9

A Time for Dreaming

When living this primitive life, one develops a quite extraordinary feeling of well-being in the heavy, dozing satisfaction that leads to sleep and dreams. You take your rest when it offers itself, and you take it thoroughly, and drink it in in deep draughts; that storm and misfortune must be slept through, is the sound principle of the Eskimos. Then, they can take a brush [a blow], when necessary, and there are few of us civilised men who have as much staying power. The chance and hazard of existence brings many surprises, and you soon learn to seize and enjoy what life offers.

—Knud Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North

The year 1919 was an excellent one for profits from Thule Station. The price of furs had not declined after the war, as Rasmussen had feared, but had soared, and the company had plenty of surplus cash. He used the money to build the Søkongen (Sea King), a sturdy vessel designed especially for sailing through icy waters. Rasmussen was now organizing what were to become known as the Third and Fourth Thule Expeditions. The Third was merely a depot-laying mission for Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s planned polar drift from Spitsbergen to Alaska. Amundsen assumed that his ship Maud could not make the journey in one stretch without refuelling, so he was anxious to have a supply and provisioning cache. His representative, Godfred Hansen, arrived in Upernavik to be met by Freuchen, who escorted him to Thule and helped him set off on dogsled for Cape Columbia, on northern Ellesmere Island. Although the bulk of the expense was covered by the Norwegian government, Rasmussen helped plan the expedition and placed Freuchen and the company ship at Hansen’s disposal, asking some of the Inuit to help. In the end, however, the cache of food and supplies proved unnecessary—Amundsen’s ship never progressed farther than Alaska because the pack ice was too thick and unpredictable.

The Fourth Thule Expedition was Rasmussen’s own brief journey to East Greenland to hear and collect more stories from the Inuit. It had nothing to do with the trading post, other than the fact that the trip was financed with Thule Station’s profits. That summer, Rasmussen took the regularly scheduled steamship from Copenhagen to Julianehåb (Qaqortoq), and from there he travelled in a smaller boat around the southern tip of Greenland and then north along the east coast to Angmagssalik. Although he had earlier heard some strange and macabre tales from people who had once lived there, this was the first time he had visited the region. He didn’t know these people, and they lived lives as secluded and remote as those of his beloved Polar Inuit. Hearing that the old pagan culture had not yet been crushed by missionaries, Rasmussen was anxious to visit them before their memories of the old days were lost. Ironically, for part of his time in Angmagssalik, he lived in a church attic. While they crouched in the attic around a small oil lamp for light and heat, he interviewed a former angakoq named Autdaruta. The news of this visit spread, and the people of Angmagssalik gathered below the two men in the church attic to listen while they talked about the old days.

When Rasmussen returned to Denmark from his summer’s sojourn, he immediately set to work writing up his findings. The resulting book, Myths and Legends from Greenland, was published in three volumes in Danish, beginning in 1921. Rasmussen collected these stories to illustrate the elusive essence of the old culture, untouched by the modern economy and untainted by Christian missionaries, who had a dim view of the old traditions and beliefs. Especially appealing to Rasmussen were tales of shamans visiting the land of the dead, legends of strange beasts that dwelt in the murky shadows during the dark season, and stories of journeys to visit the moon or the ocean spirit. He wanted to hear of flesh- eating giants and bears the size of mountains, of malevolent storm birds and ravenous human-hunting dogs, of bears and seals who talked and who plotted revenge when the required rituals were not performed. He searched for insight into this world of the Inuit and its metaphors and signs, its mosaic of magic and mystery. The angakut were the keepers of this knowledge.

Angakut were believed to have supernatural powers. These varied slightly from region to region, but they all had the same basic function and purpose in society. They understood and navigated the spirit world by entering into trances to do battle with evil spirits or the ill intentions of other angakut to steal souls. They could visit the spirit world and return with wisdom or advice. One of the primary jobs of an angakoq in traditional Inuit society was to cure sickness; this was done by curing not the body but the soul, by battling with the evil spirits that were causing the sickness—the Inuit believed sickness was a manifestation of some crime or sin or the influence of a malevolent spirit.

An evil angakoq could create a tupilaq—a hell animal, or monster of vengeance. To do so, the angakoq would search for the bones of various dead animals and assemble them into an ill-shapen blend of his own design and then cover the grotesque skeleton with an old hide. He would conceal it in a cave or other suitable place and then spend days conjuring until the unnatural beast came alive and set off to do its evil deeds. If a hunter accidentally harpooned the tupilaq, for example, he might become paralyzed or cursed with other bad luck. Rasmussen found tales dealing with the malevolent actions of tupilaqs in communities throughout Greenland and the Northwest Passage region of North America.

In most cases, the stories told by an angakoq, the traditional stories that had been passed down for generations, were allegorical; the purpose of the story was to convey some wisdom about life and morals through metaphor. In one story, an angakoq’s journey to the land of the dead showed him people in varying stages of decay. The lesson was to let the dead have their peace: when one mourns the dead for too long, they don’t decay properly in the land of the dead; and they cannot come back into power until they are forgotten. Many of the tales from the mythic realm are meant to inform daily living. Rasmussen understood the cultural trappings of the angakoq’s journeys and the cultural importance of the stories, the lessons they were meant to impart.

Neither Rasmussen nor Freuchen believed the angakut to be frauds or to be deliberately deceptive. Often, they witnessed the power of an angakoq’s hypnotic trance and incantations to cure illness or at least remove pain. That Rasmussen could convince an angakoq to reveal his abilities and methods, and could convince others to tell him of an angakoq’s power, shows the deep level of trust and respect the Inuit had for Rasmussen. That trust was not misplaced: regardless of Rasmussen’s personal beliefs—and there is no evidence to suggest that he believed in the literal truths of these magic-infused legends and tales—he knew they were true to the people he was interviewing, the people with whom he was living and travelling. In recounting the old beliefs and stories of the people who experienced supernatural interventions, Rasmussen wanted the reader to see that they are neither false nor forced. He was never judgmental, condescending or dismissive of others’ beliefs, even if they weren’t true for him.

The traditional culture of the Greenlanders was certainly governed by a different morality than the one that governed early twentieth-century Europe and America. Among the Inuit, theft, lying and deceit were considered to be serious crimes, for example, but murder was not necessarily so; sometimes it was even required as punishment. In the absence of a central authority, those who committed a crime against the group, such as stealing meat or killing another with whom they disagreed, had to be punished by selected members of the group. Because there were no jails, serious crimes were punished by the offender being killed during a hunting “accident” or in some other unofficial manner. Sometimes the treatment of the less fortunate was appalling, by modern standards; orphans or the elderly might be abandoned, or pushed off the ice into freezing water, or denied food. But Rasmussen had seen and experienced enough of what life in Greenland could be like—the brutal, meaningless starvation, unpredictable death by accident, drowning and freezing—that he could understand how and why these practices developed and how they helped smooth the working of Inuit society under certain conditions. The society had no surplus, no ability to support the very young or elderly, who were incapable of contributing or of surviving arduous travel.

While the elders talked, Rasmussen quietly sat, sipping tea or eating. He offered no opinion. He accepted and he remembered, and he wrote later. No one else could have accomplished what Rasmussen did, coaxing the buried stories from people who had recently been told by others that it was all wrong, or blasphemous, or foolish. Although not considered “scientific,” his ethnographic collections are a priceless contribution to world culture and far outstrip the more solid accomplishments of the Second Thule Expedition’s cartographic and geographical exploration, all of which was repeated later by others with more precision and greater accuracy. The collections of myths and legends that Rasmussen rescued before they slipped into oblivion—forgotten by the older generation and repressed by missionaries—would not otherwise have survived. It was on this trip to East Greenland that Rasmussen renewed his desire to explore this fading world further. Did the indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic and Alaska have the same stories, beliefs and taboos as those in Greenland?

In 1920, while he was living in Copenhagen and Hundested, Rasmussen became a member of the Greenland Commission, a Danish government council tasked with considering the future economy and political structure of Greenland. His responsibilities included numerous meetings as an expert on the language and customs of the people. The committee work could be tedious, but it was good for his reputation and a strong position from which to influence policies that would benefit the Greenland Inuit. It was a more official, governmental role for him, and he was now being taken seriously as an authority on the Inuit, as having valid and useful opinions on how the colony should be governed.

Clearly some colonial policies needed revisiting. The recently milder climate had decreased the seal population and was causing hardship in the Inuit’s livelihoods as well as food shortages. At the same time, fish stocks were increasing. Greenland remained a closed country, still requiring visitors to have a special Danish government permit, but the pressure to open up the land was increasing and was sure to bring economic and social changes to the residents. When the commission’s report was released in 1925, it not surprisingly recommended that Greenland be made into a modern society in which people were allowed free passage to and from the island, and that it move toward an economy based on fishing.

The Danish colonial structure had a great deal of paternalism and subtle racism. It was not malicious, merely condescending. Commercial trade for goods manufactured outside Greenland was controlled by government monopoly, and the types of goods available for sale was strictly regulated. Only muzzle-loading guns were permitted—never breech-loaders, for example, because the Inuit would presumably go crazy shooting each other. When the first motorboats were brought over from Europe, the pilots had to swear never to let the Inuit near them, in case they should stick their hands in the motor. Freuchen remembered that he and Rasmussen were not allowed to import kerosene, due to fear that the Inuit “would amuse themselves by throwing burning matches into the barrels.” When he tried to explain the foolishness of the notion, a government official told him to be quiet.

Freuchen commented that the Danish officials “had never tried to sit in a kayak or stand by a blowhole or fish cod in order to provide for a family at the incredibly low prices producers were offered at that time.” Nor were they compelled to work as domestic servants for the officials for “starvation wages.” There was a belief that the Greenlanders were lazy, or somehow like big, coddled children, in need of protection and guidance in how to live their lives. Church ministers and junior government officials would presume to order them about “for their own good.” When travelling with Navarana in southern Greenland, Freuchen recalled that he would be offered a seat at the dining table of a government official while his wife was asked to eat with “the natives” in the kitchen. He refused, soon coming to the conclusion that the person being insulted and ordered about “was often more dignified than the one who was debasing him.”

Although both Rasmussen and Freuchen felt that Denmark’s colonial power in Greenland was not entirely a bad thing, these practices still annoyed them. Most Inuit showed great patience in the face of verbal abuse from colonial authorities. Once, Freuchen overheard a hunter being yelled at by the wife of a colony manager. The man stoically endured the barrage and then replied in Greenlandic, a language she didn’t understand: “Alas, you are a child in the country, and a child in your thoughts. It is impossible to be angry with a child; it would be a loss of dignity!” Rasmussen lacked this Greenlandic trait. He could become nasty toward people who were rude, insulting or condescending to Greenlanders; he would leave them on the trail, trick them out of their liquor or food, or subtly mock them while maintaining a jovial façade, as he had done with “the royal assistant.” Yet he believed that a “civilizing” influence was the inevitable way of the future—he tolerated institutionally what he opposed individually.

In December 1919, it became Freuchen’s turn for a break from routine, so Rasmussen arranged a one-year holiday for him and engaged a temporary replacement to manage Thule Station. Freuchen duly arrived in Denmark with Navarana and their two children. After only a few weeks, however, he was tired of his former home and the way his wife was treated, everyone staring at her and talking slowly and loudly to her as she went about her business in Copenhagen. Although his parents were happy to see their grandchildren, Freuchen wanted to return to Thule and shorten his “holiday.” But one day in early 1920, he collapsed in the street. Passersby, thinking he was drunk, ignored him until finally the police bundled him off to the station, where they recognized the symptoms of the Spanish influenza that was then sweeping Europe and the world.

Spread by soldiers returning from the war, this terrible disease claimed somewhere between 80 million and 100 million people over the next few years, including, as they would later discover, many in Greenland and throughout the polar region. Freuchen was ill with it in a Copenhagen hospital for many months; his hair fell out and he became so weak that he could not walk. Because it was believed that he was dying, he was placed in near isolation. Worried that Freuchen might never recover, Rasmussen visited him frequently. Eventually, he told Freuchen that he and Nyeboe had hired a replacement to manage Thule Station.

Then, to everyone’s surprise, Freuchen began a slow recovery and in the spring of 1920 was released from the hospital. Although he could barely walk and spent most of each day resting, he and Rasmussen began working together to plan the grand adventure that would become known as the Fifth Thule Expedition. It was Rasmussen’s ambition to answer all the questions he had wondered about for nearly two decades, questions about the origin, language and culture of the Greenlandic people. It was an expedition he had been dreaming of since early 1910, when he published in the Geographical Journal in London his idea for a “Project of a Danish Expedition to the Central Eskimo.” He suspected that the North American and Greenlandic Inuit had to have emerged from the same culture, but he wanted proof.

The Fifth Thule Expedition would be a large undertaking. No longer would it just be Rasmussen and Freuchen on a youthful adventure, living off the land; indeed, it was possible that Freuchen would never fully regain his strength. It had been over ten years since they had founded Thule Station, and now they both had wives and children as well as other responsibilities. The scientists they would be recruiting would have little skill or experience in Arctic travel, and with the shadow of the Second Thule Expedition’s deaths hanging over the preparations, youthful exuberance and travelling light would have to give way to careful planning for large numbers of people and equipment. By anyone’s standards other than Rasmussen’s, however, it would still be a lightly equipped expedition. No other person then alive had the experience to lead an ambitious expedition such as this, with the requisite skills and cultural knowledge to make sense of the findings. Rasmussen would have to bend his own preferred style to the task, but he was ambitious and willing to compromise to achieve his dream. The Fifth Thule Expedition would be an important scientific undertaking that would cement his reputation, elevate him from his image as a wild risk-taker and prankster into a respectable member of the intellectual and scientific establishment—an explorer rather than a mere adventurer, and someone to be taken seriously.

The Fifth Thule Expedition would also be expensive, and to finance it Rasmussen secured a significant contribution from both the government and various private sources. Thule Station was the guarantor for the shortfall, from its future profits. Rasmussen was to be the overall leader and ethnographer, and Freuchen the cartographer and zoologist, in the greatest and most ambitious sled journey ever conceived. Two young Danish scientists were brought on: Kaj Birket-Smith as ethnographer and Therkel Mathiassen as archaeologist, cartographer and geographer. Helge Bangsted was to be the research assistant. The party would also include a new feature—a cinematographer—Leo Hansen, who would accompany them for the first year to capture in moving pictures some of the traditional life activities of the Inuit. The Inuit contingent, which would provide hunters, dogsled drivers, and seamstresses, was to consist of Navarana; Iggiannguaq and his wife, Arnarulunguaq; Arioq and his wife, Arnanguaq; Nasaitordluarsuk and his wife, Aqatsaq; and the boy Meteq. As Rasmussen wanted, the party would be half Inuit and half Danish.

Rasmussen was counting on both Freuchen and Navarana to participate in the expedition. Navarana, also still in Denmark, needed to return to Thule as soon as possible to organize the sewing of all the clothing that the expedition members would need for their many years of travel. She set off for Greenland in the spring, taking their son, Mequsaq, with her but leaving their little daughter, Pipaluk, behind with Freuchen’s parents. Rasmussen continued to process the reams of paperwork and documents related to financing and equipping the expedition. He also had to complete numerous applications for international travel, since the expedition would leave Danish territory to enter Canada and then the United States, and possibly even Russia. It was one thing for Inuit to wander in their traditional homeland but quite another for Danish scientists to cover the same territory, even if their expedition was scientific rather than political. Rasmussen was also putting the final touches on his book Myths and Legends from Greenland, which would be published after his departure.

The Søkongen, the new ship he had ordered for Thule Station, also needed some adjustments. Captain Peder Pedersen, longstanding captain of the supply ships that serviced Thule Station, would be the captain of the Søkongen, charged with picking up the Inuit expedition members in Greenland and then transporting the entire party and its equipment to an undetermined location along the northern shore of Hudson Bay in Canada.

Freuchen, who could still barely walk, retreated to a farm outside Copenhagen to recuperate. But within weeks, Rasmussen sent him an urgent telegram: he had word from Pedersen that the Søkongen had been damaged in a storm and was in Norway for repairs, and then had been damaged in another storm and had put in to Scotland for more repairs. It was getting late in the season, and the ship would not reach Tasiussaq until September, when it would be too late to cross Melville Bay to Thule. Rasmussen’s telegram informed Freuchen that Lauge Koch, the geology student who had accompanied them on their previous expedition, had asked for assistance in transporting some supplies for his own expedition north of Thule. Despite their chilly relationship, Rasmussen agreed to help. The situation was urgent, and in typically Rasmussen-like fashion, he decided that the solution was for him and Freuchen to leave immediately to solve the problems.

It had been nearly a year since Rasmussen had been in Greenland, and the thought of waiting until the following spring was too painful. Within a day, he and Freuchen had boarded the last scheduled steamer for the year and were on their way to Upernavik and a logistically complicated season of voyages. The Søkongen, now repaired, arrived from Scotland, picked up Rasmussen and took him north, while Freuchen boarded Koch’s overloaded ship and piloted it across Melville Bay. They regrouped at Thule. There, Rasmussen made arrangements for the following summer’s expedition, speaking to the people he wanted to recruit as expedition members. Then he sailed south again. Freuchen followed soon after, leaving Navarana in Thule.

To complicate things further, both Freuchen and Rasmussen would spend the winter of 1920–1921 in Copenhagen. They still had the final preparations, meetings and paperwork to finish and a lecture tour planned, something Freuchen hated and Rasmussen loved. These busy final months were also taken up with an outrageously complicated series of meetings and letters with officials in London and Ottawa, regarding the delicate issue of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic.

The previous season, a whaling captain had reported seeing 150 dried musk ox hides at Thule Station. Apparently, the animals had been hunted on Canada’s Ellesmere Island by Inuit from North Greenland, who were in the habit of making annual trips across Smith Sound to Ellesmere Island to hunt for polar bears and musk oxen. In the wake of MacMillan’s Crocker Land Expedition, which had wintered near Etah in northern Greenland and hunted on Ellesmere Island, there had been a significant decline in the number of animals. As a result, the Canadian government had recently added a clause to its Northwest Game Act prohibiting musk ox hunting, except for subsistence. In July 1919, it had sent official notice to the Danish government via the British Foreign Office in London, requesting that the Danish government do something to stop the hunting of musk oxen on Ellesmere Island. North Greenland wasn’t technically under Danish sovereignty, so the request was passed on to Rasmussen.

Rasmussen replied that Inuit in the vicinity of Thule were compelled to hunt on Ellesmere Island because the American expeditions had nearly depleted the caribou population in North Greenland and that in any case, Ellesmere Island was part of their traditional hunting territory. His letter had the unfortunate effect of ruffling the feathers of a Canadian government insecure about its northern territorial claims. “It is well known,” Rasmussen wrote, “that the territory of the Polar Esquimaux falls within the region designated as ‘no man’s land’ and there is therefore no authority in the district except that which I exercise through my station.” He was referring to northern Greenland (as there was no permanent human population on Ellesmere Island), but Canadian officials misconstrued his letter to mean that he viewed Ellesmere Island as a “no man’s land” and that Danish sovereignty might extend there. Could the Fifth Thule Expedition, financed in part by the Danish government, be considered an attempt to claim Ellesmere Island for Denmark?

Twitchy officials in Ottawa had been nervous about Canada’s sovereignty in its Arctic since 1880, when the Arctic islands were transferred from Great Britain to Canada. Sovereignty was maintained by occasional government proclamations and formal declarations, but in the early twentieth century, the Arctic was seeing more visitors, and most paid little heed to the distant proclamations of a southern government that had no presence in the region. In 1900, Otto Sverdrup sailed his ship Fram on a Norwegian expedition that wintered on Ellesmere Island, near the island he named Axel Heiberg Island, planted a Norwegian flag, and claimed the territory for Norway. It was, however, a claim the Swedish government (which ruled Norway until 1905) never pressed. Between 1903 and 1906, Roald Amundsen sailed his ship Gjøa on the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage without notification to or permission from the Canadian government, and American whalers had been overwintering and trading with the local people for decades. Although the Canadian government had sent out a handful of expeditions to explore and chart some of the Arctic islands in the region, there was clearly some confusion about sovereignty. When Rasmussen’s letter arrived in 1919, it touched a nerve.

J.B. Harkin, an official with Canada’s Department of the Interior, became convinced that Rasmussen’s expedition was a secret effort by Denmark to promote Danish sovereignty in the Canadian Arctic. The opinion that Rasmussen was a Danish agent was disingenuously and erroneously echoed by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, resulting in a diplomatic miscommunication that required Rasmussen to devote many hours of letter and telegram writing and travel to London to obtain permission to enter Canada and avail his expedition of the services of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the only source of supplies and communication in Canada’s Arctic. He repeatedly stressed that the Fifth Thule Expedition was entirely scientific and that it had no commercial or political aspirations. Rasmussen was still trying to sort it all out mere weeks before he was set to sail for Greenland. An interesting footnote to the whole affair is that it inspired the formation of the Eastern Arctic Patrol of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the first Canadian government outposts on Ellesmere Island. Ironically, the Inuit assistants to the RCMP were hired from North Greenland.

In late May 1921, Rasmussen said good-bye to his three children, the youngest then just over two years old, and sailed for Greenland. Freuchen had left Denmark earlier to help shoot some footage for the film of the expedition. Rasmussen and the expedition scientists arrived in time for the grand celebration on July 3 of the two-hundredth anniversary of the missionary Hans Egede’s 1721 arrival in Greenland to Christianize the Inuit. The king of Denmark sailed to Nuuk for the party, his entourage arriving with a flotilla of kayaks and boats escorting them into the harbour. It was the first time a Danish king had visited Greenland, and Rasmussen thought it a good omen. A three-day celebration followed, with numerous religious processions, in which the Greenlanders showed the pompous and pretentious Danish royal delegation how to celebrate properly, at least according to Rasmussen. “Knud was in his best humor,” Freuchen recalled. Unusual delicacies were presented to the celebrants, including coffee, cookies, figs, prunes and cigars.

Dagmar had accompanied Rasmussen on the journey, to see him off on what they knew was to be a multiyear adventure. After the celebration, the expedition members boarded the Søkongen and sailed up the coast to Ilulissat, to load bales of dried fish for the dogs, and then on to Uummannaq. There they met Navarana, who had travelled south by dogsled. She brought with her all the skin clothes the expedition members would require. Rasmussen, as usual, organized another party, but Navarana felt tired and ill and went aboard the ship to sleep.

They sailed farther north to Thule to pick up the six Inuit expedition members and the dogs. On this trip, Rasmussen heard the rumour that the passenger ship Bele, in which they were transporting some supplies, had run aground. He also became concerned that Dagmar might be stuck in Greenland for longer than she had planned, leaving their children in Denmark without either parent. When he noticed the king’s ship sailing past on its way south, he ran up the signal flags. The royal steamer cut its engines and waited.

“Very serious trouble,” Rasmussen shouted. “We need help.”

An officer yelled across for him to row over and tell them the problem. Rasmussen called back: “You send over a boat. It’s easier for you.”

The king’s officer sent a boat over to retrieve Rasmussen, and as soon as he climbed aboard the steamer he strode directly to the king. “As Your Majesty is the protector of our expedition,” he said, “I am sure it would disappoint you to see the whole project fall through. We must have more supplies to replace those that went down on the Bele. Besides, I would like my wife to return on your ship.”

The king was shocked, but after a little more of Rasmussen’s flattery he readily agreed to the request. As Freuchen observed, “Knud thought there was never any point in being too modest and subservient.” Once he had the assurance that additional supplies would be forwarded to Thule and Dagmar had safely boarded the king’s ship, the Søkongen sailed on toward Upernavik, where it met up with Mathiassen, Birket-Smith, and Leo Hansen, the motion picture cameraman Rasmussen had hired.

It should have been a time for celebration, for the expedition was well under way, but Navarana’s condition became worse and she had to be carried off the ship. It was not a slight cold that had latched onto her, but the Spanish influenza that Freuchen had contracted the year before. Freuchen remained in Upernavik to take care of Navarana, while Rasmussen and the others continued north to Thule to pick up the Inuit expedition members and bring them south. There, Rasmussen learned that his old companion Ajako had died, and when they returned south in August, it was to find Navarana dead and Freuchen despondent. In her final hours, Navarana had fretted about her children, who were not with her—Mequsaq was in Thule and Pipaluk in Copenhagen.

When Freuchen went to bury Navarana in the graveyard, the priest refused to allow her to be interred. Because she had died a “pagan,” he refused to say a sermon or ring the bells, and he threatened the Inuit with the horrible fate of dying without being baptized, using Navarana as an example. Many of the people who knew Navarana hid behind houses and rocks, peering at the tiny funeral procession, too fearful of the power of the church to be seen showing sympathy to a pagan. Rasmussen later wandered with Freuchen up the stony hill to her grave and said his farewells. Then he and Freuchen sailed south.

Rasmussen and Freuchen had an uneasy relationship with the missionaries who lived near Thule Station. Although the missionaries attempted to undermine local culture and traditions, Rasmussen reluctantly accepted them because he believed that the Inuit could not remain in isolation forever. Freuchen, on the other hand, married as he was to an Inuit, and a pagan, too, had little patience for the missionaries’ autocratic and domineering behaviour, and he went out of his way to defend the Inuit against the rough handling and verbal attacks of the missionaries. According to Freuchen, they insulted the people and their beliefs, always striving for greater control over the Inuit’s actions and behaviour. Even so, he was shocked by the callous treatment of Navarana.

Freuchen took great relish in detailing the missionaries’ own moral failings, such as when they tried to lure local girls into various sexual encounters, including once with Navarana when Freuchen was away—all while berating these people for remaining outside the church. He was frequently ordered away from the mission and seldom invited the missionaries to visit at Thule Station. Rasmussen rarely mentions either the missions or the missionaries, apart from his bland and unrevealing comments that the Inuit needed somehow to be eased into the modern world before the modern world unceremoniously swamped them. The great irony is that Rasmussen was rushing to preserve the timeless oral traditions of an ancient culture while accepting that these traditions were threatened by the twin powers of colonialism and the church.

When the Søkongen sailed into Nuuk on August 24, the families of the Thule Inuit were also becoming sick with the flu. Many were rushed to the hospital, where they spent weeks recuperating. On September 6, the hunter Iggiannguaq died, his wife helplessly holding his hand, crying and stroking his head. When after this death Rasmussen asked the other Inuit if they wanted to return, because of the ill-omened start to the grand expedition, they proclaimed that their greatest fear was that they wouldn’t be well enough to go on the journey—they really wanted to see their “cousins” in Canada, a semi-mythic people known as Akilinermiut, “those who dwell on the land beyond the Great Sea.” One day later, the overburdened Søkongen, supplies stacked dangerously high on its deck, launched west across ice-choked Baffin Bay into Davis Strait for a late-season crossing. The boat was crammed with people and about seventy dogs lolled about the deck, fighting and chasing each other, as the ship wound its way through the ice toward a land none of them had ever been before.

The Spanish flu continued to ravage the Inuit in Greenland. As Rasmussen and his compatriots were to discover, the epidemic had also had devastating effects on the Inuit in Canada and Alaska. So much death, and their long absence from their old life in Thule, coincided with the profound change in their own lives—the passing of their youth and the carefree days of adventure, when their whole lives were in front of them. Now a great loss was behind them, too. Freuchen had two motherless children, living worlds apart from each other; Rasmussen had three children and a wife he rarely saw in Copenhagen. Neither Rasmussen nor Freuchen would ever return to live in Thule, at one time home to them both.

To fight off depression and guilt and to keep grief at bay, Freuchen threw himself into work, while Rasmussen lamely and stoically mused that life must go on, even—perhaps especially—during an expedition. He planned very few all-night dancing parties in the fall of 1921. This was not how an adventure was supposed to start.