History's Toughest Heroes: Peter Freuchen: Surviving the Arctic Wilderness

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But if you're in the UK and you can't wait, you can listen to the latest episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds.

A heads up before we start, this story contains some gory scenes.

If you're squeamish, you might want to listen to another episode.

Spring 1923, the Fox Basin of the Canadian Arctic.

A massive bloke lumbered through the snow.

He's six and a half feet tall.

He had wild hair, his blonde hair, it was like this tornado, a big beard.

He had this face that looked really tough and mean.

This guy, Peter Fricken, was lost.

It's very desolate.

A little bit of a moonscape.

Lots of rock, lots of snow, ice.

One of the harshest environments that you can imagine living in.

Now he was wearing huge furs, but that couldn't protect him for long around here.

I mean the temperatures dropped to minus 40.

It's the kind of cold that if you spit, your spit can be frozen before it even hits the ground.

It'll hit the ground and make a little cracking sound like a pebble.

Freiken had left his companions at their camp to go out alone.

Bad idea.

They had encountered some rough weather and they encountered some difficult terrain and some very deep snow so they dropped their supplies off.

And then they had traveled a little bit further and then Peter decided the next day I'm going to go back and get our supplies.

But the weather got worse.

He couldn't go any further.

The wind was whipping up.

His tracks had been erased in the snow and he's caught in the jagged teeth of this storm.

He needs to find shelter.

Froiken sheltered his sled dogs by the boulder.

Then he searched for a way to protect himself from the cold.

So he digs an indentation in the snow.

He flips his sled over it and he crawls inside for shelter.

He covered his exit hole with a sealskin bag.

He would wait out of the storm.

As the wind howled outside, He fell asleep.

And when he wakes too, he realizes he's been frozen in place.

Now he he tries to kick his bag aside, but it wouldn't budge.

The snow had backed up against it while he slept.

It had frozen solid.

He was trapped.

He is in a little tiny area.

It's about the size of a coffin, and it's going to become his coffin.

I'm Ray Winston, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's toughest heroes.

True stories of adventurers, rebels, and survivors who live life on the edge.

Peter Freichen into the wilderness.

So I was living in New York, and a friend of mine was a member of the Explorers Club on New York's Upper East Side.

Reed Mittenmuller is the author of Wanderlust, an eccentric explorer, an epic journey, a lost age.

The very top of the club, they've got all these stuffed animals.

They've got the hide of a Siberian tiger that have been rumored to have eaten 48 people.

And I look and over the fireplace, there's this grand stately fireplace, there's an oil painting of this man.

He had a wooden leg and I was like, who is this person?

This person was Peter Freiken

from the Danish city of Neukerbing Fausta.

He was born in 1886.

Peter Freiken was from a upper middle class family.

His dad was a business person.

He had a lot of siblings and his brother ended up becoming a doctor.

You know, like doctors and lawyers,

they weren't super wealthy, but they definitely weren't poor.

Froiken was smart.

He enrolled in medical school in Copenhagen.

He seemed set up for a simple life as a doctor.

But from the start, he didn't fit in.

Not that doctors need to look any specific way, but I'm pretty confident in saying that Peter Freiken did not look that way.

He was getting restless.

Yeah, he's very anti-establishment in the way, you know, he was into the arts, he was into theater, he embraced this bohemian lifestyle.

You know, he hung out with the theater crowd.

And at this point in history, this is around 1905, 1906, you still have these explorers coming back from the Arctic.

And one of their first stops was Copenhagen.

The race to the North Pole captured the public imagination.

The explorers who came back gave lectures about their adventures and huge crowds paid good money to hear them.

Freiken went to a talk by Lud V.

Moulius Eriksen.

He'd just returned from an expedition in the Arctic.

Artists and writers had gone with him to get inspiration from the landscape.

And Freiken was impressed.

And so he goes to Mulius Eriksen's home and he knocks on the door and introduces himself.

They get in a chat and he basically talks his way onto his next expedition.

So Froikin ditched his respectable career and took a different path, one which led to the far north.

The Arctic was always this place that in the popular imagination was a very mysterious place, going back to the ancient Greeks.

Wild stories about the Arctic have been told in Europe for centuries.

So they had all these ideas that

there were people living there, but these people could fly.

You know, there's no gravity there.

There are other theories that the ocean currents further south would kind of go under and then back up in the Arctic.

So it was actually quite warm there and tropical.

That there were underground cities there where lost races of humans live.

Froikin went to Greenland with a small advanced group.

They put him to work in the engine room as a stoker.

He's strapping, he's got broad shoulders, you know, he looked like, you know, an athlete.

And so he's down there and it's this just noisy, clangy room where he's got a shovel and he's feeding coal into a furnace and this coal dust would get everywhere.

Even the men's flower rations turn black from the soot.

In the dirt and the swollen heat of the engine room, tensions could run high.

And if there was a disagreement among the men, they would settle it with a fight, you know, where they would just get squared off and it's like, okay, let's box it out.

And then when you're done and one of you is pummeled the other one, just go and shake hands.

At last, the ship struck pack ice.

Froykin emerged from the grimy engine room and clambered out on deck.

And then,

for the first time, he saw Greenland.

And so he steps outside of the ship and he looks, and there's this mountain range.

If you could describe the landscape in musical terms, it's like, you know, opera.

Just the strings are swelling, you've got a timpani, cymbals crashing.

It was extremely majestic, extremely harsh.

It's like an oil painting that you might see in a museum just of some of the most magnificent scenery on earth.

He was blown away.

It was his job to gather dogs and supplies for the expedition proper.

That meant getting to know the locals.

His very first encounter with Inuit people was some Inuit men paddled out on their kayaks, and just the way they talked about nature and their outdoorsman skills were just so incredible.

He had a lot of respect for that.

He was very impressed.

It was like, you're living in a place that forces you to be extremely present and to know your surroundings.

The men of the expedition spent a long winter at their base, a ship anchored off off a remote bit of coast.

Then, four teams set out to map the uncharted areas to the north.

When spring turned to summer, only three teams returned.

The expedition leader, Mullius Elickson, was missing.

In autumn, when the ice began to firm up again, a search party was sent out.

But Peter Fricken was given a different mission.

to spend the dark winter months taking weather readings out on the ice.

He had to travel 40 miles away from the ship towards the interior.

So in Greenland, you have this great ice cap.

You know, if you imagine a turtle shell,

if you took the shell and you flipped it upside down, it's like this great dome that covers the whole island.

And it's very harsh and it's very dangerous.

So the plan was this.

He'd have a team of mates come out and keep him company.

They'd drop supplies.

They'd stay a few days.

And they only got a few weeks into it when all the other men on the ship was like, You know what?

I don't want to go out there.

It's like really rough out there.

It's really bad.

So, Peter was basically left alone.

They dropped extra supplies and left him to it.

Now, the walls started closing in.

The ice inside the tiny cabin got thicker and thicker.

His breath froze on the walls.

Then

the wolves came,

getting closer and closer

in the constant dark.

They picked up Frecken's dogs, his only friends, one by one.

And he started to get very lonely, very depressed.

He starts, you know, talking to his utensils like, hello, Mr.

Fook, hello, Mr.

Spoon.

He kind of started to lose his

mind a little bit.

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When spring finally came, he saw his crewmates again, but his long winter alone had left him in a right state.

His hair was wild, his beard was crusty.

I mean, he just looked like,

I mean, it looked a little bit like, you know, the Unibomber.

And it comes out and he just wouldn't stop talking.

He was like a sponge just soaking, soaking up that human interaction.

He returned to the ship where he learned the missing men were dead.

They'd starved to death on the ice.

After another season, Froiken went home to Denmark, but he was a changed man.

And he gives school another try.

He goes back to college.

But, you know, he'd been away for three years and he had done some maturing, but he's sitting there in class and he's looking at his classmates and he just felt older and wiser and just more experienced than them and it was like i can't just sit here in a class

they started giving lectures about his adventures in the arctic turned out he was a great storyteller it didn't hurt that he looked like a viking too

soon denmark's largest newspaper came calling they needed an expert to cover the race to the north pole

Freikin wanted to go back to the Arctic himself.

He was getting restless again.

There was a big split at the time among the scientific community and the explorer community like is it really worth going to the North Pole?

You're endangering all these lies.

People are dying trying to do this.

Is it really worth it?

And you know, Peter certainly saw the appeal because it's like we want to set foot on it.

But he was also kind of skeptical.

He was kind of critical.

He did not like the way that a lot of explorers treated the Inuit.

Then Peter Frikin met a very different sort of explorer, Knut Resmundsen.

Rafmundsen grew up in Greenland.

His father was a missionary and he spoke and wrote about the country like a proper insider.

His Arctic wasn't just some barren wasteland.

It was the home of an ancient culture.

The men wanted to set up a trading post in the far north of Greenland.

They called it Tula, after this legendary island from ancient maps.

Freuken got fluent in the local language and learned about the lives of the people.

He even learned to love the local delicacy, fermented meats.

In 1911, he married an Inuit woman.

Navarana was her name.

They had two kids, and his granddaughter is also called Navarana.

So as a little girl, people always ask me, How is it to have a a famous grandfather?

And I'd say, Oh, stupid question.

I think he was very nice and warm and funny.

And the first thing he gave me when I was five years old was a pocket knife.

I have always a pocket knife in my pocket.

Because if you meet a seal or a whale and you have you like to eat

the matzuk, that's the

skin of the whale, you always have to wear a knife so you can cut a little piece of it and eat it.

He adored his wife.

I got my grandmother's name and I have her soul inside me.

He told me very much about my grandmother.

She was very

nice and very clever.

Good to make clothes.

She could use a knife, very good.

Navarana encouraged Peter's interests.

They read about the First World War, but that was happening half a world away.

Peter spent most of his time looking at the land around him.

And they would notice these little fine details like, you know, when a dog barks and a cloud of vapor comes out of its mouth, that vapor isn't as thick today as it was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

I mean, a tiny thing that somebody else wouldn't notice, they were starting to notice.

They were noticing that, you know, schools of fish, you know, that you'd see maybe further south are starting to move north because the ocean currents were getting warmer.

And so Peter started to sound the alarm about this.

You know, this is happening and people need to be aware of it because it's changing the earth.

It's changing our lifestyles.

So we need to study it more and be more aware about it.

After the war, Peter took Navarano and the kids to Denmark.

Then...

They went back north for another expedition.

Navarano sewed the clothes they needed.

She was showing off her work when she got ill.

In 1921, Spanish flu was sweeping across the world.

Navarana was among the millions who died.

Her young daughter, Pipaluk, was just three years old.

Peter was heartbroken, and he joined the expedition alone.

Two years in, That's when he made the shocking decision to leave the camp alone.

His feet were killing him all night.

Now, when he woke up in his icy coffin, they were numb, a sure sign of frostbite.

He had to take action fast.

Maybe he could shift the sled off him.

He rolled onto his front.

So he tried doing a push-up, you know, like get my back against it.

It's very powerful and he tries to do, you know, a push-up.

But...

The sled wouldn't move.

You know, and he tries clawing his way out with his hands, just not working.

In his hurry to shelter, Peter had only gone and left his snow knife outside, along with the dogs.

Big mistake,

and one which might kill him.

He sucked on a strap of polar bear skin.

Then he waited for his spit to freeze.

Once it was stiff with ice, he used it to scrape a tunnel through the snow.

And as he's, you know, getting closer and closer to the surface, you know, the snow goes from black to kind of taking on the color of, you know, wet newsprint or something, you know, like you can see the light.

So he finally, finally breaks through.

Froiken shoved his head out of the hole and into a raging storm.

And he had a lot of spit around his beard, and it got frozen to one of the sled runners.

So it's frozen his head into place.

So here is his head emerging out of the snow as the sharp teeth of the wind are just ripping around this guy.

And he realizes, I could die in about a minute in this environment.

You know, he doesn't have a hat on or anything.

He didn't have long.

He pulled himself free, tearing out chunks of his frozen beard from his face.

Then, knowing he was getting weaker, He felt something else.

A movement in his bowels.

He needed to go to the bathroom.

He'd heard of a nifty Inuit trick in desperate times with dog shit.

And so this comes to mind.

And so he goes to the bathroom and then he holds it in his hand and he shapes it into a chisel.

And he chisels his way out with, I guess, the only way to describe it is a poop chisel.

You know, it doesn't sound pretty.

For hours, he chipped away at the snow with his tool.

till he'd made a small hole.

Then he squeezed his body out inch by inch.

He kept breathing in to expand his ribs, making the hole a bit bigger each time.

When he crawls out the rest of the way, sled dogs are used to this kind of weather, so they were fine.

And he goes over and

he hooks the dogs up and

immediately

They just start running ahead like they think it's a game.

I mean, he's lost control of the reins.

He crawls back to camp.

Peter's face was covered with bloody welts.

His mates got him to a local trading post but what started as a shocking pins and needles in his foot developed into proper agony.

Frostbite.

His foot was in such pain that he would occasionally put it outside of the cabin so that the cold would kind of numb it and there's all this dead flesh on it.

And, you know, his campmates are taking mole skin and they're putting it onto his foot.

And then they're peeling it off, which helps take off the dead skin.

And it's a mess.

As the dead flesh came away, the bones in his toes were exposed.

And that's dangerous.

I mean, you know, it's going to become rotten.

You can't have a rotten portion of your body.

So he's got to remove them.

And so

he ends up doing it himself.

He's got a pair of pliers and a hammer.

He pinched his first toe with these pliers, then swung the hammer down.

Bosh!

The bone snapped.

The pain, he said, cut into every nerve of my body.

An agony I cannot describe.

There was an Inuit woman who had offered to like bite them off at one point.

He was like, no, no, no, no.

Froiken removed his remaining toes himself,

one by one.

He was out of danger for now, but by the time he got back to Denmark, his foot had got a lot worse.

In the end, the doctors had to amputate it along with part of his leg.

He was in no state to return to the Arctic.

He fell into a deep depression.

And while he's in the hospital, recovering from the amputation of his foot, he's around a lot of other amputees.

And he noticed that some of the people were depressed.

And other of the people, you know, kind of had a positive attitude about it.

And he decided that's probably the way, that's probably the way to be.

So he took on this, this more positive attitude.

But also he realized, you know, there's going to be a career change for me.

I'm going to have to have a shift.

But from his hospital bed, what could he do?

Peter was a gifted storyteller, so he decides to write a novel.

He's got all the time while he's recuperating.

He says, I'm going to write a novel and I'm going to use my experiences in the Arctic to inform this novel.

Friken didn't think much about how a lot of Arctic explorers wrote about the place or about the Inuit.

He wanted to tell stories which described how harsh it was, but treated the local culture with proper respect.

His novel was called The Great Hunter and it sold well.

And after it was published in America as Eskimo, MGM Studios bought the rights to make it into a film.

So they bring Friekin out to Hollywood to help on the script and to be an advisor on the film.

They went through all these directors and they land on W.S.

Van Dyke.

And W.S.

Van Dyke at that time was kind of the James Cameron of his day.

The film was shot on a location in the Arctic and featured Inuit actors speaking in their native language.

By the time it was finished in 1933, Eskimo was one of the most expensive films ever made.

Peter kept working at a brutal pace, writing books and lecturing.

Now fascism was on the rise in Europe and Peter no longer ignored world events.

He spoke out against the Nazis.

His books were banned in Germany.

This was a huge financial blow, but it didn't stop him.

And many refugees from the Nazis found safety and help at his farmhouse.

So as World War II is heating up, he wasn't Jewish, but he would sometimes tell people he was just to pick fights when they're making innocent comments and that sort of thing.

And he later ended up taking a lot of refugees as part of the Danish resistance.

So, as they were escaping Germany and they're on their way to Sweden or the United States or England or wherever they were, he would shelter them and he would help protect them.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark.

Peter's home was a hub of resistance for a while.

Then, he was arrested by German soldiers and imprisoned.

It was time to go.

He escaped with his daughter and went back to the United States.

Now he was traveling through Texas when he heard that Germany had surrendered.

The war in Europe was over.

He threw himself into his work again, lecturing and traveling across the United States.

In 1956, when Peter was 70 years old, a question supervisor for a new television quiz show listened to him speak, and he liked what he heard.

Round then, every Tuesday evening, Americans gathered around their television screens for a national event.

The new episode of the $64,000 Question.

I mean, it was rumored that President Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, was like, Do not bother me when this show is on.

Crime would go down in cities when this show is on.

Restaurants noticed, like, that's when they would take their night off sometimes because, like, no one's going to come in because they're going to stay home to watch this television show.

Contestants got quizzed, doubling their money with every right answer.

Those who got the answers right came back each week till the final hurdle: the $64,000 question.

Peter Froikin became the fifth person to win the top prize.

And after that moment, if he stepped out onto a street, he would be mobbed.

People would be asking for his autograph.

He was recognized everywhere he went.

I mean, it was this tremendous celebrity that he gained from appearing on that show.

The news reached Denmark and his granddaughter, Navarana.

I remember when he won, he called us in telephone and we heard in the radio.

And then my mother

went to buy some ice cream at eight o'clock in the morning.

That was very special.

Very proud about him.

After a life of danger and adventure, it was a pretty strange way to become famous in the United States.

You know, that's what it takes to really be a household name, is going on to TV and answering a few questions on a game show.

And there's something kind of funny about it, ironic about it, maybe a little sad about it.

You know, like the man's life was full of achievements, full of all these accomplishments he was on all these arctic expeditions he was part of the danish resistance during world war ii he made one of the most expensive movies in hollywood history at the time he's done all of these things that's what it takes on the 31st of august 1957 peter wrote a postcard from new york to his granddaughter then he boarded a plane to alaska He was going to fly over the North Pole for a TV special.

After all his adventures, it was a place he'd never seen.

Three days later he arrived in Anchorage.

It was the end of the Arctic summer.

He signed a few autographs, then he went to his hotel room.

He felt down on the floor,

banked you,

without being

ill or without pain.

And that was very happy for for a man who was so active

and lived such a strong life.

life, he shouldn't be in a bed for a long time.

He died suddenly.

That was very

nice date for such a man.

And four days later I got his last postcard.

Next time on history's toughest heroes.

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