north as possible before continuing on dogsled for hundreds of miles. It was here, in the long days and nights of the arctic, that Freuchen first met the Inuit people. He would spend most of the rest of his time on Earth working and living with them. He made his home in Thule, Greendland (Now called Qaanaaq), where he and fellow explorer Knud Rasmussen established the Thule Trading Station in 1910. It was the most northerly trading post in the world, hence the name.
Between 1912 and 1933 the Thule station was home base for a total of seven arctic expeditions, dubbed the Thule Expeditions. The first of these was led by Rasmussen and Freuchen, and aimed to test Robert Peary’s claim that Peary Land was a separate island from Greenland. They travelled over a thousand kilometers by dogsled in a journey that very nearly killed them. Freuchen fondly remembered it as the “finest [journey] ever performed by dogs.” Only one other dogsled trip across Greenland was successful.
In his later autobiography, Vagrant Viking, Freuchen recalled an incident during the first expedition where he was buried in ice by a blizzard and used a dagger fashioned from his own feces to chip his way free before crawling back to camp to amputate his own gangrenous, frostbitten toes with a pair of pliers. Add in fighting off an attacking wolf with nothing but his hands and killing a polar bear all by himself, Freuchen was the human embodiment of the unstoppable.
In 1911 he married his first wife, an Inuit woman named Navarana Mequpaluk, with whom he had two children. Ten years later, Navarana fell to the Spanish Flu. The local Christian mission refused to allow Navarana, who was unbaptized, to be buried in their graveyard, so Freuchen buried her himself. He became an outspoken critic of the Christian church and their practice of sending missionaries to the Inuit with no understanding of the people’s culture or traditions. He became an activist for Inuit culture, and when he and Rasmussen returned to Denmark they held a series of lectures that were nominally about their expeditions, but focused heavily on the Inuit and their culture and history.
In 1920, Freuchen returned to Denmark for a longer stay. He joined the Social Democrats and became heavily involved in the journalistic community, contributing articles to the Social Democrats’ publication while at the same time serving as editor-in-chief of a magazine owned by his second wife’s family and leading a movie company. After another expedition to the arctic funded by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Freuchen entered the filmmaking community. He acted as a consultant and screenwriter for Arctic-related scripts, eventually even winning an Oscar.
In 1938 he founded The Adventurer’s Club, which exists today. Only two years later he became an active member of the Danish Resistance during World War Two, despite having lost a leg to frostbite back in 1926. He was known for countering any anti-semitic acts he experienced by looming up to the perpetrator and claiming to be Jewish. He was imprisoned, sentenced to death, escaped, and fled to Sweden. In 1945 he married Jewish designer Dagmar Freuchen-Gale.
The year before his death in 1957 he became the fifth-ever winner of The $64,000 dollar question. He died of a heart attack in Elmendorf, Alaska. His ashes were scattered on the mountain overlooking Thule, his adopted home.
In all, he published thirty-one books over the course of his life, was honored as a member of the Royal Danish and American Geographical Societies, was awarded with three literary prizes and an Oscar, and had spent five decades campaigning for awareness of the Inuit people and their culture. He was an unstoppable giant of a man who dedicated his life to the people he loved and risked his life for people he didn’t know.
He was humanity’s exemplar.
