12

Records of a Vanishing World

All true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of men, in the great solitudes; and it can only be attained through suffering. Suffering and privation are the only things that can open the mind of man to that which is hidden from his fellows.

—Igjugarjuk, recorded and translated by Knud Rasmussen, Across Arctic America

In the spring of 1923, Roald Amundsen brought two airplanes to Alaska in an attempt to fly across the Arctic Ocean to the North Pole. This first attempt at polar flight ended when the planes crashed, destroying their landing gear. But others would follow; the world was changing. In the previous three and one-half years, Rasmussen had travelled more than 20,000 miles and visited thousands of Inuit in three countries. He had done it by living off the land, in the local custom, and he had travelled by dogsled. He knew these traditions would not remain the ways of the Inuit forever, as he had already seen the changes wrought by modernization in much of the Alaskan population. These changes were not all for the worse, he felt; modern technology would surely make the lives of the people easier. But the situation saddened him a little. “From my heart,” he wrote near the end of his journey, “I bless the fate that allowed me to be born at a time when Arctic exploration by dog sled was not yet a thing of the past.”

His reminiscence was bittersweet—pleasures he hadn’t tasted in years awaited him. Yet he also must have known that this was his final epic adventure. He was getting older at forty-five and had been nearly everywhere that Inuit lived. “To all these people, this is an ordinary day, a part of their everyday life; to me, an adventure in which I hardly dare believe.” An airplane, even a primitive one, could cover in a day the distance a dogsled needed a season of hard labour to traverse. It was easier travel, but it wouldn’t be an adventure, and you wouldn’t meet anyone.

Before leaving the Arctic, Rasmussen had one final wish: to cross the Bering Strait and visit the East Cape of Russia’s Chukchi Peninsula. He was curious about the small number of Inuit who lived in Russia. Were they the same people as those on the eastern side of the strait? What language did they speak? Were they marine hunters, or fishers? Rasmussen was very close to having visited every known Inuit group, and he had all but proven that they were culturally, linguistically and biologically related. But there were formalities to observe. In Nome, he went to the telegraph station and composed a brief message to the Russian authorities in the Central Office of the Soviet government, requesting a permit to enter Chukotka for research purposes. Usually Rasmussen did things as he pleased, and his international fame opened doors quickly for him, but in this case the speed was not forthcoming. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1919 had recently swept Russia, and relations with the United States were strained, owing to the recent conflict over Wrangel Island—only a few years earlier, Vilhjalmur Stefansson had planted the British flag on the island that Russians claimed as their own. Russian officials did not want to admit any potential spies. Rasmussen’s request slowly wended its way through the byzantine bureaucracy in Moscow, and he grew impatient.

Every day for a week he wandered to the telegraph station, hoping for the permit to arrive, but to no avail. Finally, he became frustrated and worried that fall storms would make crossing the strait impossible. The Bering Strait between western Alaska and East Cape is not a wide stretch of water, only fifty-one miles across at its narrowest point, but it can be treacherous with erratic winds, strong currents and few safe harbours. As he so often did, Rasmussen decided to go ahead and see what happened. He ruled out crossing the strait in a traditional umiak, because the winds would be against him at that time of year. Going to the docks in Nome, he negotiated for a small schooner, Teddy Bear, to ferry him across. Setting out from Nome on September 8, the Teddy Bear endured a dangerous week battling storms before reaching a country of “desperate loneliness… a forbidding rocky coast with snowclad hills rising from the sea” and arrived at the settlement of Emmatown, near East Cape. One of the first people Rasmussen met was the trader Charley Carpendale, whose daughter Camilla had been taken by Amundsen to Norway for schooling a few years earlier as one of his famous “Eskimo girls.” The other official was Allayef, a giant of a man in a fur cap who had “very friendly eyes but a hint of obstinacy about the mouth.” Hauled to the police station, Rasmussen tried to explain that he wanted only to meet and interview people, not to engage in any form of illicit trade.

Allayef offered Rasmussen the opportunity to leave at once or to be taken inland to meet the governor. Rasmussen chose the latter because it would “at least prolong my stay in the country.” His papers were confiscated, and Allayef brought him to a nearby village to find a guard to escort him farther inland. “It was at once evident,” Rasmussen observed, “that these people were of a different type from the cheery, noisy Eskimos. These men looked serious, and from their expression, appeared to regard me as some dangerous criminal.… They were not unaccustomed to seeing people carried off never to return.” The Chukchi were the northern Asian native peoples and had a different culture and language from the Inuit.

It was a day’s journey by dogsled over swampy tundra to the governor’s residence. Rasmussen was distressed to see his Chukchi guard use a barbed harpoon to prod his poor dogs into greater exertions. Inside the imposing governor’s mansion, Rasmussen was surprised to meet friendly officials, people not at all in keeping with “what I had expected of the new Soviet type.” They shared some Russian cigarettes and tried to make sense of Rasmussen’s unusual request. He mobilized his considerable talents of persuasion to present his case—it would look bad if an internationally recognized scientific expedition were turned away from Russia after having received a favourable reception in other countries; it was surely only a matter of time before his request from the Danish consulate to Moscow would be approved anyway; in Canada and the United States, it was customary for travellers arriving from the Arctic to be exempt from the regular passport requirements; the expedition’s purpose was purely scientific—but to no effect. Nevertheless, he was ushered into the dining room for a hot meal. He bowed at two smiling Russian girls, “finding time to notice their peculiar beauty,” and ate in silence beneath a photograph of Lenin.

Given eighteen hours before he had to depart Siberia, he was free to interview as many people as he wished. Thousands of Chukchi and about 1,200 Inuit—the Yupiks—lived in the region. Although these two groups shared some similarities in their material culture, their languages were distinct and Rasmussen could understand nothing of the Chukchi language. He spoke mostly with the many traders bankrupted by the new Soviet regime, and only with a handful of the East Cape Inuit, barely enough to discern that they did indeed share the same language as other Inuit. He had reached as close to the source of Inuit cultural migration as possible.

It was in Chukotka, before being deported, that Rasmussen realized he had nowhere else to go. From a hilltop he stared east into the rising sun and imagined all the places and events of his monumental journey. “I see our sledge tracks in the white snow out over the edge of the earth’s circumference,” he wrote, “through the uttermost lands of men to the North. I see, as in a mirage, the thousand little native villages which gave sustenance to the journey. And I am filled with great joy.”

In October, with the first snows dusting the land and a bracing wind coming off the water, Rasmussen, Arnarulunguaq, Miteq and Leo Hansen boarded the steamer Victoria in Nome, bound for Seattle. Ironically, as they began the slow journey home, things became ever more strange to Arnarulunguaq and Miteq. While the ship slowly wended its way south to the land of the white men, the two Inuit from Greenland experimented with appropriate southern clothing. A photo shows their new getup: Miteq exchanged his travel garments for a suit and leather shoes, and got a haircut; Arnarulunguaq looks distinctly uncomfortable in a dress with a white collar and leather high-heeled boots. She tried to master the skill of walking in heels but never did, expressing amusement as she waddled like a duck. She balked at wearing a hat but marvelled at the comfort and softness of a pair of silk stockings (though she could not quite figure out what purpose they served). Rasmussen, also in suit and tie, looks perfectly at home, as usual.

On the voyage to Seattle, a party of distinguished American tourists and business travellers were delighted to be on the same ship as Rasmussen and invited him to join them for dinner at the “first sitting.” The ship, however, had a rule that no “Eskimos” could eat at the first table; so Rasmussen politely told his hosts that he would join Arnarulunguaq and Miteq at the second table. The prominent people at the first table responded by declaring that they, too, would join the second table. So, reported the New York Times, in the end the second table “became the first, in a manner of speaking… a happy and gracious ending.”

As the Greenlanders walked the gangplank off the ship in Seattle, crowds pressed in, snapping photographs, and a throng of journalists asked dozens of questions. Robert Flaherty’s documentary film Nanook of the North, detailing a Hudson Bay Inuit family’s struggle for survival in Arctic conditions, had been a massive hit two years earlier, and Rasmussen and his companions were celebrated as a real-life example of Arctic life and travel. Their story fed into the public appetite for knowledge of this remote and harsh region. “I have positive proof of the origin of the Eskimo race,” Rasmussen enigmatically declared to the press, “but regret that I cannot make public my discoveries at present.” But he did declare that all the tribes of people he had met, from Greenland to Russia, spoke a variation of a common language.

The three travellers were a great sensation, famous for completing the longest sled journey in history and the first through the entire Northwest Passage. And, in their hotel, the people of Seattle were amused at the Inuits’ fascination with the elevator. Arnarulunguaq and Miteq rode the machine for hours, repeatedly pressing the buttons and exclaiming in surprise when the doors opened at various floors. When Arnarulunguaq looked out the window at all the skyscrapers, she mused: “It is strange that people never mimic the large animals like polar bears, but always the small animals like lemmings.”

Rasmussen then led them on a cross-country train trip to Washington, DC. The scenery of the American countryside whipped past their windows as they now covered more distance in a few days than they would have in a season of hard travel in the Arctic. At the station in Washington, they were met and cheered by crowds from the Danish American community. They stayed in more luxurious hotels and rode a variety of vehicles, or dogless sleds. Ushered into the White House to meet President Calvin Coolidge, Rasmussen was honoured to shake the president’s hand, though Arnarulunguaq and Miteq were more interested in the giant flag that hung behind the desk. Many more photographs were taken of the exotic “Eskimo” in southern attire; in some photos of Arnarulunguaq in furs, she looks far more comfortable and alive than in a cotton print dress.

After a few days the trio pressed on to New York City by train. One reporter noted that although they had never met, he recognized Rasmussen immediately and described him in glowing detail for the paper’s readers as “a man of medium height, slender and sinewy, whose outdoor life and battles with the ele ments have developed muscle. His hair is straight and black as an Indian’s and his skin is bronzed by wind and sun. From under shaggy brows his eyes gaze forth with a steady clearness. They are greenish-gray-blue—and look as though they had taken to themselves the tones hidden in the depths of frozen water.”

As Rasmussen toured Miteq and Arnarulunguaq through the busy cityscape, their eyes were wide with wonder. They braved the terrors of New York traffic, crossed the busy streets clinging to each other as they stared in awe, and trusted Rasmussen to lead them safely through the unimaginable chaos and congestion of people, things and sounds. Stopping to eat at a restaurant, Rasmussen told the waiter not to place vegetables before them as they had never eaten them before. When plates of oysters and steak arrived, “their eyes lit up and their faces were wreathed in smiles.… their table manners were excellent,” wrote the reporter who was accompanying them on their city tour. Arnarulunguaq delighted in squirting lemon juice on the oysters, puckering her mouth at the unknown flavour.

Rasmussen himself behaved nonchalantly, “as if he had not been away from our so-called civilization at all. He felt as much at home in New York as if he had spent three years here and not at the Pole. He was marvellously adaptable.” He attended dozens of meetings, presentations, luncheons and dinners—at the Carnegie Institution, the Museum of Natural History, the National Research Council, the Coast Guard, the National Geographic Society, and many others.

Inevitably, the endless public appearances, speeches, photo ops and dinners, combined with living out of a hotel room, even a luxurious one, took their toll. Photographs show a weary- looking man beneath the impeccably suited exterior, hollow cheeked, tired, a smile on his lips but not in his eyes. He wrote a letter to Nyeboe expressing his concern about having a victory so costly that it is really a defeat. The transition was exhausting.

One day in mid-November, as they stood on the roof of a skyscraper scanning “the stony desert of New York,” Arnarulunguaq launched into a penetrating speech: “Ah, we used to think Nature was the greatest and most wonderful of all! Yet here we are among mountains and great gulfs and precipices, all made by the work of human hands.… Those tiny beings we see down there far below, hurrying this way and that. They live among these stone walls… stone, stone and stone—there is no game to be seen anywhere, and yet they manage to live and find their daily food.… I see things more than my mind can grasp; and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life.”

Rasmussen had one final meeting planned in New York, one that may have made him anxious: Dagmar had crossed the Atlantic on a steamer to meet him after so many years apart. What transpired between them is private. He rarely mentions her or his children in any of his writings; even in Across Arctic America, he describes his visit to New York but not meeting Dagmar there; she was equally circumspect. Before they departed for Europe together, Rasmussen commented that the past four years had been “a great and rich experience for me. I think that there are more tasks for me in the future, but they can only be poor in comparison with the Fifth Thule Expedition. The wise saying of course is that a person with initiative can achieve ever higher goals, but I am unable. My field of work has been and will continue to be north of the Arctic Circle. I cannot spread my interests as Amundsen and other explorers, for it is the Eskimos that own my heart.”

Before arriving in Copenhagen, the steamer first put into Oslo, where the Greenlanders and Dagmar were met by several prominent Nordic explorers, including his old hero and inspiration Fridtjof Nansen, as well as Otto Sverdrup and Peter Freuchen, who now sported a wooden leg. Rasmussen then gave a speech at the Norwegian Geographical Society. In Copenhagen, the celebration of Rasmussen’s return was jubilant, featuring many cultural and political luminaries, and included a torchlit procession and an audience with King Christian X, who presented Rasmussen, Miteq and Arnarulunguaq with medals. Rasmussen was covered in garlands while the Danish national anthem played. He was the foremost Danish national of international stature, and he already had an impressive history of courageous achievements. He was feted as a hero, having done something extraordinary in pursuing his grand vision with bravery and tenacity.

He was also in debt. The expedition’s expenses, including the cost of shipping, transportation and travel, and the salaries of its members over the years, had been enormous. Most of these expenses, apart from being covered by some Danish government funding, had to be recouped from the profits of Thule Station, the sale of Rasmussen’s books and the proceeds from the lecture circuit. From Alaska, Rasmussen had written to Nyeboe, requesting more money, lamenting that he had no time to sort out the overabundance of material that he had collected. Now he ended his nomadic ways and settled down to a routine of working at Hundested, his country home overlooking the sea. He began to write, and perhaps also to reacquaint himself with his wife and children. His oldest daughter, Hanne, was now fifteen years old, Inge was thirteen, and Niels was five; the boy had been a toddler when his father had left Denmark and had no memory of him. So it was surely a changed world to which the peripatetic Rasmussen returned at the end of 1924. He was now regarded more as a respected statesman than as a devil-be-damned adventurer and irreverent celebrity. His adventure was called work and his writing was now more academic, in accordance with his international stature as an ethnographer.

Rasmussen enjoyed the attention, the fame and publicity, the seemingly endless requests for speeches and opinions. He was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Copenhagen, among other distinctions, and more were to come in the following years. The Fifth Thule Expedition collected 15,000 to 20,000 ethnological and archaeological treasures that were donated to the Danish National Museum, including items that covered the entire spectrum of Inuit material culture: clothing, tools, amulets, even kayaks and sleds. The collection was a colossal donation that made Copenhagen an international centre for polar and Inuit cultural research. It included comprehensive collections from the Igloolik, Caribou, Netsilik and Copper Inuit, in addition to collections from Mackenzie Delta and northern Alaska. Also included were extensive archaeological collections of artifacts from sites throughout Greenland, Canada and Alaska, as well as geological, botanical and zoological collections. The expedition also contributed to polar knowledge by mapping vast areas of coastline previously only vaguely charted.

Rasmussen now had a herculean publishing schedule ahead of him. He set to work on his most ambitious work to date: The Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, a massive compilation of all the reports from the expedition published over a number of years, which would be his lasting contribution to scholarship. More prosaically and profitably, he also wrote the Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, published in English as Across Arctic America in 1927. Across Arctic America was a popular account of his adventures since leaving Greenland in June 1921: the exploration of the Hudson Bay region of Arctic Canada and an account of this expedition’s great dogsled journey through the Northwest Passage to Alaska, his dalliance in Siberia and a brief account of the trip across America and on to Europe. Once again, his own exploits take a back seat to portraying the Inuit he met, lived with, and interviewed.

The book includes a great many stories, poems and songs, and a discussion of various unusual beliefs and taboos, told haphazardly, woven into the account rather than organized, analyzed, and compared, as Rasmussen did for the comprehensive Report—chapters of which served as doctoral theses for Birket-Smith and Mathiassen. Birket-Smith wrote that “when we were back again, he never got tired of emphasizing the work of his collaborators while he kept his own person in the background.” This genuine humility, coupled with the widespread knowledge of Rasmussen’s daring escapades—the awareness that whatever he said about others, his own accomplishments were much greater—only served to magnify his reputation, bolstering his fame and esteem.

Across Arctic America lacks the youthful charm and flighty poetical musings that characterized Rasmussen’s earlier works. This journey was an adventure, a celebration of life and living, but it was also his work, and he took great pains to emphasize the scientific planning, goals and accomplishments of the expedition. He knew now that his future reputation would be based not upon exuberance and poetry but on science—on verifiable facts and knowledge. It was necessary to bind his cultural interest and literary skill to something concrete to give it substance. Ethnographic science would give his work the legitimacy by which it could be accepted by institutions, both in Denmark and internationally. Rasmussen began his culturally divided life in the Inuit world, then entered the Danish world, then returned to live again as an Inuit as a young adult, and finally returned to the Danish world in his mid-forties; he would never again overwinter or live with the Inuit after the Fifth Thule Expedition. He was now drawn to the institutions and the establishment that he had shunned as a youth, that he had abandoned to live in Greenland. He had a job to do, an important job, and it was no longer just some vague or fluid objective combined with a love of travel and meeting people.

Rasmussen was very much aware of the timeliness of his journey. His collections of stories, poems, songs and legends of an oral culture on the cusp of great social and technological upheaval would now be written down for posterity, just when they were at risk of disappearing. Many of the Inuit living closest to the Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts, RCMP outposts and Christian missions had already lost a great deal of their oral tradition. Rasmussen’s meetings with important angakut gave him insights into and knowledge of the Inuit spiritual world just as these beliefs were being undermined and discouraged by outside influences.

It was not always easy for him to collect the stories—why would people tell intimate stories to an outsider, a stranger? Rasmussen’s greatest strength was his ability to convince the Inuit that he wasn’t an outsider, and thereby to gain access to their innermost beliefs and traditions. In Greenland, this became easier over the years because his reputation preceded him—he was eventually known by nearly everyone. But in North America, he was not yet known, and he often had less time to spend with each tribe in each region. To be accepted, he had to rely on his language skills, his persuasiveness, his charming personality and his skills as a hunter and dog driver. His technique was always the same: patience and cultural blending. “I determined to begin by doing nothing,” he wrote, “but simply to live amongst them, be as communicative as possible myself, and wait for an opportunity when the desire to narrate should overmaster their reserve.”

Oddly, his hatred and fear of math, one of the causes of his less-than-successful academic career, aided him unintentionally. His lack of numerical proficiency ensured that he could never do any of the navigating or charting work on expeditions. This had two effects: he was free to devote time to other pursuits, such as hunting, cooking, and talking with people about their activities and concerns; and he was never seen using any scientific instruments. Science was a foreign activity to the Inuit in the early twentieth century, and anyone involved in it might have been viewed with suspicion. Rasmussen would not have been as accepted if he had been directly involved in strange, incomprehensible activities instead of the familiar ones like dog driving and hunting. It was acceptable for him to be in charge of others, who were obviously foreigners doing scientific work, but it would have undermined the feeling of equality that existed between Rasmussen and his Inuit friends if they had seen him doing things they didn’t understand. If the Inuit had seen him pull out a theodolite and start to measure the angle of sun, it would have affected the way they related to him, tainting him as an outsider, not to be trusted with intimate wisdom. His methods were evidently correct. Igjugarjuk, an angakoq and chief from the vicinity of west Hudson Bay, proclaimed that Rasmussen “was the first white man he had ever seen who was also an Eskimo.”

For Rasmussen, the interviews and collecting were more than work. He took great pleasure in recording the stories and legends he heard and in writing about them afterward. He found the individual tales of bravery, adventure and challenge similar to the tales of the ancient Greek myths. Greenlanders and most North American Inuit were nomads who loved travel and the adventure of daily life; they had plenty of tales of unusual occurrences to relate. “When the conversation turns on their adventures, their tales run on apace. The narrator is fired by the many gestures in illustration of his story, which is now listened to in breathless silence, now accompanied by laughter and shouts of acclamation. It is no read-up knowledge that the Greenlander spins out, but it is a fragment of his own restless life that he is retelling to his comrades.” Rasmussen’s own storytelling prowess is undisputed; his poetic sensibilities are clearly evident in the interpretation and translation of the stories and poems he recorded.

Rasmussen’s view of the Inuit was so different from that of other people at the time because he had a window into their rich inner world. He was not put off by the shabby, often rough external image. When he was inhabiting this inner world, a bubble of awe enveloped him and he saw the Inuit in a heroic mold. The reality perceived by many other observers was quite different: a barren landscape, scraps of tattered hides, old chopped and chewed-up bones lying around, dirty cold stones to sit on, huts made from snow, mangy dogs, greasy old furs as garments and people who reeked of rancid oil. To newly arrived outsiders, the impression was less than heroic, but these were facts of life in the Arctic. And conditions were likely similar for Bronze Age Greeks, crammed aboard tiny ships in less than sanitary conditions. Odysseus’s epic adventures would not have seemed heroic to a casual observer, either, with the men grimy, scabrous from the salt water, and emaciated from lack of food. Much is in the perception. Rasmussen understood that beneath the veneer of daily life lies the hidden world shared by the participants.

The traditional Inuit poetry and stories of the North American Arctic, as in Greenland, are not carefree tales of adventure and obstacles overcome. Frequently, they are preoccupied with the darker, more disturbing themes of death, starvation, murder, evil spirits, hunger, disease, cannibalism, intertribal conflict, infanticide and suicide by elders. Female infanticide must have been common. Rasmussen had heard about it, but his direct evidence came from counting the men and women in each region, and he found that men outnumbered women by one-fourth. The shortage of women led to fights over wives and to polyandry, or husband sharing, which also led to murder. These seemingly brutal practices resulted directly from the requirements of the harsh land the people occupied. As Rasmussen was fond of saying, a life in such a raw and unforgiving environment doesn’t produce squeamish hothouse plants. Rather than be condemned for transgressing southern morality, he claimed, the Inuit should be lauded for building a society in the world’s outermost regions, and its most rugged conditions.

The autumn comes blowing;

Ah, I tremble, I tremble at the harsh northern wind

That strikes me piteously in its might

While the waves threaten to upset my kayak.

The autumn comes blowing;

Ah, I tremble, I tremble lest the storm and the seas

Send me down to the clammy ooze in the depths of the waters.

Rarely I see the water calm,

the waves cast me about;

And I tremble, I tremble at the thought of the hour

When the gulls shall hack at my dead body.

Less common are the amusing, even whimsical, stories and poems, such as the tale of the little mosquito that Rasmussen heard while travelling west of King William Island.

There was once a tiny mosquito that flew out into the world. It was so small that it thought people did not notice it. But when it was hungry, it landed on the hand of a boy and while it rested it heard someone say: “U-uh, that nasty mosquito, crush it fast.” But then the mosquito could suddenly speak so that the boy could hear it. “Spare my life, spare my life. I have a little grandson who will cry if I do not come home.” Just think—so small and yet a grandfather!

What Rasmussen demonstrated through his lifelong interest in Inuit folklore, mythology and poetry, and confirmed by his epic journey to visit the remotest people on the planet, is that even on the fringes of human habitation, where survival is a constant struggle and material possessions are of necessity simple and transient, art flourishes. In the Arctic, artistry took its greatest and most powerful form in the oral storytelling traditions. Easily transported, storytelling needs no materials other than imagination and memory, and it can be enjoyed and appreciated, pondered and changed, anytime and anywhere, under any conditions, alone or in a group. Rasmussen showed that artistic expression is not a luxury of complex and powerful civilizations. The rich and inner world of art and metaphor, story and imagination, are not products of a centralized political structure, population density, complex social order or other defining aspects of “civilization” but are inherent traits of humanity.

There is no specific word for “inspiration” in the Inuit language, Rasmussen wrote; instead, the phrase “to feel emotion” is used in its place. Because all people feel emotions in the course of their lives, “all human beings are poets in the Eskimo sense of the word.” Most Inuit oral poems are simple songs chanted spontaneously, changing slightly with each telling, celebrating great happiness or sorrow, a successful hunt, the birth of a child, starvation, drowning and other momentous life experiences. The Inuit frequently improvised, he told a New York Times reporter in 1925, “making up words and melody as they go along, after the fashion of the troubadours.… When it helps dramatization the dancers wear masks and animal heads, some representing the evil spirits which play an important part in their philosophy, others wolves, or other familiar four-footed creatures. There is considerable beauty and rhythm and tune in Eskimo music.

“Every man and woman makes poems and songs. I doubt if there are any people who have developed, primitive as it is, the fine sense of rhythm of these people… I have said that they are all poets and composers, yet unconsciously much of the song and poetry of their grandfathers for hundreds of years has been stamped upon them, and by listening closely a man can be projected back a thousand or two thousand years.” Rasmussen further elaborated on his theory: “The songs are born in the minds of men as bubbles rising from the depths of the sea to break on the surface.”

Rasmussen also sought to clarify and promote his answer to one of the great questions about the Inuit and the purported reason for his epic journey: the “origin of the Eskimo race.” His theory of their origin was similar to one propounded by the influential Danish geographer Hans Peder Steensby. As Rasmussen explained to the New York Times in 1926: “The Eskimos and the North American Indians were once the same people. They came over together in ancient times from Asia. What are now the Indians is a race that split off from the Eskimos. They developed in the land of trees to the South, the Eskimos in the treeless lands of the North. After centuries these Eskimos of North America migrated eastward all the way to Greenland.” Rasmussen was mostly right. Researchers now know that the Arctic was peopled in several waves of migrations, with the Inuit culture probably originating in Alaska about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago and migrating across northern Alaska, Canada and finally to Greenland over a period of several centuries. However, they did not arrive with other Native Americans, as Rasmussen supposed, but on a separate wave; nor did the Inuit develop their distinctive culture somewhere in the centre of Canada and later migrate to the edges, but rather moved from west to east.

In 1926, Rasmussen planned a trip to southern France and northern Spain to study the caves occupied by “the old Cro Magnons or men of the old stone age”—the creators of the famous cave art that is thought to be about 25,000 years old. He wanted to see if it was possible to link them with Inuit cultures. According to a theory then proposed by the Scottish professor Boyd Dawkins, the Inuit and the European Cro-Magnons were the same “race.” Rasmussen discounted the theory but nevertheless suggested that they were “spiritually like-minded.” He was intimately familiar with Inuit stone tools and compared them to the tools discovered in France and Spain; to his mind at least, they appeared fundamentally the same. His mind was always working along unusual, if not entirely scientific, lines of thought, and he was willing to debate his ideas and explore them further. Despite the inaccuracy of some of his theories, Rasmussen essentially proved that the Inuit were the most dispersed people in history, having a similar language, material and intellectual culture and similar artistic sentiments throughout their broad northern territory.

While Rasmussen worked on his books and lectures, organized the collection of stories and songs, described his journeys, and fine-tuned his theories in the office of his famous house in Hundested, he dreamed of new horizons and the open expanse of snow-clad hills and icebergs bobbing in blue polar waters. Even in his forties, the youthful-looking Rasmussen retained his dreamy imagination. The traits that led him to seek freedom and adventure in Greenland dogged him in Hundested as he toiled away on his manuscripts. In the cool evenings, he strolled in the gardens and hills of the estate, with the salty breeze blowing off the water, reliving old memories—by this time, he certainly had many to draw on—perhaps again feeling himself in the Arctic, with the chill breeze coming off a glacier and hearing the barking of dogs in the distance, and with a new destination in his mind’s eye.

Rasmussen’s days were extraordinarily busy. He wrote for both Danish and foreign magazines and newspapers, popular and scholarly books, and scientific journals. He travelled frequently to Copenhagen to give lectures, speeches and presentations, and hosted innumerable distinguished visitors, attended meetings with business partners, publishers and colleagues. It was a social whirlwind: he had many friends and acquaintances, and there were so many demands on his time that he must have struggled to meet the competing demands of his wife and three children. It is not uncommon that great figures in history are not always remembered by their immediate families as being so great. There is no evidence that Rasmussen was abusive toward or neglectful of his children, he just wasn’t around much for them. The younger ones surely could hardly have known him, and they must have had a limited relationship.

Despite all the writing and lecturing, it didn’t take Rasmussen long to be on the road again. After only a few months in Copenhagen, he returned to New York, for a week in late March 1925. He arrived with Nyeboe, who would be showing Leo Hansen’s motion picture clips of the Fifth Thule Expedition in the city. In April, Rasmussen travelled north to Ottawa, where he had been hired by the Canadian government as a consultant on Arctic policy.

His controversial remarks of a few years earlier about Ellesmere Island being “no man’s land,” and the Canadian government’s concern that he might be a spy intent on promoting Danish sovereignty in the Arctic, were apparently forgotten. Now he was an honoured guest, his opinions on the welfare of the Canadian Inuit actively sought. The Danish celebrity was a sought-after consultant to Canada rather than a threat to territorial sovereignty. “It’s not easy to give advice to an organization on the entire Arctic Canada, when you only have eight days to do it,” he complained to Nyeboe. Nevertheless, the Canadian ethnologist Diamond Jenness remembered that when Rasmussen “visited Ottawa, by special invitation, to advise our government in its administration of the Eskimos, everyone who sat around the council table with him carried away a warm feeling of affection and esteem.”*

Rasmussen returned to Denmark in May 1925 and continued his frenetic work schedule there, not journeying to Greenland at all that year. He was frequently in meetings with scientific and government colleagues, in addition to keeping to his own personal writing treadmill. Hundested was sometimes ridiculously busy with the comings and goings of flocks of visitors in addition to his own family’s activities.

In the summer, when Dagmar and their children were at the country house, he rented out an additional farmhouse to escape the endless demands of family and visitors and to get some peace and quiet to complete his writing. He did not go entirely alone, though: Arnarulunguaq came along, with several other Greenlanders; and his secretary Emmy Langenberg was there, as was Tom Kristensen, his personal editorial assistant, employed by the publishing house Gyldendal and whose job it was to keep Rasmussen focused on his writing.

According to Kristensen, Rasmussen was an early riser; even when he stayed up late he began his day at 6 a.m. with a bath, a strong cup of coffee and a piece of bread. Sometimes he did his writing while pacing the wooden floor of his office and dictating to his secretaries. His literary output remained prodigious, despite his ceremonial duties, outings and trips abroad. A man of extremes, he occasionally surfaced from his all-consuming work to party and release tension. He swung like a pendulum between solitude and socializing, work and play.

In one of these bouts of play, Rasmussen met Rigmor Fritsche, a young woman from a neighbouring farmstead not many years older than his daughter Hanne. Fritsche, who was in an unhappy marriage, frequently came over to visit, and when Dagmar and the children weren’t around, they went walking together. They also went out to nightclubs in Copenhagen, Rasmussen claiming Fritsche was his secretary, though he already had one. Rumours began to circulate; Rasmussen was too famous for such a dalliance to go unnoticed. Dagmar heard the gossip, and although there is no record of her reaction, she surely must have been hurt, perhaps even embarrassed, though she probably had become inured to this sort of behaviour over the years. It was one thing to turn a blind eye to extramarital affairs in Greenland, where different cultural mores applied and no one was around to report on it, but quite another to do so in Copenhagen, even if only for a summer. At the height of Rasmussen’s fame and public acclaim in the late 1920s, a portrait of him with Dagmar and their children shows the unsmiling couple, each staring stone-faced in a different direction.

In addition to New York and Ottawa, Rasmussen visited London to give a speech at the Royal Geographical Society in November 1925, as he had been awarded the Founder’s Medal the previous year. Early in 1926, the Danish edition of the narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, titled From Greenland to the Pacific, was published to great acclaim and became a best-seller. And by May 1926, Rasmussen was off to Scotland to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews. During this time, Rasmussen’s formerly robust health showed signs of decline. He now had developed an unspecified problem with his kidneys, or gallstones. At one point his doctor forbade him to visit Paris, where he wanted to escape the pressures of fame and enjoy some freedom.

Between May and September 1926, Rasmussen returned to Greenland as a guide and cultural adviser on the Morrisey expedition, also known as the George Palmer Putnam American Museum Expedition, a general reconnaissance voyage along the coast of western Greenland led by the well-known New York publisher George Palmer Putnam. In Greenland, Rasmussen was reunited with his old travelling companion Inukitsoq, who had travelled with him and Freuchen across the Greenland Ice Cap on the First Thule Expedition, nearly fifteen years earlier. Inukitsoq told Rasmussen of his amazing airplane ride with Richard Byrd, in which they had flown from Thule in “a large hissing metal bird” over rock-strewn fjords, headlands and glaciers, covering in a few hours distances that in the past had taken many hard weeks of travel. The era of the dogsled was drawing to a close, and soon flight would revolutionize the exploration and mapping of the Arctic.

He returned for a brief stop in Denmark, then boarded a steamship and recrossed the Atlantic to New York for a lecture tour in October. The Morrisey expedition was famous in the United States, receiving dozens of newspaper updates on its progress, adventures and discoveries. Although Rasmussen was only one of many participants in the expedition, he received considerable American exposure, all of which pleased his publishers. While in New York, he joined two other Arctic luminaries from the recent expedition, Bob Bartlett and George Palmer Putnam, for a series of live radio broadcasts complete with “musical background furnished by an orchestra.” G.P. Putnam’s Sons became the publisher of Across Arctic America the following year. Rasmussen’s lectures included prestigious engagements, such as with the American Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society. Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, announced, “In the history of Arctic exploration Rasmussen’s expeditions have never been surpassed and seldom if ever equalled.”

Rasmussen returned to Denmark in November to resume his literary labours and his occasionally flamboyant public life. His expenses were high, but his income, from his books and speaking engagements and his share of the profits of Thule Station, was also high. Yet it took years to pay off the debt incurred by the Fifth Thule Expedition. There were continuing disagreements with the investor Nyeboe over the disposition of the profits, misunderstandings resulting from poor record keeping and poor communication. More than Rasmussen’s prolific literary output, it was the profits from Thule Station, in particular the pelts of Arctic foxes, prized as the best in the world, that made it all possible.

The one major sadness for Rasmussen in these years concerned Arnarulunguaq, who had contracted tuberculosis before arriving in Copenhagen. After all the travails and dangers of the past years, she had sickened when all believed the dangers were over. She appeared to be wasting away day by day and was finally operated on in the hospital. She and Rasmussen had been through a lot together, and he took her sickness hard. His account of their journey through the Arctic dwells on her enthusiasm and boundless energy. Although her husband had died during the expedition’s early days in Greenland, she had still pressed onward for the adventure of a lifetime—across foreign seas and along strange coasts, struggling over mountain passes with all the equipment and dogs, enduring ferocious storms, to meet possibly dangerous strangers. She had beheld the staggering peculiarity of southern cities and experienced the odd customs of southern peoples.

Rasmussen recalled one occasion when Arnarulunguaq had nearly died. East of Point Barrow in early 1924, as their heavy sleds crossed new ice, Hansen and Miteq had heard behind them a horrifying crack and Rasmussen’s cry of alarm. Arnarulunguaq was nowhere to be seen. She had plunged through a fissure in the ice into open water and passed out. She was in danger of being sucked under the ice by the current. Rasmussen tore off his overcoat, dove into the freezing water, and pulled her limp body to the ice edge. Yet the ice crumbled around them as he tried to climb out of the hole. They needed a way to get out of the water. “Try with the whip,” Rasmussen calmly suggested. They nearly froze to death before finally being dragged out. Stripped of their icy, wet clothes, they were wrapped in sleeping bags and sheltered in a hastily constructed snow hut. Soon they were joking and drinking hot coffee together.

Arnarulunguaq was certainly the most travelled woman among her people, and it was an open secret that she was Rasmussen’s lover during the journey. Rasmussen’s editor and friend Tom Kristensen joked that when Rasmussen returned from the Fifth Thule Expedition and was at the height of his fame, “there were letters from lady-admirers, because Knud was very much a man who attracted women’s attention… ask[ing] to join the next expedition in hope of fulfilling the same contribution as ‘the little woman.’”

Arnarulunguaq did recover and was eventually able to return to Thule, and she remarried there. She lived in a house of imported pine that Rasmussen had acquired for her as compensation for her many years of work for the expedition.

The Fifth Thule Expedition enabled Rasmussen to achieve one of his life’s great ambitions. He no longer had to explain the significance of his actions. He was internationally famous, but he also had to live with that fame. The international acclaim was no doubt gratifying, yet for Rasmussen it was also something of a gilded cage. His schedule was now so demanding that it required the assistance of two secretaries. His family was still young, and he had little of the freedom that he so cherished, that had always brought him back to Greenland and its open spaces.

In Denmark, he had no anonymity. With many eyes on him at all times, he was no longer a free man.

* This wasn’t the last time Rasmussen visited Ottawa on business. The following year, on November 24, 1926, the Ottawa Citizencarried a story promoting Rasmussen’s upcoming December 6 visit—a slide and motion picture lecture titled, “Three Years of Eskimo Life in Arctic Canada.” The news story praised his achievements and claimed that his “exploits” would “never be surpassed.”