13

Final Journeys

When you go home to your countrymen, you can tell them what you have just heard. Tell them that you did meet me when I was still stronger than death. You see my own eye is blinded. Minik thrust it out for me, when he desired to satisfy his hunger with my flesh. Look at my body: it is covered with deep scars; those are the marks of bear’s claws. Death has been near me many times, my family are disappearing; I shall soon be the only one left. But as long as I can hold a walrus and kill a bear, I shall still be glad to live.

—Merqusaq, recorded and translated by Knud Rasmussen, The People of the Polar North

In Rasmussen’s time, the North and South Poles were the great geographical mysteries of the world. Many explorers—Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Robert Peary, Richard Byrd, Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Fridtjof Nansen, among them—offered examples of heroism in these often previously unexplored regions. They were real-life heroes, venturing into the unknown and returning with fascinating information about the fringes of the planet. These explorers became household names, and their exploits featured regularly in newspapers and magazines. People flocked to see them on the lecture circuit and, by the 1920s, listened to them via the new technology of broadcast radio. Motion pictures became popular as the decade advanced, and film brought to life the people and geography of the poles like never before.

Rasmussen was unique among this polar pantheon; his goals were cultural as well as geographical, and he was the first to reveal to outsiders the lives and customs of the little-understood people who dwelt on the edge of the habitable world. His career was based on this distinction, and his reputation grew over the years as his many publications demonstrated the breadth of his knowledge. Although the great deeds of one season are often overshadowed by those of the following season, this did not happen in Rasmussen’s case.

The first volumes of his monumental Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition rolled off the presses in 1927, keeping Rasmussen’s name in the limelight. Hardly a season went by without a new Rasmussen publication, whether a collection of poetry, myths and legends or a scientific paper. The Report, some of it published posthumously, would eventually run to thirty-two monographs in ten massive volumes—the most exhaustive study of Inuit oral culture, beliefs and philosophy ever undertaken. It is more scholarly and thorough than the popular books that related the tale of his and his companions’ adventures.

The many volumes included titles such as Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos; Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos; Iglulik and Caribou Eskimo Texts; The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture; and Intellectual Culture of the Copper Eskimos. The monographs included notes on vocabularies, each particular angakoq’s regional dialect, lists of all the place names and peoples visited, and comments on regional variations in social conventions and material culture. Birket-Smith called the work “a profound study of intellectual life among the various tribal groups of the Central Eskimos, a description so penetrating that nothing like it exists from any other Eskimos and on the whole from very few aboriginal peoples. Rasmussen accounts for all the taboos, the training of angakut, magic formulae and amulets, and describes the various divinities, especially the Mother of the Sea Beasts, the Moon Man, and the strange Spirit of the Weather, which is a being half impersonal, half a kind of supreme power.” Extraordinarily comprehensive, the Report is a priceless contribution to world culture that would have been impossible to compile even a few years later. Rasmussen’s popular books, in order to reach a larger audience, blended material from the Report with the story of his own adventures. Across Arctic America was published in North America to favourable reviews in publications such as the New York Times, where Vilhjalmur Stefansson pronounced it “a notable achievement in the literature of Arctic exploration.”

Rasmussen made summer trips to Greenland in 1927, 1928, and 1929, and travelled all the way north to Thule. Although his trips were no longer noteworthy for their adventure or geographical discoveries, his star continued its trajectory. He remained a cultural luminary on both sides of the Atlantic, his opinions and advice were sought by many, and his scientific recognition vied with his popular appeal. He was called to expound on Arctic matters whenever they were in the news. When Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth hadn’t returned from their famous Arctic flight from Spitsbergen to the North Pole in June 1925, for example, Rasmussen was consulted for his expert opinion. He thought that it would just be a matter of time before they safely returned. “Amundsen has shown,” he stated to a reporter for the New York Times, “that the time has come for the using of flying machines for Arctic exploration.” He publicly disagreed with Stefansson’s theory of blond-haired, blue-eyed natives in Arctic Canada having descended from wayward Norse Vikings in the Northwest Passage.

Because he was the acknowledged world expert on the Inuit, Rasmussen’s influence transcended art and literature. His opinion was sought on practical matters as well. Canadian Arctic policy was influenced by his opinions, and he was asked to comment on Danish colonial policy as compared with Canadian and American approaches. After all Rasmussen had seen, it was the American approach in Alaska that he thought was the way of the future. He was an outspoken critic of the Danish policy of isolating the Inuit from outside influences, other than those of their arrogant and paternalistic colonial managers. He claimed that many of the Greenlanders lived in a form of “primitive squalor” compared with the Alaskan Inuit, who had made great strides in integrating themselves into the changing society and economy, albeit at the loss of some of their traditional beliefs and traditions. It was the byzantine workings of the entrenched Danish colonial bureaucracy, price controls and restricted access to world influences, he wrote, that kept “our Eskimos down.” The loss of traditional culture in Alaska was a loss that saddened him, but it was a loss he believed to be necessary for their survival. No people could ever hope to live isolated from the rest of the world in an era of rapidly changing technology, travel and communication.

Rasmussen’s international prominence and devotion to the Inuit, his articles and lectures on their culture and life, began giving them a voice. It was the voice of a unified culture that spanned three countries rather than merely being a scattered collection of isolated primitives dominated by outside political and economic interests. Rasmussen’s concern was always for the welfare of the Inuit, and for this he was a hero. Birket-Smith recalled that “in Greenland people flocked to the place, when his arrival was announced in the village, old men and women came stumbling to press the hand of ‘dear little Knud,’ the young girls sent him loving glances, the children crowded around him—it was the arrival of a victor. He was a chief among them.”

But Rasmussen acknowledged that the changes were not always for the better. There were now duelling legal systems and competing methods of dispute resolution, one age-old and the other new and imported. Which custom should be followed, which law should be obeyed? The old ways had given way in a single generation to dependence on the manufactured goods provided by Thule Station in Greenland and by the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, and there was no going back: these items made life easier and safer. Nevertheless, the introduction of trade goods had unintended consequences. Firearms, for example, allowed hunters to obtain food more easily and perhaps relieved famine, but they could also wreak havoc on animal populations. “In the old days,” Rasmussen wrote, concerning Inuit and the caribou, “their settlements were located along the caribou migration routes. Men hunted with bows and arrows, which required extreme patience, waiting for an animal to (maybe) wander within range. Later, they got guns, which could kill from a greater distance, making it much easier to fill the freezer. In response, the caribou abandoned their old routes, and went elsewhere. The hunters starved, and their settlements became Arctic ruins. While one group starved, another group several miles away might be feasting on abundant meat.”

Tuberculosis had become common in southern Greenland, and Rasmussen feared it would spread like the Spanish flu. He saw that a hospital with a doctor was needed for the northern region of Greenland. It was constructed in 1928 and offered free medicine for all, paid for by Thule Station. In 1929, he arranged for the construction of a school, and the hiring of a teacher, for the northern region as well. Rasmussen also wanted to assess the possibility of importing reindeer to replace the diminishing caribou populations, and he devoted his charisma and influence to establishing the Council of Hunters in northern Greenland. He called the hunters of various tribes together, said that he had spoken with the old people about the problems they faced, and proposed enacting some laws for the entire region. The Inuit agreed, forming a council of elected individuals to enforce the laws. The Council of Hunters would manage local issues such as sanitation and animal conservation, and would enforce other basic laws such as those setting appropriate punishments for crimes committed during clashes between clan members—Rasmussen would be the ultimate authority. The resulting Thule Law was proclaimed on June 7, 1929, Rasmussen’s fiftieth birthday, the same year he was nominated for, but didn’t win, a Nobel Prize in literature.

The Thule Law was officially recognized by the Danish government in 1931 when it took over the administration of the Thule District of northern Greenland and Rasmussen was recognized as the Danish government’s representative in northern Greenland. The northerners accepted Danish colonization because Rasmussen, the respected authority, backed it. In Copenhagen, there was a large celebration attended by many of his former adventuring comrades such as Freuchen and Moltke, as well as the Danish cultural and political literati.

As Rasmussen became older, his enthusiasm for activities that formerly brought him joy waned. Freuchen recalled times from their youth, during the First Thule Expedition in 1912, when they routinely danced into the night even after long days on the trail, when the night “rang with our shouts and laughter.” On one occasion, the older manager of a trading post had expressed his amusement but declined to participate. Rasmussen had wondered aloud: “Peter, do you think we shall ever be so old that we will not dance whenever we have the chance?” Many years later, however, he and Freuchen were amazed at the enthusiasm of the young people for dancing. They found it “inconceivable” that they, too, once had the energy and inclination for such frivolity.

Even Greenland was no longer the escape it had once been for Rasmussen. Thule was not the same place: Freuchen was not there; and Navarana was dead, as were many of Rasmussen’s other friends. He was too old for the adventures he had once launched from Greenland and he could never return in spirit, though on occasion he was there briefly in person. His adventures were now limited to predictable and safe summer jaunts. And his relationship with Freuchen, once his close comrade in danger and in life on the edge of the world, had drifted, partly over minor disagreements about money for Freuchen’s services and his removal from Thule Station. Freuchen had become a journalist and was on his way to becoming a famous novelist, scriptwriter and memoirist in the United States; he and his new wife, Magdalene, were visitors at Hundested, but he and Rasmussen were no longer inseparable.

In Copenhagen, Rasmussen became restless and uneasy. The responsibility of living up to his heroic image grew tiresome. He regularly smoked cigars now, not bothering to hide his habit or limit it to Arctic adventures or fieldwork, as he had in the past. He was often described as smoking while he wrote and smoking during the endless social gatherings at Hundested, and photographs of the time show a cigar in his hand even when he was lounging on a bench with Dagmar. He was also drinking more. Although he was always a bon vivant, ready for a party in Greenland or a celebration in Copenhagen, his “celebrations” now seemed routine, and reports of his excessive drinking suggest it may have been the sign of a deeper melancholy. Despite his age, he would sometimes show up late at the popular Copenhagen nightclub Adlon, so inebriated that his long-suffering secretary Emmy Langenberg was tasked with keeping an eye on him and with trying to sober him up. Sometimes he would enthrall onlookers with his energetic and wild dancing, clearing the dance floor and monopolizing it for a frenetic spectacle.

Rasmussen continued to have a weakness for women. Certainly his attitude toward women was influenced by Greenlandic tradition, in which sexual relationships were more fluid and less formal than those in early twentieth-century Europe or America; but he also felt he could get away with it. His fame and naturally outgoing social demeanour placed him in situations that made affairs possible, and he took advantage of the opportunity. Rasmussen felt that the boundaries and constraints of society that applied to others didn’t apply to him in the same way, and he was right. For much of his life he led two lives, one in Greenland and the Arctic and the other in Denmark, and sometimes he found it hard to keep each set of customs straight.

Rasmussen was not always happy during these years. He yearned for freedom, yet it was his discipline that made his prodigious accomplishments possible, that both consumed his time and bestowed celebrity. Dagmar remained the foil to her husband’s flamboyant energy. She was quiet and reserved, an accomplished pianist who entertained the many guests who were constantly in Rasmussen’s entourage at Hundested. But Rasmussen’s relationship with Dagmar was undoubtedly strained, despite her patient acceptance of his dalliances. She complained that she hardly ever saw him. He was away from home more often than not, for years at a time, and happily left her to manage a household and raise their children alone. When he was in Denmark he was often in great demand socially and seemed always to be working on his writing or his next great plan.

In the summer of 1929, Rasmussen brought Hanne with him to Greenland, along with Peter Freuchen, who was godfather to all of Rasmussen’s children. His eldest daughter was almost twenty years old. He took great pride in showing her the country, the scene of so many of his adventures, a place she had only ever heard her father describe and reminisce about. It was a triumphant tour of the coastal communities from his birthplace of Jakobshavn (Ilulissat) to Thule. A kind and sweet young woman who took after her mother temperamentally, Hanne was welcomed with great warmth along the entire coast, and Rasmussen shone with pride as he introduced her to people he had known for decades.

On the return voyage to Denmark, he met the American artists Rockwell and Frances Kent. Rockwell was an artist and writer, world traveller, and charming philanderer. Rasmussen felt an instant affinity for Rockwell and invited him and Frances to stay at Hundested for several months, where Rockwell took over a small attic room for his painting. Sometime in the fall of 1929, Rockwell and Dagmar had an affair. She had fallen in love, and later wrote to him at his New York farm, “Asgaard,” in the Adirondack Mountains, pondering whether she should join him there. Oddly, the affair, which Rasmussen knew about, improved his and Dagmar’s relationship, and she later reported that he was kind and solicitous toward her when she needed support. Gaining confidence in herself, she and Hanne visited the United States in the summer of 1930 and stayed all summer at Asgaard; Hanne remained until the spring of 1931. Dagmar exchanged letters with Rockwell and Frances for several years, although the affair had ended.

In the spring of 1930, Rasmussen did not make his annual trip to Greenland. Instead, he travelled to Oslo to deliver the eulogy at Nansen’s funeral, then went on a holiday to Switzerland and Italy. There he suffered a serious bout of flu and finally rested, avoiding reading, writing and socializing. The break energized him and inspired him to dream of a new expedition, more ambitious than anything he had done in years. In keeping with tradition, he called it the Sixth Thule Expedition.

At the age of fifty-one, after years of relatively sedentary existence, Rasmussen found that his sense of adventure was awakened once again. Now he foresaw a sailing expedition to the remotest regions of coastal East Greenland, to visit communities that had seldom been seen by outsiders. East Greenland was often hemmed in by pack ice and storms. Twenty-seven years earlier, at the end of the Danish Literary Expedition, Rasmussen had looked northeast from Cape Farewell and imagined that someday he might journey to that fjord-riddled, storm-bound coast. The coast both north and south of Angmagssalik, although partly explored by several other previous expeditions as early as the eighteenth century, had never been visited by an expedition dedicated to collecting geographical, meteorological, literary or cultural information. In the summer of 1919, Rasmussen had made the voyage to Angmagssalik to interview the residents and collect their stories, which became the foundation of his book Myths and Legends from East Greenland. With more time, the cultural and literary harvest would be much greater. To cover the seven hundred miles of coastline, the expedition would have to sail about 2,500 miles.

Rasmussen spent the winter of 1930–1931 arranging the financing, selecting expedition members and planning his route. This expedition’s goal was to chart the coast, collect flora and fauna, measure temperatures and magnetism, and search for ruins. Rasmussen, meanwhile, would meet and interview people to gather evidence of “the ancient intellectual culture.” The Sixth Thule Expedition consisted of nine individuals travelling in cramped quarters on a small boat. Rasmussen asked Dagmar if he could name his boat after her, “in the hope that it will be able to carry me safely and return home to you. You have always been my great shielding genius. This time, I must rely on others… so I have on this trip so many, many times more use for your great love and protection.”

This was the first expedition in which Rasmussen’s expertise in dogsledding and hunting would not help him. In fact, dogsleds were almost passé, with the recent development of motorized sleds. This journey would be mostly by boat, and he would be merely a passenger—a directing passenger, certainly, but he would not command respect for his superior knowledge and skills in sailing. The voyage would be difficult and challenging for the captain and the sailors, not for the scientists. Rasmussen’s personal skills, usually the bedrock of his expeditions, would be of little use in getting there.

Perhaps the most interesting member of the expedition was one of the Greenlanders, Christian Poulsen, a guide who had grown up in East Greenland and was familiar with the many fjords and strong currents in the region. Rasmussen had interviewed him years before in Angmagssalik. Poulsen’s original name was Autdaruta; he had given up this name when he moved west and was baptized.

Poulsen was also a murderer. Now about sixty years old, many years earlier he had killed his wife and eaten her raw heart to prevent her spirit from haunting him. He laughed at the story now, and Rasmussen, never one to judge morality, apparently laughed with him; Poulsen was an excellent storyteller, with his facial expressions, voices and gesticulating arms. He claimed that he had never murdered anyone for pleasure, but only in the best interests of the community. He was also an excellent and good-natured guide. After the expedition, Rasmussen gave him some timbers to build a new home in Nuuk. Poulsen was inordinately pleased, announcing, “I’ll have to find me a wife, but it must be a young, beefy wife, so I can be happy with her and she can enjoy the house and the next man when I’m dead.”

The expedition had about ten weeks—the months of July, August and early September—before the ferocious northeast storms would make sailing dangerous. The expedition’s ship, Dagmar, sailed into Nuuk in June and, after a brief stopover, headed south and east. The shore was “wild and colossal,” Rasmussen wrote, “an inaccessible cliff coast with numbers of fjords, in which the shining white inland ice tongues out and spreads quantities of icebergs out over the fairway. And in between the fjords skyscraping promontories, glacier-shorn, wind worn.”

As they sailed past a bare island named Griffenfeldt, Poulsen related an old story that entranced Rasmussen. In ages past, white men used to live in the region, and they were on friendly terms with the Inuit. Among them “lived a man who was very fond of his wife, and the white men challenged him to prove his love by walking across a rope stretched between the two pinnacles,” two mountains that loomed over the island. “He accepted the challenge. He was strong and loved his wife, and it was an easy feat to him. But when he had got halfway across the white men suddenly began to swing the rope; the man held on, but the line cut so deep into his arms and legs that at last his muscles gave way, and he fell into the sea. Afterwards one of the white men married his wife, and from them descend all the pale-eyed and fair-haired men on the East Coast.” Rasmussen recorded several similarly unusual stories on the journey.

On this voyage, the first to visit East Greenland by sailing from West Greenland instead of from Iceland, Rasmussen met dozens of residents and enjoyed glorious weather. Farther along the coast they went, stopping in well-known regions such as the Dronning Maria Valley, where the salmon river was legendary; it wound its way through the fertile, “bloom-carpeted and bush-grown valley in among calving glaciers and savage alpine crags.” Each step in the lush valley squashed “black, lustrous crowberries… the soles of our kamiks becoming red with the flowing juice.” Poulsen told how the valley was a place for various tribes to gather in the summer to fish and cool themselves in the broad, shallow river. In the evenings the men on the expedition lounged around campfires roasting fish. On August 30, the Dagmar reached Angmagssalik and dropped off presents and supplies. Rasmussen spent several days visiting, including a day with his old friend Mathiassen, who was doing archaeological excavations in the area, before heading south again to avoid the storms.

By mid-September the sailing season had advanced, and the Dagmar was nearly crushed by pack ice in a storm that destroyed its rudder and knocked out the engine. The ship was nearly swamped in battling the “foaming backwash of the waves,” while drifting without a rudder in a sea littered with icebergs. Near-hurricane-force winds blew the ship 125 miles off course, into the open waters of the Denmark Strait, requiring five days of sailing to return to the calmer waters along the coast. It wasn’t until October 2, after two weeks of storms, that they rounded Cape Farewell and returned to West Greenland.

The most interesting aspect of the voyage was not its dangerous passage, but Rasmussen’s observations of the unusual cultural practices he encountered. East Greenlanders were prone to “more lively fantasy than one finds elsewhere, except perhaps in Alaska.” They believed that they were not the only beings who inhabited the isolated patches of fertile land along the fjords. The “other kinds” of beings, however, were seen only by angakut. There were Ignerssuit, or beach spirits, benevolent spirits who happened to have no noses. And Timersit, enormous giants who dwelt far inland on the ice cap. Inerajuvaitsiat were mountain dwarves who could expand to great size when they wanted; Isserqat lived underground and could tickle people to death just for amusement. Tarrajassuit were shadow people, invisible but deadly to the touch. The most feared creatures were Erqitdlit, bloodthirsty ice-dwellers who had human bodies with the heads of dogs and could massacre entire villages on a whim. Each of these spirit beings was featured not only in the legends of the region, but also, and to a lesser extent, throughout the polar world.

The food of the region was also one of Rasmussen’s favourite topics. There was porusit, a whole sealskin tied like a bag and filled with blubber, berries and other herbs, lightly fermented for about six months, until it “melted on one’s gums.” Another regional delicacy was qajulat—seal blood boiled until stiff and then mixed with slightly rancid seal oil—“Gorgeous! One could taste it all day, and it was long before one was hungry again.” An especially delectable dish, reserved for feasts, was bearded seal caught in the early summer and cached away whole without any cleaning or butchering, its rotting body swelling with gas all summer until it was “properly appetising… one would almost fight for the meat nearest the blubber, for there it was particularly tender and juicy.”

Overall, Rasmussen’s impression of the East Greenlanders was as positive as his impression of Inuit wherever he had travelled. “Life on the East Coast is undoubtedly the hardest struggle for existence any human being has to endure, and it is true, judged from the Danish standards. But to the frugal and hardy Eskimos it was an Eldorado… All those who have lived up there, and built a house in some sheltered cove, have never allowed their spirit to be broken by its severity; rather they were enthralled by its grand beauty.” This was a magical world, the world of the Inuit, a land of extremes and contrasts, where life and death were never far apart. It was so different from European- American life, in which one could get bogged down in life’s mundane problems. One song Rasmussen recorded during the voyage seemed to him to capture everything about the land that could be put into words.

I came down

Where the ocean lies before the shore

And looked out over

The small lands in the north

Lying blue under the clear sky,

And I thought:

Someday, when I am tired, And lie down to rest,

Someday, when I die, All this that I see

Will be the same to others,

And the air will arch blue

And quiver in the heat

In just the same way

To those who live when I am gone

But I became faint

At all this beauty

This latest expedition demonstrated that Greenland’s east coast, for generations so choked with ice as to make navigation dangerous if not foolhardy, was now navigable from early July to mid- September. Rasmussen immediately began planning an even more audacious expedition for the following summer. He spent the winter of 1931–1932 in preparing proposals, choosing expedition members and calculating the logistics of the scheme. The Seventh Thule Expedition was to be larger and more complicated than anything Rasmussen had ever undertaken. “Where once a few isolated umiaks battled their way along that deserted coast through breakers and ice,” now the coast would be open to an armada of Rasmussen’s design. He would command sixty-two expedition members, twenty-five of them Greenlanders in kayaks. There would be seven motorboats of varying sizes, including the large expedition ship Stauning (diplomatically named after the prime minister, who happened to be Rasmussen’s friend), and an airplane.

“This coast is so extraordinarily wild and so indented that there are more than fifty large and small inlets and sounds,” Rasmussen recorded, and the expedition’s objective was to explore them all. From the very start, the planned multiyear exercise, dubbed “the expedition of many journeys,” was split into a number of groups, each with independent leaders and objectives. Rasmussen would be the grand coordinator, maintaining communication with the many boats and the airplane from his position aboard the Stauning. He departed from Copenhagen in late May for southern Greenland to interview and select Greenlanders to accompany him east.

He also had something new to do. He had been hired as the Greenland adviser for German filmmaker Arnold Fanck’s motion picture S.O.S. Iceberg. Starring Leni Riefenstahl and primarily filmed in West Greenland, the film would be a large project. Rasmussen was hired to organize Inuit kayakers and extras. The film crew soon descended on isolated communities in the Uummannaq district, including Ilulissat, briefly shattering the peace with machinery and many cast and crew members, before departing as quickly as it had arrived. Rasmussen worked with the filmmakers for about ten days, then used his earnings to help finance the Seventh Thule Expedition.

The rest of that expedition had massed in Nuuk. In June, Rasmussen was joined there by some familiar companions, including Mathiassen and Peder Pedersen. Over the next three months, the expedition’s many boats wound up the serpentine fjords and along the broken, erratic coast from Cape Farewell to Angmagssalik. Although the expedition was not like the tightly knit group of a sled journey, in which individual actions and leadership determined not only success but survival, Rasmussen apparently remained the charming and charismatic leader, urging the many teams on to great efforts, constantly assessing their abilities and inclinations. Hundreds of aerial photographs were taken during thousands of miles of flying, to be used later to perfect maps being drawn up by the Geodetic Institute in Copenhagen. Other teams of scientists studied the region’s geology and meteorology and took sonar measurements of ocean depths, and of course Rasmussen collected ethnographic material.

The entire expedition went off without any difficulties or complaints; there were no accidents, disasters or insurmountable problems, no food shortages or sunken ships. Rasmussen’s unerring sense of human nature kept the dozens of people and intermingling teams happy and productive, focused on the task. Christian Poulsen came along again, as Rasmussen’s companion. Rasmussen missed the immediate connection to the land that he got from dogsledding, so to escape the technology and the Danish scientists, he and Poulsen would often take a boat ashore and head inland with backpacks to hunt and explore, to smoke giant cigars, laugh at private jokes, and celebrate their freedom.

Rasmussen organized coffee parties in every settlement they came upon, with drumming, dancing, singing and storytelling to pass the long summer evenings. He feasted on East Greenlandic delicacies; once they learned of his love for their type of food, hunters brought him special treats they had been preparing for months—green, rotten, tender meats and blubber sacs. He likely partook of these spicy local foods more often than he should have; on the return journey, he was overtaken with severe stomach cramps and had to be hospitalized in West Greenland. The nurse thought it was food poisoning, as in previous years Rasmussen had endured several bouts of illness that had hospitalized him. His years of hard living and a staggering workload had begun to take their toll. But after he returned to Denmark on November 5, he brushed off his illness and continued to eat, drink, and smoke as he had always done. One photo from the time shows Rasmussen in casual clothes, lounging on a wicker deck chair and smoking a cigar. Dagmar sits beside him, her head turned in his direction, looking prim in a black dress and holding a teacup and saucer in both hands. Rasmussen’s cheeks look slightly gaunt and he appears weary.

Rasmussen’s reunion with his family was brief, however, and he was soon off to the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague. He was part of a twenty-person Danish delegation, consisting mostly of lawyers, politicians and officials with the foreign commission. For several years, Denmark and Norway had been locked in a territorial dispute over the sovereignty of East Greenland. The legal arguments were rooted in history dating back to the Norse colonization of Greenland a thousand years earlier and were further complicated by the historical merging of the Danish and Norwegian royal families in the Middle Ages, as well as several recent territorial agreements between the two nations. In July 1932, a band of Norwegian hunters had raised the Norwegian flag at Myggbutta, an uninhabited but frequently visited summer hunting ground for Inuit hunters in the far north. It was rich in game and, as the New York Times put it, “probably in minerals.”

Norwegian newspapers decried the Danish presence in a land they believed belonged to Norway. Rasmussen was asked to speak on behalf of Greenlanders, to offer a perspective on the conflict that might more accurately reflect the interests of the indigenous peoples who lived there rather than the governments of the two European nations claiming colonial suzerainty. The conflict deeply troubled Rasmussen, who always had a great respect for Norway and its explorers and statesmen, such as Fridtjof Nansen. One of his own ancestors had come from Norway and settled in Greenland. Rasmussen didn’t speak long, but he was appreciated as one “whose incorruptibility was universally recognized, whose mind could not be poisoned by hate,” as Freuchen put it. Rasmussen said: “I consider myself entitled to defend Greenlanders not only because of blood ties that bind me to them, but also because of the fact that I have ever since my childhood been in continuous connection with them. We speak the same language as hunters and scientists, we have the same interests, and I therefore am considered in all conditions as one of their own. I would not with any justification occupy the position I have if I failed them on an occasion like this—if I failed to defend my childhood friends, all my old expedition mates.” He spoke as a citizen of the land, and his opinion helped sway the court in Denmark’s favour.

In December 1932 and the early months of 1933, Rasmussen set to work on yet another ambitious plan, this one inspired by his work on the Hollywood film S.O.S. Iceberg the previous spring. He now wanted to make his own feature film, to be shot entirely in East Greenland and featuring a Greenlandic cast in a traditional Greenlandic story. The Wedding of Palo, as the film was eventually titled, was in some ways a refutation of the opinions of Robert Flaherty, the director of Nanook of the North. Flaherty had claimed that “films are well-suited to portraying the lives of primitive people whose lives are simply lived and who feel strongly, but whose activities are external and dramatic rather than internal and complicated. I don’t think you could make a good film of the love affairs of an Eskimo.” The Wedding of Palo was a love story.

Rasmussen no doubt intended the film to be more than merely a fictional story set in Greenland; he envisioned a folklore- inspired tale, almost a documentary disguised as fiction. The film should, in his words, “be at all costs, true to life” but also have commercial appeal to attract financing. The New York Times reported that he would be trying to “portray the strange life of the Greenlanders by means of sound pictures.”

Rasmussen always had good commercial instincts for his books, and he had big hopes for this new medium as well. In fact, he had already planned two more related films, one to be set in Thule and the other in West Greenland. Together, these three films would provide a window into the Greenland Inuit world’s three regions and their various levels of contact with European culture. In The Wedding of Palo, Rasmussen wanted to portray the culture of the Greenland Inuit as it was before contact with Europeans and to show that these indigenous people experienced the same emotions and desires as people everywhere—they too felt love, jealousy, desire for revenge. He envisioned a film that was a celebration of their life and traditions, wrapped in a fictional tale of love, betrayal and heroism.

Mere months remained to set it all in place—to raise funds, negotiate contracts, write the script, hire the crew, decide on and purchase the equipment and arrange for its transport to Greenland. But the film was just one component of Rasmussen’s grand plan for the season. He also wanted to continue with the scientific work of the year before, which required interviewing and hiring for the scientific positions; to work on his translation of Inuit poems, stories and other folklore; and to oversee the ongoing work of the Fifth Thule Expedition. He was drowning in paperwork.

There was a brief holiday in Italy, in February; but otherwise, Rasmussen worked steadily until the early June sailing. In Greenland, while the scientific parties continued their work along the coast, he travelled to Angmagssalik and began selecting the actors for his film. To get a large crowd together, he organized a giant coffee party and invited anyone in the vicinity who could make it. Rasmussen presided over drumming, dancing and singing competitions as well as kayaking displays and shooting contests. He wasn’t necessarily interested in the winners of these contests, but in those who had distinctive facial characteristics and emotive gesticulations, important qualities in an era of film with limited dialogue, as the actors would be given creative licence in bringing the story to life. The plot of The Wedding of Palo was simple: two young men are rivals for the same woman, named Navarana after Freuchen’s deceased wife. The men oppose each other in a traditional singing duel; insults lead to a stabbing and an abduction, a flight by kayak, followed by the inevitable rescue. It was an amalgam of stories and legends that Rasmussen had heard from people along the coast.

Rasmussen helped director Friedrich Dalsheim scout locations to ensure that his vision was realized and that the scenes and actions were true depictions of life. He also translated between the Greenlandic actors and the Danish film crew for each scene and choreographed the kayak chase scene. Hundreds of small problems and details required his attention; he put in long hours under the midnight sun, under stressful conditions. Throughout the summer, he was periodically sick with various colds and undetermined illnesses that occasionally kept him bedridden. This was unusual for a man whose iron constitution had always seen him through staggering levels of exertion and hardship with rarely a complaint. He remained in good spirits, though.

While in Greenland working on the film, he kept up his Greenlandic diet of mostly raw meat and indulged his love of Greenlandic cuisine’s mature and aged delicacies. In August, the aviators Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, stopped in Angmagssalik on their 30,000-mile world tour to scout potential commercial airline routes. Their craft was a single-propeller Lockheed Sirius float plane recently christened Tingmissartoq, “one who flies like a big bird,” by an Inuk boy in Nuuk. They landed in the calm waters of the bay, and Rasmussen, delighted with their company, presented them with a large walrus tusk as a memento of their visit and “gave an Arctic dinner for the notable guests, consisting of all kinds of special Greenland fare.”

Rasmussen’s illness probably began as stomach upset from too much rotted or fermented meat, but it soon took on other aspects. He began to have fevers and headaches and was often overcome with weakness and dizziness. He would be ill for a few days, then rally and seem to be on the mend. But the fever would return. Signe Vest, the only nurse on the coast of East Greenland, was in wireless telegraph contact with the nearest physician, Laurent Christensen, who was six hundred miles away in Nuuk, and in early October Christensen ordered Rasmussen to the hospital in Nuuk. After several days at sea, the ship Kivioq arrived in Nuuk and Rasmussen staggered to the doctor’s house. It soon became evident that the illness had evolved into virulent flu with pneumonia.

Such was the seriousness of his illness and the extent of Rasmussen’s fame that the Hans Egede, the only regularly scheduled ship plying the route between Copenhagen and Greenland, made a special detour to Nuuk to collect Rasmussen and take him to Copen hagen. Bedridden and delirious throughout the two-week voyage, he was given a blood transfusion. On his arrival in Copenhagen, the cheers of the crowd waiting at the dock revived him. He rolled from his stretcher and shuffled down the gangplank on unsteady legs, clinging to the handrail while waving weakly to his fans. Flashing his boyish grin, he was helped into a waiting ambulance and rushed off to the hospital.

After several weeks of fever and delirium, his “wonderful constitution” seemed to be defeating the illness, which was diagnosed as a rare form of botulism from contaminated meat, complicated by influenza and pneumonia. From his hospital bed, Rasmussen sent out Christmas greetings expressing his wish to return to Greenland. He was, after all, only fifty-four years old. “I believe I shall recover soon and be back at work,” his physician reported him as saying. Two days later, on December 21, 1933, he was dead.