Lore Accurate Humans: Peter Freuchen

Everyone's got that grandpa who goes on about his glory days, back when he benched 405 in high school, fought one billion lions and won, and was by all accounts the most legendary man to ever walk the face of the Earth. Most grandkids brush it off, knowing full well that their grandpa wasn't all that. But Peter Freuchen was all that — and more.

Born in 1886 in Denmark, Peter Freuchen was baptized Catholic, studied medicine at University, and led a relatively normal life until 1906, at age 20, he went on his first expedition to Greenland. This would be the first of many voyages with other known legend Knud Rasmussen. On this particular voyage, they would travel 600 miles across Greenland by dogsled to map the remainder of the island, and see if there were any remaining Inuit people on the island.

They would end up accomplishing both goals when they met the Inuit people on their trip along the northeastern coastline. The two spent time learning the language, trading with the natives, and hunting everything from wolves to walruses as they absorbed as much of the culture as they could.

Freuchen fell in love with Greenland and — together with Rasmussen — established the Thule outpost so he would have a home base for the next decade of expeditions that he would go on across Greenland.

The most noteworthy of the expeditions was The First Thule Expedition — where Freuchen's only goal was to disprove the claim that Peary Land and Greenland weren't connected. He would accomplish this by covering 1,000 kilometers of ice with an expedition team, nearly dying multiple times in the process.

He met and married his first wife, Mekupaluk, in 1911, and she joined him on several of his expeditions. However, she would die of the Spanish Flu in 1921, and when the church refused to bury her, Freuchen dug the grave himself.

Freuchen returned to Denmark in the 1920s, where he joined the Social Democrats and became a writer for the newspaper Politiken while also commencing work on the first of his 30 books he would publish. It was also at this time he married his second wife, Magda Vang Lauridsen.

In 1926, he wanted to return to Greenland for a dogsled trip across the country. Instead, he ended up getting stuck under an avalanche. According to his own claims, to free himself he had to freeze a bowel movement into a dagger. While the manner in which he freed himself is still unknown, what is known is that he then crawled for three hours back to Thule, saw that his toes had gangrene, and amputated them himself with a hammer and pliers — without anesthesia. Unfortunately, that effort wasn't enough to save the rest of the leg, which required amputation and replacement with a peg.

The amputation didn't stop Freuchen from continuing to be larger-than-life, especially when World War II rolled around. Never someone who tolerated any sort of discrimination, Freuchen didn't take kindly to those who expressed anti-Semitic views. He would often rectify the situation by approaching the person in question, towering over them at his staggering height of 6'7”, and claim to be Jewish to see if they would lift a finger or tuck their tail and run.

He also served as an active member of the Danish Resistance, where he hid refugees and worked to undermine Nazi operations. He became such a nuisance that when he was finally arrested by the Germans, he was sentenced to death. He managed to escape, flee to Sweden and continue to wreak havoc for most of the rest of the war.

In 1945, he moved to New York and refocused on his careers in writing and filmmaking, marrying his third wife Dagmar Cohn and waiting out the end of the war.

In 1956, he made an appearance on the show “The $64,000 Question,” where he would become the fifth person to ever win the show. This was in large part due to the fact that they asked him about his area of expertise — the Seven Seas.

In the preface of the final book he released, the date he noted was  Aug. 30, 1957. Three days later, he insisted on carrying his own bags up a long flight of stairs at Elmendorf Air Base in Anchorage, Alaska, when he suffered a heart attack, dying at the age of 71. That kind of lifespan for anyone leading as adventurous of a life as Freuchen was unheard of at the time. Following his death, the mythos surrounding this man — all 6'7” of him — has expanded a bit beyond the truth, but underneath the tall tales lies a legendary foundation that Freuchen built by hand, one exploit at a time.