#grenland

Bøkkerkåsa and Eden's garden , Frierfjorden - Jan Thomas Njerve , 1943.

Norwegian, 1927-2014

Siljan, Grenland, Telemark, Norway (June 16, 1989-Today)

He was born in Denmark on Feb. 20, 1886. At the age of eight he got his first small boat, in which he spent all his time, while school did not interest him. He befriended sailors in the local harbor and listened to their stories from lands far away. He studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen for a time, but did not feel that medicine was his true calling. Freuchen went on his first trip to Greenland as the second youngest member of the Danish expedition to Northeast Greenland in the years 1906-08, and after that he participated in several other. Once back in Denmark, he was working as a reporter when he met Knud Rasmussen. In 1910, they established the North Star trading post in the heartland of the Inughuit of northern Greenland, where Freuchen became chief trader.

But he was much more than a merchant. Freuchen travelled and explored, adding to the geographical knowledge of northern Greenand. The Inuit called him Piitarjuaq — big Peter (Piitarsuaq in Greenlandic). Some danes called him Peter the lyer

There are plenty of good stories when it comes to the polar explorer Peter Freuchen. The most famous took place in a howling blizzard, where the temperature had crept down to 54 degrees below zero. It was during the fifth Thule expedition in 1924 that the weather surprised Peter Freuchen. Now he was buried behind his dog sled and trying to find shelter, because he had neither tent nor sleeping bag with him. The storm raged for several days, and when it finally abated, Peter Freuchen was walled up behind a thick layer of granite-hard snow. Then it was that Peter had one of his ideas: he fashioned a chisel out of a piece of his own excrement. 11 hours later he had hacked his way out of the cave with the frozen shit chisel. At least that was the story Peter Freuchen himself liked to tell, although there is probably something to the fact that it was his hands and a piece of frozen skin that saved him - and not his own excrement. Was Denmark’s most recognisable polar explorer a liar or just a good storyteller? Both, perhaps, and definitely a lot more

For a number of years he lived with the Inuit and tried to live like them. After returning to Denmark, he farmed until 1940. However, he had more success as a writer during this period. His authorship includes, among other things, travelogues, novels and autobiographical works. Freuchen was certainly not politically indifferent. In the 1920s, he had joined the Social Democrats and wrote articles in Politiken with political content. He was no friend of Christian missionary activity and a great chastiser of the imperialism and capitalism which had destroyed and oppressed many so-called primitive cultures. He was pro-Soviet and traveled to Moscow, but got a terrible impression of the political conditions there under Stalin. In the 1930s he turned against Nazism in Germany, actively participated in the "Liberation Committee for Hitler-Fascism Victims" and traveled to Berlin with other Scandinavian writers to gain access to the Mohabit prison, where, among other things, Ernst Thälmann, the German labor leader, was imprisoned without trial. The authors were denied entry and expelled. In collaboration with i.a. grosser Carl Mogensen, a former foreign legionnaire, helped Peter Freuchen communists and Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s. Despite the occupation, Peter Freuchen continued his verbal opposition to the Germans. Like other well-known anti-Nazi Danes, he was therefore a thorn in the side of the germans. In September 1943, he was arrested at his residence in Birkerød and interned in Høvelte-camp. However, he was released again at the behest of Werner Best. According to Best, Freuchen was a salon communist. But the following year it was crazy again with a house inspection. The family went underground and took a boat to Hven and continued via Skåne to Stockholm .

Together with Carl Mogensen, he also founded the "Danish Professional Boxing Association", and in 1938, following the American model, the "Adventurer's Club".

In 1932, Freuchen starred in the film Eskimo, based on his own script, which made him world famous, and in his older days he became almost a fairy tale figure — not least when in 1956 he won a $64,000 quiz on American television based on his extensive knowledge of the world's oceans. He died in 1957 during a stay in Alaska and his ashes were scattered over Dundasfjell at Thule.

A “snow sailor”: AB Hjalmar Hovig. In 1909-10 there was an expedition  to North East Greenland ; The “Alabama expeditionen”

Nome, Grenland, Telemark, Norway (March 10, 1989-Today)