3

The Danish Literary Expedition

It was midday, and a ray of red sunlight penetrated the haze, like the reflection of a fire very far away; on the south-west wing the colours were sharp and yellow, the sky overcast and rent with gashes of blue. The dark blue precipices at the edge of the glacier itself stood out like walls against the soft, red blush at the summit; but the ice on the sea, out beyond the glacier, gleamed pale green in the daylight. This was the Polar day in all its splendour.

It is good sometimes to feel the power of Nature. You bend in silence and accept the beauty, without words.

—Knud Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North

After the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede visited Greenland in 1721 and set in motion the Danish colonization, or re- colonization, of the island, Denmark had kept the land mostly isolated. Foreign ships were discouraged from sailing there except in emergencies, and even Danish citizens were forbidden to visit without government approval. As a result, Greenland was remote from both Europe and America in a way not conceivable today. Because only Danish government officials and missionaries were allowed to visit the remote colony, Rasmussen couldn’t return, though he had been born there. Even if he could find a ship willing to take him to Greenland, it would be, if not technically illegal, at least in defiance of Danish government regulations.

This isolationist policy stemmed from the Danish government’s paternalistic desire to allow native Greenlanders to avoid commercial exploitation so that they could adapt more slowly to outside cultural influences. As a result, by the early twentieth century, no travellers or journalists had visited the colony to report on local conditions.

Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, who had been Rasmussen’s companion on his voyage to Iceland, was determined to change that. An outspoken journalist, poet and law student, Mylius-Erichsen, then about thirty years old and on the staff of the prominent newspaper Politiken, had discussed with government officials the possibility of visiting Greenland. He had been planning the expedition since being inspired by his discussions with Rasmussen during their voyage to Iceland. Mylius-Erichsen wanted to tour the southern “civilized” regions of Greenland in order to compare them with the distant northern communities that Rasmussen had always dreamed of visiting. He called his expedition the Danish Literary Expedition because he hoped to find things to write about when he toured the island. Perhaps he would uncover corruption or government incompetence, which would make for good magazine and newspaper articles and fit nicely with his anti -establishment disposition.

As he didn’t speak Greenlandic, Mylius-Erichsen was excited that the charismatic Rasmussen, who could serve as a guide and cultural interpreter, was eager to join the Danish Literary Expedition. They would need other expedition members, so Rasmussen convinced a painter, Count Harald Moltke, to join them. Moltke, then thirty years old, was experienced in northern travel, if not northern culture. He had made several trips to Lapland and Iceland, and even a brief trip to southern Greenland, where he had worked as an artist for a geological expedition. In the coming months, Mylius-Erichsen recruited a fourth expedition member, the twenty-five-year-old Danish physician Dr. Alfred Bertelsen.

Financing the voyage was another issue. Mylius-Erichsen worked tirelessly to secure a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, a charitable foundation that had been established by the brewer and philanthropist J.C. Jacobsen in 1876. The Carlsberg Foundation was the world’s first foundation funded by private industry to support the arts and sciences, particularly in the north. Later, the Carlsberg Foundation was to cover costs for Rasmussen’s various other Greenlandic undertakings. Rasmussen, meanwhile, made a brief trip to Kristiania (now Oslo) in the spring of 1902 to speak to the now-famous Norwegian explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen to secure his support in breaking down any barriers the Danish government might erect to block the expedition. Happily for Rasmussen, not only was Nansen in favor of the endeavour, he was also quite taken with the young Greenlander’s enthusiasm and prospects. He suggested that Rasmussen would make an excellent ethnographer, adding: “Of course, your work does not end with a description of West Greenland and the Smith Sound Eskimos—you must go on to Cumberland and Alaska, and you have benefits like no other researcher before you.” Around the same time, the young Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who was also planning his first major adventure—sailing through the Northwest Passage—was seeking Nansen’s advice and support as well. These early meetings reflected changing attitudes in Denmark: the notion that isolation was the best policy for the Inuit was eroding. Thus, despite some initial resistance from Danish officials, after Mylius- Erichsen’s second application, and bolstered by Nansen’s endorsement, there was no more opposition to the expedition from Denmark’s director of Greenlandic affairs.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1902, Mylius-Erichsen and Rasmussen calculated and purchased the necessary provisions, then tested and collected various types of equipment and clothing. As the only one who had any experience living in Greenland and was familiar with the traditional methods of travel and hunting, Rasmussen knew that nothing they could buy in Copenhagen in the way of clothing, dogsleds, harnesses and tools would be anywhere near as useful as what they could obtain in Greenland. He wrote notes to his relatives in Greenland informing them of his arrival and mentioning that he might need supplies.

Finally, in late May, the day for the Danish Literary Expedition’s departure arrived. Owing to Mylius-Erichsen’s connections in the press and the fact that this was the first civilian expedition to visit Greenland, the event caused great fanfare. The ship made a two-week voyage to Greenland, first arriving at the colonial outpost of Godthåb (now Nuuk) in southwest Greenland, and then sailed north to Rasmussen’s old home, Ilulissat, where the adventurers planned to overwinter, acquiring additional equipment and dogs before setting off for the north in the following spring. Mylius-Erichsen hired one of Rasmussen’s old Greenlander friends, Jørgen Brønlund, to act as an interpreter and worker. Brønlund, who had received a year’s leave from his position as a catechist and teacher, was eager to join the expedition with his old boyhood friend. Rasmussen was not only pleased to have his friend join the expedition, he was also relieved: he hated acting as a translator, conveying and explaining other people’s thoughts and ideas into a different language. He lacked the patience for this, as he had too many of his own ideas to convey. He was too much of a conversationalist to be satisfied with merely communicating the conversations of others.

In Ilulissat, Rasmussen was warmly welcomed by those who remembered him from his childhood. The Danish Literary Expedition members stayed in Rasmussen’s old home at the invitation of the new pastor, Gustav Osterman. Rasmussen’s connections in the local community ensured that they soon acquired dogs and sleds, and now they began to learn how to drive them— Mylius-Erichsen and Moltke had never done it. As training for the coming season, Mylius-Erichsen, a demanding and somewhat impractical leader, wanted to launch an excursion across Disko Island and back to test the expedition’s equipment and gain experience. Moltke didn’t want to go and was content to remain in Ilulissat, sketching and drawing. Undaunted, the other three members set out to cross the island. This first venture proved to be a disaster: Mylius-Erichsen was a poor dog driver and never seemed to get the knack of it; he was also at a disadvantage in not understanding the Greenlandic language or culture. When angry, Mylius-Erichsen roared, annoying everyone near him. Brønlund, too, was impatient and irritable.

Their tents were blown down by the terrific mountain winds, and several dogs ran away after gnawing through their leather harnesses. The weather was foul and they remained stuck in the mountains; the food ran low and they began eating the dogs’ rations of frozen fish and seal, eventually killing some of the remaining dogs for food before the storm broke. Finally they straggled into Qeqertaq, where Rasmussen had family—Uncle Carl and Aunt Augustine lived there. Seeing the trekkers’ desperate condition, Carl outfitted them with new clothing and gave Rasmussen twelve dogs for the rest of the journey. A few days later they reached Uummannaq, farther north on the coast, where another of Rasmussen’s uncles, Jens Fleischer, lived. They spent several days relaxing there while Rasmussen visited local storytellers and collected legends about the land and its people.

The fiasco exposed difficulties in the relationship between Rasmussen and Mylius-Erichsen, who regularly quarrelled with each other. Both men had literary ambitions, and Mylius- Erichsen feared that Rasmussen’s work about Greenlanders’ imagination and thoughts would compete with his plan to write a history of Greenland. Although the two writers were working on two very different projects that would never really compete, the tension between them remained. Mylius-Erichsen, the official leader of the expedition so far as Denmark was concerned, was also annoyed that wherever they went, Rasmussen was treated as the natural leader, on account of his family ties, fluency in the language and dog-driving skills. The unfortunate Moltke needed several months to mediate the quarrel between the two men. Nevertheless, by March 1903, they were sufficiently reconciled to make the final acquisitions of dogs and equipment for the journey north.

As the five men dogsledded north to Upernavik (“the Springtime Place”) in the spring of 1903, they passed through numerous tiny communities and seminomadic settlements. Rasmussen, the first to arrive, was regularly greeted by villagers clapping him on the back and congratulating him, ignoring the others. He was also given gifts of frozen fish for his dogs, which he shared with the other members of the expedition. While the others went about their various pursuits in the communities, including Dr. Bertelsen’s cursory medical examinations of the villagers and treating of their minor ailments, Rasmussen was so delighted to be back in Greenland that he spent most of his time chatting and gossiping with the local people, telling stories and listening to others’ tales, happy to be surrounded by the Greenlandic language again.

On reaching Upernavik, the northernmost community in “Danish” Greenland with a government outpost, the visitors were welcomed as usual. There Rasmussen organized a series of celebrations and parties, including a dance in which the participants donned a succession of costumes during the evening. The villagers advised the travellers to stay through the winter and to catch a boat back to Denmark the next summer; their planned journey north was too long and hazardous to contemplate. From Uper navik it was almost four hundred miles north and west, paralleling the frozen shores of Melville Bay to Cape York and the northernmost human settlement in the world. Rasmussen recalled their warnings: “Whoever wished to go there, must travel with the South wind, right up to the Lord of the wild northern gales.”

Not to be swayed, at the end of April all the members of the expedition but one set off for the north. Dr. Bertelsen, the lone holdout, declined to venture north of “Danish” Greenland. Perhaps he had tired of the quarrelling between Rasmussen and Mylius-Erichsen. He remained in Upernavik and then headed south to continue his medical research and treatments in remote Greenland communities.* Rasmussen found a replacement for Dr. Bertelsen: Gabriel Olsen, whom everyone called Gaba, was the nephew of a local Danish trader. Yet the northbound party remained small, now with six members: Rasmussen, Mylius- Erichsen, Moltke, Brønlund, Gaba and the Inuk hunter Elias. No other Greenlanders could be tempted to make the journey because so many terrible things had been heard about the pagan northerners. For all of them, it was a venture into the unknown.

The people of Upernavik all knew they had kinsmen living north of Melville Bay beyond the ice barrier. A Greenlander elder told Rasmussen a story he remembered from his childhood. The man’s story, detailing a close encounter from the foggy past, began: “Once upon a time there was a man who lived farther north than any of the settlements. He hunted bears every spring on a dog-sledge.”

On one of his journeys, the man noticed unfamiliar sled tracks that led farther north. He decided to follow them to find out more, and the next spring, during his annual bear hunt, he set off earlier in the season than usual. He drove his dogs north for three days and came upon a collection of stone-and-snow huts that had a strange design, one using narwhal tusks for the roof beams and support posts. Fresh sled tracks led away from the huts, and he never saw any of the people. Returning south, he went on with his life until the next spring, when he again headed north on his annual bear hunt. He loaded his sled with wood, a rare and valuable commodity. Still he encountered no people, just the evidence of their tracks mysteriously disappearing to the north. He was afraid to venture farther north than he had come, so he buried the wood in the snow near their houses as a gift and departed.

On his third expedition, the man “raised the best team of dogs that he had ever had, and earlier than was his custom he drove north after bears and the strange people. When at last he reached the village it was just as it had been the other years: the inhab itants had gone, but in the snow, where he had left his wood, they had hidden a large bundle of walrus tusks, and inside, in the entrance passage, lay a magnificent bitch and her puppies. These were the return gifts of the strangers. He put them on his sledge and drove back home; but the people who lived north of all other men he never found.” Nor had any other Greenlander, apparently, and nor did routine trade ever develop between the two regions. So it was into this unknown that, in the spring of 1903, three Danes and three Greenlanders—with sixty-seven dogs hauling six sleds packed with provisions and gifts—ventured north to fulfill Rasmussen’s childhood dream.

Sixty-seven sled dogs consume a lot of meat. During the winter a single dog at rest can consume 4,500 calories per day, and on an active day, up to an astonishing 10,000 calories. In ad dition to carrying the usual camp equipment and travel clothing, the sleds were loaded with vast quantities of frozen seal and fish. Even so, it was impossible to carry sufficient food for men and dogs on an excursion they estimated would take many weeks. In order to fill that many stomachs for weeks of hard travel, the travellers knew they would have to rely on hunting, which added a degree of uncertainty to the expedition. After hauling all day, the dogs became hungry and often dangerously feral. They would snarl at each other and fight if no food was available and would then devour their leather harnesses and traces. Roald Amundsen faced similar problems on his race to the South Pole several years later, in 1911, when his dogs were starving and he and his men huddled in their tents for fear of being attacked by their dogs. Only Rasmussen, Elias and Brønlund were experienced dog drivers and hunters, so the success of the expedition was disproportionately heaped on their shoulders.

As they travelled around the rim of the ice-encrusted Melville Bay, their daily routine was to eat breakfast, pack up, sled and ski as long as daylight allowed—the days were getting longer with the coming of summer—and then set up camp as the light waned. After eating, they would smoke their pipes and write in their journals. Mylius-Erichsen was tasked with taking accurate distance measurements, and Moltke was assigned to sketch prominent geographical features and correct the expedition’s rudimentary maps wherever possible. No one knew anything about the terrain or the weather they were likely to encounter as they pushed north. Despite the April sun shining almost constantly, the temperature was a bracing –4° Fahrenheit (–20° Celsius) on the coldest days.

After nearly two weeks of hard travel, Rasmussen and Elias ventured ahead to break trail and hunt. The dogs were well trained in what Rasmussen called “the bear signal.” When a hunter found evidence of bear tracks, he repeatedly yelled in a way that to the dogs signified an imminent feast of fresh bear meat. They would go wild with anticipation and surge forward with renewed vigour to catch the nearby bear. Melville Bay was one of the greatest polar bear hunting regions in Greenland because the prevailing west winds blew giant icebergs into the bay from Lancaster Sound and Jones Sound, and these icebergs sometimes had bears on them. On this occasion, the dogs unerringly led the hunters to two polar bears, which Rasmussen and Elias shot and triumphantly brought back to the others. The great beasts were cut up quickly before the meat froze, and meal-sized quantities were portioned out for the dogs and steaks cut for the explorers.

Travel conditions deteriorated even more near the Cape York headland, and the dogsleds now struggled over immense ice blocks and pressure ridges. The dogs were behaving better on a diet of polar bear meat and had stopped eating their harnesses and straps, but the men endured freezing nights in their tents, as they didn’t have either the time or the knowledge to construct snow houses. Moltke spent hours outside sketching and drawing, perched on wind-lashed rock promontories and ice hummocks, until exhaustion and cold led to his illness. While the others crawled into their freezing sleeping bags, Moltke sweated and burned with fever, unable to eat or sleep. Also unable to ski, he was placed on a sled and pulled. Rasmussen led the procession, breaking trail for the others.

When the bear meat ran out, the dogs once again became wild with hunger. The expedition had left some provisions behind to lighten its load and now had barely enough food for a single good daily meal for its members. At this point they encountered the remnants of some abandoned snow-and-stone houses, and what looked like fresh tracks leading north. “The first time one sees a house of this description,” Rasmussen recorded, “one is struck by how little human beings can have and still be content. It is all so primitive, and has such an odour of paganism and magic. A cave like this, skilfully built with gigantic blocks of stone, makes one think of half supernatural beings. You see them, in your fancy, pulling and tearing at raw flesh, you see the blood dripping from their fingers, and you are seized yourself with a strange excitement at the thought of the extraordinary life that awaits you in their company.”

His excitement was not universally shared.

Gaba and Elias were afraid that people lurked nearby, ready to attack. When Mylius-Erichsen crawled into the entrance of one of the houses, he kept a revolver in his hand as a defence against surprise attack by polar bears, Inuit or feral dogs. He described the huts as “all worn, sooty, greasy, disgusting smelling and presumably vermin filled. A creepy cave of wild beasts.” But it was worse than that: the huts were empty. There was “no one to greet us inside—not to put even the meanest food before us and say: Eat up! No one to give us water from melted ice and say, Drink!” In one hut, the men discovered a frozen seal, which they cut up with axes and fed to the ravenous dogs. Soon they would quite happily spend many months in similar dwellings.

Exhausted, they collapsed for a rest in the sun after the preliminary exploration. When they awoke, they inspected the sled tracks leading north and noticed that the tracks seemed narrower and the people’s footprints smaller, but the dogs’ paw prints were larger. Things were different here, at the rim of the world. Rasmussen, Elias and Gaba concluded that the tracks were fresh and that perhaps they could overtake the mysterious travellers. After they had eaten the last of their food and drunk a cup of warm cocoa, Mylius-Erichsen unpacked three Danish flags and tried to stamp them into the still-frozen ground. They were able to gather enough rocks to build a cairn around the base to hold the flags, and he conducted a brief ceremony that would purportedly take possession of the land for Denmark: all the territory they were about to explore would be “enclosed in the Danish kingdom and be a part of our fatherland.”

The ceremony complete, four of the men loaded their sleds “and drove off along the glorious rocky coast, into the clear, light night.” Because they were exhausted and Moltke remained dangerously ill, the group decided that Rasmussen and Brønlund would continue north, following the elusive tracks, while Mylius- Erichsen and Moltke would follow at a slower pace. Elias and Gaba would remain behind to try to catch seals at blowholes in the ice. By this time Moltke was so ill that the others feared he was dying, and he was strapped in his sleeping bag onto Mylius- Erichsen’s sled, where he continued to slip in and out of consciousness.

Rasmussen and Brønlund surged ahead, following the tracks as fast as their exhausted dogs could carry them. “All the provisions we could take were a few biscuits and a box of butter,” Rasmussen wrote. “Still, we had our rifles to fall back upon.” Soon the two men came upon even more recent sled tracks and a cairn of stones mounded over a freshly caught seal: people were nearby. They drove on, for another fifty-six miles. Nearly dropping from exhaustion, they stopped, ate a little butter, and again roused the dogs. After continuing north for a few more hours, with a bitter wind in their faces, they saw unmistakable moving dots on the horizon, dark against the white. “The dogs dropped their tails and pricked up their ears,” Rasmussen recalled. “We murmured the signal again between our teeth, and the snow swirled up beneath their hind legs.”

The two weary travellers surged across the snow plain toward two fur-clad figures, one driving a dogsled and the other riding on it. The strangers had spotted Rasmussen and Brønlund in the distance and now turned around to race toward them. Rasmussen and the approaching man leaped off the runners of their sleds and ran alongside one another, as was the custom, greeting each other warmly while their dogs barked in excitement. The strangers, Maisanguak and his wife, Meqo, stared in astonishment at each other—astonishment that grew when Rasmussen explained who he and his companion were. Maisanguak yelled back to his wife, “White men! White men! White men have come on a visit!”

The couple were returning to their home, about fifteen miles up the coast of Melville Bay. Four other families lived there, in three stone houses and five snow huts, and even more people were at the beach at Agpat (Saunders Island), where the hunting was particularly good at this time of year. Maisanguak and Meqo were so excited that they decided to join Rasmussen and Brønlund and lead them to Agpat. They soon met two other men on sleds who joined the group, and they all proceeded toward Agpat. The drivers screamed, “White men! White men!” and people rushed from their dwellings to behold the spectacle. Rasmussen described the excitement: “Our dogs drooped their tails and pricked up their ears as a many-tongued roar from the land reached us. And then, like a mountain slide, the whole swarm rushed down to the shore, where we had pulled up—a few old grey-haired men and stiff-jointed old crones, young men and women, children who could hardly toddle, all dressed alike in these fox and bear-skin furs, which created such an extraordinarily barbaric first impression. Some came with long knives in their hands, with bloodstained arms and upturned sleeves, having been in the midst of flaying operations when we arrived, and all this produced a very savage effect.”

The expedition had reached the Etah Eskimos—Inughuit, Polar Eskimos, Polar Inuit or Thule people, as they have been variously called—who lived farther north than any other people on earth, in a land Rasmussen called “The Kingdom of the North Wind.” They had reached the land of the “New People,” a group cut off from the more southern Greenlanders by the two-hundred- mile ice barrier around Melville Bay. Even to Rasmussen, this first encounter with the Polar Inuit in Etah was a shock and a revelation. “Never in my life have I felt myself to be in such wild, unaccustomed surroundings, never so far, so very far away from home, as when I stood in the midst of the tribe of noisy Polar Eskimos on the beach at Agpat.” While the children snuck glances from around sleds and huts, dashing away if any of the strangers looked at them, the men passed around, among themselves and to their visitors, a frozen raw walrus heart, each gnawing off a chunk of meat as a symbol of welcome and camaraderie.

Contrary to common belief at the time, the Polar Inuit were not entirely isolated from contact with the outside world. Whalers had periodically put into sheltered bays in the region for brief summer visits. Other explorers had been in contact with them, including the British captain John Ross, the first European to encounter these people, whom he called the “Arctic Highlanders,” in 1818. The British mariners had traded some beads, cloth, mirrors, sundry metal utensils and knives for furs and meat. Later contacts included the Scot William Penny in 1850–1851, and Americans Elisha Kent Kane in 1853–1855 and Charles Francis Hall in 1872–1873, although their cultural exchanges with the Polar Inuit were limited. The American explorer Robert Peary had visited the region in 1892 and 1894 and later used the area as the base for his North Pole expeditions. Nevertheless, these Inuit were not accustomed to having Europeans arrive from the south by dogsled; this was the first arrival of Europeans by dogsled.

Rasmussen immediately noticed that while the northerners’ language was similar to that spoken in southern Greenland, differing only in dialect and accent, their customs were different, causing occasional embarrassment: “On one’s arrival at a settlement in Danish West Greenland, it is usual for the young women to help the newcomers off with their outdoor clothes. Now, for a moment, I forgot where I was, and as the Greenlandic custom is, stretched out my foot towards a young girl who was standing by my side, meaning her to pull off my outer boots. The girl grew embarrassed, and the men laughed. There was that winning bashfulness about her that throws attraction over all Nature’s children; a pale blush shot across her cheek, like a ripple over a smooth mountain lake; she half turned away from me, and her black eyes looked uneasily out over the frozen sea.”

“What is your name?”

“Others will tell you what my name is,” she stammered.

“Aininaq is her name,” put in the bystanders, laughing.

A jovial old man then came up to her and said with gravity:

“Do what the strange man asks you.” And she stooped down at once and drew off my boots.

“Move away, let me come!” called out an old woman from the crowd, and she elbowed the people aside and forced her way through to my sledge.

“It was my daughter you were talking to!” she burst out eagerly. “Do you not think her beautiful?” and she rolled her little self-conscious eyes around.

But Aininaq had slipped quietly away from the crowd of curious beholders and hidden herself. It was only later that I learnt my request to her had been construed into a proposal of marriage.

Rasmussen had reached the land he was for many years to call home and to which he would often return. Once the New People had built a large snow house for their unexpected visitors, they helped to bring in the remaining sleds and members of the Danish Literary Expedition. Rasmussen and Brønlund spent the next two weeks shuttling between Etah and the caches of goods they had left behind, bringing exotic luxuries such as bread, preserves, canvas tents, tools and items Rasmussen considered indispensable, such as his phonograph and records. Although ice and snow lingered here in May, men and women threw off their clothes and played in the welcome warmth as the dogs sought relief from the heat by the ice edge, their tongues lolling in the sun. Moltke, who had been “transformed from a young, healthy man into a dirty skeleton,” was slowly nursed back to health. Once the travellers were settled in the community and given food, rest and shelter, Moltke resumed sketching, now of the people and activities in this exotic land.

Not long after the visitors had settled in, a blood-curdling cry issued from the stone hut of a powerful shaman, Saqdloq. As he was the greatest and oldest member of the tribe, everyone rushed over to investigate. Saqdloq was about to conjure spirits, and a hush went through the gathered crowd. “Every face bore the imprint of earnest reverence.” Rasmussen peeked in the irregular window to behold the weathered old man sitting on a bench and drumming.

“When he saw my face at the window he stopped beating the drum, laughed up at me, and said: ‘All foolery, silly humbug! Nothing but lies!’ And he wagged his head apologetically.”

Someone pulled Rasmussen back from the window and ordered him to be quiet, as no one could interfere in a spirit conjuring. “All foolery!” the old man repeated, with what Rasmussen called “genuine Eskimo sham modesty. A magician always precedes his conjurations with a few deprecating words about himself and his powers. And the more highly esteemed he is, the more anxious he is to pretend that his words are lies.” The drumbeat grew louder and was soon joined by a slow murmuring that also grew louder and stronger as the spirit song plodded on. Others in the crowd hummed along or issued grunts and exclamations with the rhythm. Soon Saqdloq began to moan as if under a heavy weight. The sounds of a struggle could be heard, followed by a screech. “Ow! Ow! It is impossible! I am underneath! He is lying on me. Help me! I am too weak, I am not equal to it!”

Finally, Saqdloq’s shrieks faded into convulsive sobbing. But the drum beat on, with rhythm and power. Then it stopped and the crowd grew uneasy. The shaman released a series of staccato barks: “The Evil Fate, misfortune-bringing spirit, the white men!” and then made some garbled sounds.

“The white men brought the Evil Fate with them, they had a misfortune-bringing spirit with them. I saw it myself, there are no lies in my mouth; I do not lie, I am no liar, I saw it myself!” The people looked toward the newcomers. In a long and disjointed speech, punctuated by howls, moans and words in a secret spirit language, the shaman pronounced that the evil spirit had touched Harald Moltke and made him sick. It had tainted many of the dogs, too, accounting for their illness. Then followed groaning, heavy breathing, the sounds of wrestling and clacking of stones and the relentless pounding of the drum. No one was to eat dog’s flesh, he proclaimed. But the shaman’s wife had eaten dog, she claimed in a weak voice, and she was now ill. The shaman roared louder in ululating howls mixed with deep laughter. He could be seen, despite his advanced age, contorting around the small chamber “like a wounded animal.” Then, at last, the ordeal was over.

Once the evil spirit had been exorcised, the visitors were officially welcomed to the community. In a short time, Rasmussen impressed them with his skills; he proved to be one of the best dog drivers around, and one of the most skilled caribou hunters. With his unique ability to forge relationships, he was quickly accepted. The Inuit regarded him, rather than Mylius-Erichsen, as the natural leader of the expedition because he was proficient in the skills that were critical for their survival. Rasmussen was a good speaker and storyteller as well, and he quickly learned the subtleties of their distinct northern dialect. Most important of all, he was a good listener. He spent countless hours crouched in the stone huts or snow houses of the oldest people, listening intently to their stories, hearing their songs and poems.

He never wrote anything down when listening, just concentrated and memorized; afterward, he would rush to his hut and record what he had heard in a notebook. Neither did he carry or use scientific instruments of any kind, instead relying on his hosts and his own travel and survival skills to get around. “It would have destroyed their confidence in him,” wrote Freuchen, “and their feeling of equality to see him pull out a theodolite or another magnetic instrument.” Much later, after many expeditions and years of living in the region, Rasmussen would claim with perfect honesty that “no hunter exists up there with whom I have not hunted, and there is hardly a child whose name I do not know.”

The six southerners spent from May to December of 1903 in the Cape York District. Living with “the neighbours of the North Pole,” they experienced all the seasons. As the sun grew stronger in June, the snow melted and the oceanside cliffs came alive with ducks, petrels, guillemots, razorbills, gulls and kittiwakes, quarrelling and screeching in “one great roiling wave of sound” as they fought for nesting space on the innumerable ledges and cracks. There were over fifty breeding species of birds in Greenland. “Things are beginning to wake up out there. Summer is coming!” was a common refrain as driftwood fires were lit in anticipation of the first great bird feast. Occasionally, melting ice dislodged in mighty chunks from the face of the cliff, and as it plummeted, it sent up vast clouds of squawking birds. The children would dash to the stones below the cliffs to collect the birds killed by the falling ice.

“In the spring, there are no regular hours for sleep in an Eskimo camp,” Rasmussen wrote. “Life goes on by day and night, if the weather is good. A large open fire, kept burning briskly, assembles the people round the open-air banqueting place, and the constant coming and going of men who are starting out on fishing trips, and of those who are returning, keeps up life and interest round the fire all the time.” The fire pit was the perfect setting for the charismatic Rasmussen to meet people and talk to them, to learn of their activities and make plans to join them on their journeys.

In summer, the land was transformed under the perpetual sunlight into a lichen and wildflower carpet profuse with life. “The sun is scorching our faces,” Rasmussen wrote, “and the sun’s rays, which are flung back by the endless icefields, force us to close our eyes, so brilliant are they.” Foxes, stoats and Arctic hares wandered the rocky plains. Hunters pursued caribou, while kayakers searched for walrus and seal.

In spite of the beautiful weather, Moltke’s recovery was slow and he could still barely walk. The members of the expedition decided they would cut their trip short and try to return south before winter fully set in again. At first they hoped whalers might appear in the bay and take them south. But when half of July passed with no ship arriving, they knew they couldn’t wait any longer. Rasmussen decided to head north, to find out about a small boat reputedly owned by a man who had received it as a gift from Robert Peary. The boat would enable them to sail south before Melville Bay froze.

On July 17, he and Brønlund and two young local Inuit, Sidtluq and Qisunguaq, readied their sleds and dogs for the journey. It was hard going from the start. Inland travel was rough at that time of year, and they made slow progress, clambering over rocky outcroppings and headlands, wading through glacial streams wild with the summer melt, and following the snakes of unmelted snow while searching for a path for the sleds. They brought only sleeping bags, a little clothing and some sugar and biscuits on this trip—no tent and no meat: “Men don’t drag meat with them in the height of summer,” Rasmussen observed. Although it was summer, they were stranded by several storms that kept them hunkered down in caves for days at a time. The few duck eggs they found were insufficient nourishment. Finally, they shot a caribou and ended their “starvation fare.” They spent many days telling stories to pass the time during a series of unrelenting storms, until Sidtluq grew impatient and began yelling into the sleet, “Stop the rain! Stop the rain!” When Rasmussen asked him what he was doing, Sidtluq calmly replied that “up among the rocks there lived powerful spirits who can command the wind and stop the downpours of rain.”

But the rain and sleet did not stop. It continued relentlessly, and soon the men’s feet were swollen from damp and cold. Then Qisunguaq began yelling at Rasmussen, blaming him for the unseasonal storms because Rasmussen had taken some items from a grave they had passed.

“You are so strange, you white men!” he yelled. “You collect things you will never require, and you cannot leave even the graves alone. All this calamity is the revenge of the dead. Perhaps we shall die of hunger. Just because you took those stupid things!” Rasmussen tried to explain that he had done as they had told him—exchanging tea, matches, blubber and meat for the scratching-pin, needle-case and curved knife he had taken—surely the corpse would have been satisfied with these “gifts to the soul”? But Qisunguaq would not be placated so easily.

“The thoughts of the dead are not as our thoughts,” he sighed. “The dead are incomprehensible in their doings.”

“Stop, stop the rain!” Sidtluq again called despairingly up to the rocks.

Even Brønlund was growing bored and irritated with their forced inactivity, and he called to Rasmussen: “Tell tales, and do not stop till we have forgotten where we are and think we are with them.”

Soon, Rasmussen recalled, “memory hypnotises us back to experiences that lie behind; and fancy draws us ever in the same direction back to vanished well-being, when we knew no privations; back to the delicacies of the Danish-Greenlandic kitchen, to the magnificent splendour of the shops. And thus, when one of us gets well under way with his narrative, we succeed in forgetting for a moment where we are, and friends, who perhaps think of us no more, Danes and Greenlanders, file past us, while the roaring stream outside thunders and swells with the rain.”

When the sun finally came out on July 25, many days of hard slogging remained before they would reach the place where a boat might be found. On one occasion they clambered up over 2,000-foot cliffs, hauling the sleds and dogs up the rocks with ropes, only to find that their destination was blocked and they would have to backtrack. After two more days of sledding, this time over glaciers, they encountered people who fortunately had food to share. Eventually they came to the small bay, only to discover that there was no boat in the district after all. One wonders if Rasmussen had gone on this journey as much for the adventure as to investigate the dubious likelihood of finding a seaworthy vessel in such an unlikely place.

Once back in the Agpat region near Saunders Island, Rasmussen and his companions, using boulders from a nearby cliff, built a winter house near the village. With no boat, they would have to wait until Melville Bay froze over again before heading south. “Up there then, in that cave half-buried in the cliff, we were to await our fate, the Winter and the Dark. We were going to pass the next few months of cold and night far north of the civilisation which so many of us regard as a necessity of life. Our tiny winter lair was of cold stones, and we had no stove to warm ourselves with, and no fire. And we should have to procure our food from day to day. And yet,” he enthused, “I felt a warming wave of joy rush through my body, the joy which those who live on their travels feel most keenly: excitement at the rich possibilities of life!”

By September the nights were lengthening, the new ice was forming, and the village was anticipating the return of the moon and the stars. To celebrate, Rasmussen invited all the “happy people” to his hut for a party. He brought out his hand-cranked phonograph, played recorded opera music and doled out tea and currant biscuits to his guests. Moltke fired off some magnesium shells for makeshift fireworks. “This may sound all very childish and foolish,” Rasmussen wrote, “read among the manifold resources of civilisation; but to us, up in that little Eskimo camp, it meant a great deal. Our spirits rose high and we saw our strange existence in a very festive light. In this marvellous land you can hold a perfect bacchanalia on a few cups of tea and a little mouldy bread.”

He had obtained the currant biscuits from Roald Amundsen, whose ship Gjøa was in the vicinity in mid-August, pushing through the ice-choked waters of Melville Bay to pick up a cache of supplies that Amundsen had commissioned a Scottish whaling captain to deposit for him before launching his epic voyage through the Northwest Passage. While Gjøa was in the vicinity of Dalrymple Rock, two kayakers came around a giant iceberg and began to wave and yell at the Norwegians. “We were very anxious to make the acquaintance of the North Greenland Eskimo,” Amundsen recalled, “of whom many strange things are reported. They were extremely lively, jabbered both together, threw their arms about and gesticulated. There was evidently something particular they wanted to tell us, but we, of course, could not understand a syllable.” Soon there was the sound of gunfire, and a flotilla of six additional kayaks rounded the iceberg, one flying a Danish flag. It was Rasmussen and Mylius- Erichsen, on tour with their Inuit companions. They all enjoyed a festive congregation of “joyous confusion” while the Norwegian explorers loaded their supplies and shared the currant biscuits with the two Danes.

Ironically, it was around this time, in the fall of 1903, that the first news of the Danish Literary Expedition reached Copenhagen. The Scottish whaling ship Diana reported on the “pitiful” state of health of the three Danes when it had dropped off supplies for the Amundsen expedition near Saunders Island at the end of June. While Rasmussen was on his northern excursion, Mylius-Erichsen met Captain Adams of the Diana on the shore and brought him to the village to meet Moltke, who was still partly paralyzed. When Adams returned to Scotland, he described the three Danish expedition members as “pathetic, filthy and unclean, while oddly enough the two Eskimos were scrubbed, combed and looked to be brave men.” His comments, intemperate and vague as they were, provoked controversy in Denmark. There was no communication except by sailing ship back then, so as far as anyone could tell the entire party might either be dead by the time the news arrived or might have travelled south to Danish Greenland and safety.

From our twenty-first-century vantage point, expecting instant communication via satellite phone, when the fate of explorers is nearly always known, and help can be dispatched with comparative speed, this uncertainty appears unbearable. At the time, Captain Adams’s report gave rise to a fog of unsubstantiated rumours, speculation and sensational claims, often designed to attract attention. What if the Danes and Greenlanders were in danger, or dying, or trapped? What if they were in fact in desperate need of rescue? But if they were really in such a poor state, why had they not returned with Adams on the whaling ship?

“The lower the sun circles towards the horizon,” Rasmussen wrote in People of the Polar North, “the lovelier in its vivid colouring the Polar country grows. Light and darkness wrestle in blood-red sunsets, and the clouds with the light behind them, crimson-gashed, glide out into the night.” He and his companions had spent nearly eight months in the Cape York region, living among the New People in all seasons before it was finally safe for them to cross Melville Bay again on their way south. Darkness had come upon them months ago, and gloom ruled the land much of the time. The “visiting month,” November, had come and gone, and people went about their business in this darkest time of the year with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The members of the Danish Literary Expedition had inspected the bone runners of their sleds for damage, repaired them and cut new leather harnesses for the dogs that would pull them. Without these preparations, the dark season would be deadly.

Mylius-Erichsen and Rasmussen had done much writing and thinking; they had each formed the foundations of their respective books, and their minds were filled with new ideas. Now it was January 1904, and they would make their second attempt to cross Melville Bay. In early December, they had ignored warnings of poorly frozen ice, setting off with eleven people and nine sleds, each hauled by a team of six to nine dogs. It was a difficult journey in the cold and dark of winter, with eerie shadows looming on the snow and the appearance of strange ice formations. They were turned back by open water. Once again Rasmussen was in the unexpected position of making decisions for the entire party, which now included several northern Inuit who wanted to visit their southern cousins, as well as one Inuk who wanted to return to Denmark with him. In fact, several young men had expressed an interest in visiting Denmark.

One of these was Qisunguaq, the young man with whom Rasmussen had travelled north and spent days holed up in a rocky cave waiting out a violent summer storm. Rasmussen enjoyed Qisunguaq’s company, and they had become close companions on several journeys. In The People of the Polar North, Rasmussen writes of how Qisunguaq spoke to him of his desire to travel to Denmark.

“You have masters in your country?” he asked Rasmussen. “A man of wisdom and power, who can think thoughts for other people as well as himself, and tell one what to do?”

“Yes, that is what a master ought to be,” Rasmussen replied.

“I should very much like to have a master, and I should like to choose you,” Qisunguaq said.

“Perhaps you would get tired of it, Qisunguaq,” Rasmussen replied. “All you men up here are accustomed to be the masters of your thoughts and actions yourselves.”

“Yes; but a master gives the one who helps him possessions. That is what the great Peary always did up here. And I am fond of you; and I should like to possess something.” Slowly Rasmussen learned Qisunguaq’s story. Although he came from a respected household, his father had died in a fall when Qisunguaq was young, and he grew up having to provide for his mother and two younger siblings. He had never been able to acquire his own dogs or gun, and consequently, although he was twenty years old, he had no wife. “The desire to become the owner of something had taken hold of him,” Rasmussen recalled. Qisunguaq knew that the men who had ventured north with Peary returned with valuable items. He wanted some for himself, to share with his younger brother and to help him gain a wife. Rasmussen agreed to take him south when they departed in the fall. But Qisunguaq soon had second thoughts.

“Riches and possessions are death,” he burst out. “I will follow you far away south,” he went on, “and you will keep your word and give me precious weapons, I know that. But amongst strangers I shall die. My body will not know life in other countries; rich in gifts, I shall be obliged to sacrifice the breath of my life to strangers.”

“The spirits of the dead have talked with me; my words are wisdom, like the speech of our forefathers. I have seen hidden things!” he shouted and then began to tremble. Qisunguaq had closed his eyes and clenched his fists. He soon began singing a spirit song, which ended in great fits of sobbing.

“I held him by the shoulders to quiet him,” Rasmussen wrote, but “he rushed at me with a roar, and for a long time we struggled together, stumbling in the dark over the stones. He pressed his face against my neck, as if he were trying to bite me, and ground his teeth with rage.” Was he wrestling with his fear? The question remained unanswered, and they travelled in silence for the remainder of the journey. When Rasmussen went looking for Qisunguaq in the fall, to ask the young man whether he still wanted to go south, Qisunguaq replied that he had changed his mind: he had gotten married and would be heading north instead.

Another young man, Osarkrak, was also an orphan who desired the material wealth that was unobtainable in his present circumstances. He was cross-eyed and had a leg that could not stretch out fully, forcing him to walk with a bent gait, “like a bear that balances on his hind legs.” Despite this, he was a good enough hunter and an excellent dog driver, but still he could not find a wife because of his imperfection. As a youth he had wandered between families, often sitting by himself outside to eat the food scraps tossed to him from within. Mylius-Erichsen wrote that Osarkrak “was poor because his legs were paralyzed. For that reason he was not a good hunter… With his little sled, built of many, small, joined pieces of wood, and pulled by only three dogs, he continually visited the settlements. The dark season he spent with one or another family willing to mend his clothing in exchange for his catch.” Osarkrak was determined to better his standing by journeying south with Rasmussen.

The January journey south across Melville Bay was “a terribly bad one.” The hunting was poor, and the travellers ran low on food. The dogs in particular were starving, until a polar bear appeared on the ice ahead of them and they shot it. In early February, the party reached a food cache it had placed on the trip north. A few days later, on February 12, the sun rose briefly on the horizon for the first time in months, and soon after, the men saw a Danish flag fluttering in the wind. They had reached Upernavik. It was feared that they had perished in the north, so their sudden appearance in the village was cause for celebration. They spent several months in Upernavik to recover their strength before conditions improved with the return of the sun and they could continue south to Ilulissat. There they visited with Rasmussen’s uncle Jens Fleischer; but as they found no ship to carry them farther, they continued south by dogsled to board a ship there. Moltke decided to wait for a ship in Ilulissat, returning to Denmark on his own. Although Rasmussen was reluctant to leave Greenland, he was equally reluctant to remain in one place for too long. He had already developed the nomadic urge that would characterize his life.

* Dr. Bertelsen remained in Greenland for many years, until 1927.