4

The New People

I have a little song to sing,

The little worn song of another,

But I sing it as were it mine,

Mine own dear little song.

And thus singing it, I play

With this worn little song,

Renewing it.

—Recorded and translated by Kaj Birket-Smith in Upernavik, during the Fifth Thule Expedition

News of Rasmussen’s and Mylius-Erichsen’s return to Copenhagen preceded their arrival. Disembarking from the British ship Fox II on November 7, 1904, they were greeted by throngs of admirers on the Copenhagen waterfront, given ovations and lavish bouquets, and presented with countless dinner invitations. Even for Rasmussen, who was perfectly comfortable with crowds, the adulation was overwhelming. He wrote that he felt “exhibited” with all the parties, speeches and interviews, and it took a while for the excitement to die down. He and Mylius- Erichsen were pestered by reporters for months, although, to Rasmussen’s irritation, they showed little real understanding or appreciation for his work and were more interested in the sensational aspects of the expedition, particularly in his Inuk companion Osarkrak. What was his life in the north like? What did he think of Copenhagen?

Even so, Rasmussen was quite willing to provide anecdotes, opinions and interviews to the press. He clarified that the rumours of their poor condition in Greenland were false and that Captain Adams’s lurid report was probably a reflection of his inability to conceive of Europeans living like Inuit—stripped of the trappings of European culture, with no modern means of travel or pre-stocked food supplies. Contrary to expectations, the Danish Literary Expedition had shown that it was possible to live off the land as the Greenlanders did, and in the future Rasmussen would seldom travel in any other way.

As a result of the publicity, he was no longer merely an ambitious youth with big ideas, but a genuine celebrity. The Danish Literary Expedition had ventured to the fringes of the known world, had travelled in this mysterious land populated by little- understood people, and had returned with intriguing and previously unknown information about them. They had claimed Greenland’s northern territory for Denmark, as an extension of the southern colony, and had established cultural, commercial and political ties with the most remote group of people then known to exist. It was an exciting and brilliant accomplishment, and the expedition’s members were on their way to becoming national heroes.

Despite a two-and-one-half year absence, Rasmussen quickly rejoined his old circle of friends—the poets, musicians, writers and actors whom he had always chosen as his companions—and renewed and expanded his correspondence with luminaries in the Danish arts community and others who shared his interests, such as Fridtjof Nansen in Norway and the writer Albert Engström in Sweden. All were part of his ever-broadening social circle. And he no longer had to ask for paying work as a writer: his opinions were sought after by newspapers and magazines. He was learning to use the press just as the press used him. About town, the now famous Rasmussen was frequently seen with his “heathen” friend Osar krak, provoking even more publicity and sensational reportage.

Although Osarkrak was a celebrity in the Danish capital, he was not the first Inuit to visit southern lands. In 1897, Robert Peary returned from one of his North Pole expeditions with a group of six northerners to be displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. At this time, the people of the world’s last remaining wild places were regarded as exotic novelties by the urbanites of America and Europe. Some viewed them as amusing spectacles of curiosity and wonder, others as a window into humanity’s Stone Age past. Some zoos included humans, often Chinese or African Pygmies, in their exhibits. Over the centuries, other Inuit, too, had been kidnapped and brought back to Europe or America as novelties or entertainments, and usually they died without ever seeing their homelands again. For example, four of Peary’s “specimens” died in New York within a year of their arrival; one survived in America and eventually returned to Greenland.

Osarkrak, however, had not been kidnapped, and his friendship with Rasmussen was genuine and reciprocal. He lived in Rasmussen’s father’s rectory, where all the members of the Rasmussen family could speak with him in his own language. Osarkrak was as curious about Rasmussen’s new land as Rasmussen had been about Osarkrak’s home, and he was on “the trip of a lifetime” with a devoted and sensitive host. Rasmussen attempted to answer his questions as best he could, as Osarkrak was especially interested in cars, trains and other “vehicles without dogs.” He was also curious about the men and women he saw promenading down the street together, soldiers wearing identical uniforms and men raising their hats to each other, an act which he thought was a prelude to battle. He wondered how people could live in such crowds, like mosquitoes. But it was the exotic animals at the zoo—the lions, monkeys, elephants and other creatures that bore no resemblance to anything living in Greenland—that aroused his greatest curiosity. Rasmussen wrote up his conversations with Osarkrak as a series of vignettes, slyly posing questions about Danish society to people who never questioned their own habits or customs.

All the while, Rasmussen was working long hours between publicity stints on his book Nye mennesker (The New People), published in Denmark in 1905. The following year, he published another book, Under nordenvindens svobe (Under the Lash of the North Wind). Both volumes were combined, translated and published together in English in Great Britain and the United States under the title The People of the Polar North in 1908.

Rasmussen’s ability to make friends in new communities was one of the secrets to his success. In The People of the Polar North, he related the story of meeting a boy who appeared to be alone:

“Who is he?” I asked an old woman, the first time I saw Kajoranguaq. He was worse dressed than any of the others, but his eyes rivalled the blubber of the lamps in their brilliance.

“Oh, a poor little orphan fellow, who eats by the cooking- pots,” she replied, flinging a bone to him. The boy seized it eagerly, and set upon it with his teeth; but the meat was tough.

I had a rusty little child’s knife from South Greenland in my pocket, and I presented him with it, to inaugurate our acquaintance. A gift always opens the door of an Eskimo heart.

It was assuredly the first time in his life that the orphan boy had ever had such an experience as to receive a present. He looked me up and down and shook his head. I assured him that I really meant it. Then, without a change of expression, he snatched the knife out of my hand and ran off. I did not think that I should see any more of him for the present, and was just going into our tent, when he came running up with a piece of walrus meat, which he pressed into my hand.

“You gave, see: I give too,” said he, and his face shone with grease and pride. Of course he had stolen the walrus meat. But from that day forth we were friends.

Rasmussen knew how to get people to trust him, respect him and talk to him. Sitting with old people for hours, he would help them with their tasks and tell stories and jokes about his time growing up, always telling these tales in their own language. He had developed an intuitive sense of human nature and a deep understanding of Inuit culture, not only the rituals and customs but also an insight into why those rituals and customs came to be, and an acceptance of them even when they seemed cruel or vio lent by Danish standards. His penetrating character portraits are astonishing for their insight into human nature. His ear for words and sense for story captured the Greenlanders’ worldview in a series of powerful vignettes, in chapters titled, for example, “The Orphan,” “The Old Bear Hunter” and “The Magician’s Last Great Inspiration.” The People of the Polar North was fleshed out with Moltke’s sensitive charcoal sketches.

Rasmussen drew from the Inuit intimate details that would never have been shared with strangers. When he mentioned that the Inuits’ “gums were always dry with smiling,” one elder from the northwestern rim of Hudson Bay commented: “Oh! You strangers only see us happy and free of care. But if you knew the horrors we often have to live through, you would understand, too, why we are so fond of laughing, why we love food and song and dance. There is not one amongst us but has experienced a winter of bad hunting, when many starved to death in front of our eyes.” Rasmussen wrote how they were always keen to see happy people around them, to hear laughter in their homes, and were grateful for a jest or joke. A researcher makes himself one with his subjects, Rasmussen believed, and this was key to his insight. His sympathy, however, also came from a shared appreciation and desire for the simple life, which allowed him to admire a life stripped of the façade of civilization, exposing the raw human impulses that drive everyone.

Although his first major literary work lacked a distinct chronology or anchoring structure, Rasmussen is a minor character in many of the stories, a supporting actor whose role is to set up the performances of the others. Interwoven throughout the book are four distinct elements: the narrative of his own travels, the stories of people he met during his travels, details of Inuit customs and taboos, and their legends and folklore. He follows roughly the sequence of events of the Danish Literary Expedition’s progress from south to north and back again along Greenland’s western coast. His story is told with self-deprecating humour, candid appraisal of his own ignorance and an ear for anecdotes.

In one anecdote he relates how he was urged to take a wife and the underlying cultural reason for the advice, revealing a little more about both himself and the world than is evident at first. The angakoq (shaman) Sorqaq did not mince words when he told him: “You should understand that it is not the right thing for a man to travel all over the country, as you are doing, young and unmarried. You will get a bad reputation, and expose yourself to be made game of. See you, a bachelor is a man who is rejected because he is a poor provider. For a woman is one of the things that a man should have. Here, a woman is the first thing he takes; after that come dogs, kayak, and last and most difficult of all, a gun. All this you have already. But who is to look after your things, who will warm your bed, and caress you? Up here a young man always travels with a wife; sometimes, if necessary, with a borrowed one.”

Rasmussen describes pleasures in the direst of conditions. “Some of the pleasantest memories of my travels,” he wrote, “are the recollections of days when I have lain weatherbound on a desolate coast, far from the conveniences of the overheated huts. There grows up within you a feeling that you have just defeated the malice of the storm nicely when, despite an unexpected attack, you have been able to reach a satisfactory shelter, and you can rest at ease with a good friend, wrapped in soft skins with well-filled stomachs and delicacies to eat and laugh at everything. You feel yourself master of the situation.”

The People of the Polar North reveals for the first time many aspects of northern Greenlandic cultures. When Rasmussen discusses, for example, food caches, it is to show that the land wasn’t quite as desolate and untouched as it might seem to an outsider unfamiliar with the landscape and the people’s customs. “When Eskimos, travelling from one fishing-place to another, meet with a quarry, they generally store the greater part of the meat in a deposit, as it is often a matter of difficulty to transport it. These stores of meat are regarded as places of refreshment for any travellers, and there are always enough of them scattered along a day’s driving distance, to render it unnecessary for anyone to carry provisions for a journey, in the more frequented districts. The meat is stored under formidable piles of stones, to protect it from bears and foxes.”

Other customs and taboos governing behaviour are described in short interludes. An astute storyteller, Rasmussen knew not to clump the anecdotes together, however more comprehensive an approach that might have been. A woman, for example, “must never name animals which are used for food; if she does, they might bring some misfortune upon the hunters,” whereas a man “must never talk to her of his hunting or fishing; if, after his arrival home, he wishes to mention dangerous animals to others, he must call them by other names. Thus nanoq, a bear, must be called ajagpagtoq; auveq, a walrus, sitdlalik; uksuk, a bearded seal, takissoq. He must never use serratit (magic formulae) to his prey.”

Rasmussen also included the standard incantations to ward off bad spirits or for luck. When a hunter was creeping up to a seal basking on the ice, for example, he might chant silently to keep the animal from becoming aware of him.

Let me disappear

Between the earth

And the glacier.

When it came to the ancient Inuit legends, Rasmussen provided context for the way these legends were told and remembered, describing the culture of storytelling that was so strong among the northerners, and then recounted many unusual tales of strange goings-on and mysterious happenings.

“These fables and legends are told in the houses during the polar night, when the Eskimos, after great banquets of raw, frozen meat late in the evening, are digesting their food and are heavy and tired. Then it is the task of the story-teller to talk his hearers to sleep. The best story-tellers boast of never having told any story to the end. The legends are known to all; it is the grandmother’s business to teach them to her grandchildren. This is the first time that the legends of the Polar Eskimos have been put on record, and my principle, during my task, has been never to repeat any story until I myself had learnt it and told it. In this way I made the whole manner of the story-telling my own, and I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to give literal translations.”

In the rich narrative tradition of the Inuit, where wisdom was expressed as story and metaphor, the inspiration perhaps came from the brooding darkness that pervades the land during half the year. Inuit oral traditions reveal an intricate system of beliefs in spirits, strange beings and magic, in which souls can travel between humans and animals and between animate and inanimate objects; giants roam the land, and terrifying flesh-eating monsters deceive and attack lone travellers.

Despite being raised in a Christian home, and though his own religious beliefs were often skeptical and ambivalent, Rasmussen never passed judgment on others’ beliefs or on the powers of shamans. Never are any of the beliefs of the polar people he met presented as anything but entirely valid—his job, as he described it, was to learn and report rather than to instruct and correct. As a result, the stories have a rare vibrancy and authenticity, drawing readers, as they must have listeners, into a unique and fascinating world, into the lives and rich cosmology of the Greenland Inuit. The stories have an otherworldly essence; instead of portraying a marginal culture of people grimly struggling against nature, Rasmussen shows bravery, heroism and tragedy occurring in a mysterious and unexplained world. These stories, like all great myths, transcend the time and place they record.

One of the intriguing and arresting stories Rasmussen retold is of Navaranapaluk, who when she married went to live with a tribe that she didn’t like and sought vengeance through deception and brutality:

One day she was going to pay a visit to her relations, she drew a pair of mittens over her feet instead of boots. She did this so that her people might believe her new compatriots treated her badly. It was the middle of winter, and her relations were exceedingly sorry for her, when they saw her arrive on foot; and so they agreed to attack the tribe that she now belonged to.

They set off, and arrived at the village at a time when all the men were away; there were only women at home, so they fell upon them and murdered them; only three escaped. One of them had thrown over herself the skin that she was just dressing; the second had turned a dog’s-meat trough over herself; and the third had hidden in a shed where meat was stored.

When the men came home they found all their women killed, and their suspicions were aroused when they found that Navaranapaluk was also missing.

And great was their anger, for the assassins had impaled the women on long stakes, so that the stakes pierced their bodies. At once they prepared to attack their enemies, and began to make large numbers of arrows.

The three women who were left plaited the sinew-thread with which the heads of the arrows were to be fastened on; and they plaited with such ardour that there was no flesh left on their finger- tips, and the bones projected. One of them died from loss of blood.

When they were well equipped, they set off, and hid behind large stones, above the houses of their enemies. The assassins, after their return home, had expected the avengers every day; so their women took turns to watch.

It is said that one old woman had a remarkable dream. She dreamt that two lice were fighting on her head. And when she told it to the others, they all thought that the avengers must be in the neighbourhood. So they all gathered together in one house to ask counsel of the spirits. And when the incantation was well under way, a dog on the roof suddenly began to bark.

The men rushed out, but by then their enemies had surrounded the house, and they accomplished their vengeance by shooting all the men down with arrows. It was only when there were none left that they chose wives from among the widows, and took them home.

Many of the Greenlandic legends Rasmussen recorded are similarly violent and disturbing. “The mind of the Eskimo may be calm and sunlit like the water of the deep, warm fjords on a summer day,” he wrote. “But it may also be wild and merciless like the ocean itself, eating its way into the land.”

The People of the Polar North became an immediate sensation. No one had read anything quite like it before. The content and subject matter were fresh and intriguing, and the writing masterful. The reviews were all positive, and Rasmussen was hailed as the champion of a new kind of anthropologist and scientist—as someone destined to clear out the musty halls of academia by venturing from the library into the field, exploring and returning home with the new information. His was a poet’s and writer’s approach, in which intuition, imagination and insight carried the day. His way of empathizing with “primitive” people revealed their culture as universal, a perspective that applied to humanity in general and spoke to life more broadly.

No longer merely a charming and entertaining companion at parties and dinners, after the publication of The People of the Polar North Rasmussen was a cultural celebrity, a public figure regularly sought out for official gatherings, for speeches and interviews by newspapers and magazines, the mass media of the day. Peter Freuchen recalled that “he was the most sought-after young man in Copenhagen, and he had many, many friends.” Rasmussen’s parents encouraged their three children—Knud; his sister, Me; and his brother, Christian—to invite their friends to the parsonage so that they could chat and play croquet there. His father, still the indulgent parent, pleaded, “Bring them home… We know there must be something worth knowing in all of them, even though it is often difficult for us to recognize what it is!”

One member of that large and fluid group was a friend of Christian’s—a twenty-one-year-old medical student, Ellen Hallas. She and Rasmussen began a flirtatious relationship that continued, on and off, for years. “What was it that was so charming about Knud Rasmussen?” Ellen asked herself in a memoir of her time with him. “The confidence with which he met all the people, the goodness that actually radiated from him and characterized all his actions, his cheerfulness, chivalry, naturalness? I do not know, but he enchanted all the people who came into contact with him.”

Rasmussen continued to enchant Ellen for the next several years, but he was too nomadic for a settled relationship. His first multiyear trip to Greenland had not cured him of either his love of that rugged island nor his wanderlust. In any case, his intentions did not seem serious, particularly when he informed her in a letter from Greenland that he had gotten a Greenlandic woman pregnant. It might very well have been true, but it might also have been a way to keep Ellen from feeling too strongly about him. It was his style to be direct and frank, and he made little effort to conceal behaviour that would have been considered outrageous by the Danish moral standards of the day. In 1908, he was still flirting with her: “Ellen, alas, Ellen! I like you a little… I will marry when I get home, but not with you—God forgive me for it!” This was typical of his numerous relationships with women: full of admiration, teasing, and professions of love, but avoiding commitment. One could pass it off as the insensitivity of youth, but Rasmussen never seems to have entirely outgrown it.

He could not forget Greenland and its people, but neither could he dispense with the lively congeniality of Copenhagen. He was a hero in each place when he returned from the other. The fame, adulation and public pressure in Denmark drove him to the solitude and remoteness of Greenland, the source of his public acclaim, in a cycle that repeated itself for his entire life. He was celebrated in Copenhagen, and soon in other cities in Europe and North America, for his exploits in Greenland; he was celebrated among the Inuit for returning from the far south and from across the sea in Denmark.

Within a year of the Danish Literary Expedition’s return to Denmark, Rasmussen was off on another trip back to Greenland. In the summer of 1905, under the auspices of Denmark’s Ministry of the Interior, he toured the fjords of South Greenland to investigate whether reindeer herding, common in Lapland, could be introduced into Greenland to augment the local economy. Reindeer herding was big business in Alaska at the time, particularly the famous Loman Brothers enterprise in Nome.* To assess its potential, Rasmussen toured possible herding sites in Greenland with his friend Osarkrak and an experienced Sami herder. This was followed by a dogsled excursion north to Cape York, where he was met by more than two hundred cheering Inuit. It was a short trip, but it was free from logistical complexity and uncertainty.

Rasmussen was back in Copenhagen by the fall, and in January 1906, he made another trip to Lapland, returning to Greenland in the spring for a longer journey in which he planned to record more myths and legends. His sister, Me, came with him on the first part of this trip. Rasmussen had a warm and stable relationship with Me; indeed, he was close to all his family members throughout his life. Brother and sister toured the more settled regions of Greenland, visiting relatives and inspecting the southern, more Danish-influenced communities, until Me returned to Copenhagen in the summer of 1907. Knud was forlorn and lonely when they parted ways in Tasiussaq, the northernmost Danish settlement in the Greenland colony. “In the winter we had worked together in Greenland, we had become so strongly attached to each other that now it was hard to separate,” he wrote. “It was so strange now that my sister would be standing there on the ice and not following as she did before. She was the only person in the world I could not be without.”

Rasmussen seldom stayed in one place for long. After leaving Me, Rasmussen dogsledded north to the Cape York region again. In early 1908, he crossed the ice to Ellesmere Island to interview a handful of Inuit who were hunting there. During this trip, he hunted and collected the furs of hundreds of Arctic foxes, amassing a small fortune because the pelts were extremely valuable. Hunting and all commercial activity was strictly regulated by the government in southern Greenland but not north of Melville Bay, where Denmark had no recognized territorial authority. The success of this venture gave Rasmussen not only a business idea that would transform both his life and the economy of northern Greenland, but also provided the additional money he needed to consider marriage.

Soon after returning to Denmark in August 1908, after an absence of nearly two years, he married. However, his bride was not Ellen, but rather Dagmar Andersen, another attractive young woman he had met around the same time. He had been consolidating his relationship with Dagmar even while continuing his ongoing flirtatious relationship with Ellen.

Dagmar was a counterbalance to Rasmussen: serious, reserved and sensible, she was as grounded as Rasmussen was flighty. Three years younger than Knud, she was the daughter of Niels Andersen, state councillor, chairman of an employers’ association and one of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Denmark. Well off and well connected, Dagmar was modest and unassuming. She did not immediately attract attention, though many considered her beautiful. She was an accomplished pianist and shared Rasmussen’s love of opera. Her reserve was perhaps exacerbated by the glaucoma that hindered her eyesight. She was also an excellent secretary and had been reading and commenting on Rasmussen’s manuscripts and letters for years, becoming immersed in his exotic world as no other woman had done. “In the gay crowd that surrounded Knud,” Freuchen recalled, “she functioned as a breath of common sense without ever being cool or sitting in judgment on them; she was a wonderful human being.”

Dagmar had taken an interest in Rasmussen and his Greenlandic adventures soon after the return of the Danish Literary Expedition in 1904. She wanted to learn about the Greenlandic world. In the fall of 1906, she had sailed to the remote West Greenland community of Uummannaq, where she became the housekeeper of physician Dr. Alfred Bertelsen, Rasmussen’s former companion on the Danish Literary Expedition. These determined efforts were certainly an unusual initiative for a young woman of such affluence and status, and her posting with Bertelsen had probably been organized by Rasmussen or his father. When Dagmar returned in the fall of 1908, after two years abroad, she spoke tolerable Greenlandic and had developed an insight into Rasmussen’s world.

Dagmar and Rasmussen corresponded frequently during the years of intermittent contact, when she was in Uummannaq and he was roaming around Greenland, first with his sister and then alone. He had spent part of his time in the Uummannaq district during the winter of 1907–1908 in order to visit Dagmar, on one occasion undertaking a weeklong journey by dogsled, with only a twelve-year-old boy for company. The boy, Ajako, later became a famous adventurer who accompanied Rasmussen on several lengthy journeys. On her return voyage from Greenland to Copenhagen, Dagmar had met an engineer and mine owner, Marius Ib Nyeboe, and told him about Rasmussen’s work. It was a contact that proved useful the following year, when Rasmussen was seeking financial backing for a business he had in mind for Cape York.

Their wedding on November 11, 1908, was an elaborate affair in an ancient church, attended by prominent members of Copenhagen’s business and arts communities. Two Greenlandic Inuit led the couple to the altar. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds set off for a skiing holiday in Norway. But the honeymoon period didn’t last long; Rasmussen was already planning another expedition to Greenland for the summer of 1909.

In many ways, theirs appears to have been an ideal match, each opening new worlds to the other and complementing each other’s strengths. Although their relationship had its turbulent periods, Dagmar was always loyal, advocating for Rasmussen, working with him to promote his ideas and fame, perhaps knowing that this reflected glory from her husband might be her only reward for years of loneliness. She was, according to numerous sources, his comrade and champion—yet she did not share in any of his major adventures, remaining in Copenhagen during the years-long absences. Unfortunately, most of their letters were destroyed after Rasmussen’s death, either by Dagmar or by their children.

Around the time of their marriage, the American edition of The People of the Polar North was published and hailed in the New York Times as “an important work” by “the only explorer whose journey has been made for the sole purpose of acquiring knowledge about a peculiar and somewhat mysterious branch of the human race.” The book review and author interview also made an interesting claim that hinted at Rasmussen’s grand plan, commenting that he “hopes to start on a six years’ tour along the whole of the north coast of North America to make a further study of the Eskimos… traveling like an Eskimo and living very much like an Eskimo.”

Rasmussen’s growing fame in Denmark also paved the way for the publication of his book Lapland, from a manuscript that had sat untouched since he had written it years before. Now the manuscript had become a valuable commodity. It was hailed as a perceptive account of another remote people undergoing the rapid changes of modernization. The parallels between the Sami of Lapland and the Greenlanders were clear.

Rasmussen and Dagmar spent the remainder of early 1909 in Copenhagen while he laid plans for his next trip to Greenland. This time he had a more concrete objective than simply wandering from place to place and interviewing people. He spent four months that summer of 1909 visiting communities along Greenland’s southern coast for the Danish government’s Department of the Interior, helping to introduce a new set of laws for the island. He was also on a contract from the Greenlandic Lutheran Church to help establish a mission station among the Inuit of the Cape York region. His ship arrived in North Star Bay in northern Greenland on July 23, and within two weeks he had unloaded all the cargo and constructed two small buildings—a residence for the two missionaries and their families and a nearby storehouse. His assignment was to help the missionaries meet the local people. It was not to be a fire-and-brimstone mission; rather, Rasmussen hoped it would ease the transition of the Polar Inuit to a more settled life. His longer-term goal was to have a commercial trading post built in the region, and he hoped the mission would bolster the argument for having one.

Much as he admired the traditional ways of the Polar Inuit, Rasmussen believed that the material culture from Europe could bring them a better life. He never believed, as his government did, that they should be left isolated, as museum pieces, unchanging down the generations. Change was inevitable, and the increasing number of whalers in the wake of Peary’s explorations was just the beginning. Rasmussen thought that by understanding their culture and helping others who encountered it appreciate the Inuit ways, he might be able to ease their transition to a life that would have to accommodate outside influences.

Those intrusions from the south were becoming more numerous and attracting a great deal of attention. While Rasmussen was in Greenland, Dagmar forwarded requests to him for information about a polar controversy that was becoming a sensation: after years of effort and competing expeditions, two men were each claiming to be the first to have reached the North Pole.

* A few decades later, the Canadian government implemented its own similar plans for reindeer herding in the North. This experiment proved successful over time; there is still a small reindeer business today in the Mackenzie Delta. See Dick North, Arctic Exodus: The Last Great Trail Drive (Toronto: Macmillan, 1991).