Peter Freuchen: The Real Most Interesting Man In The World

This is Peter Freuchen, posing in 1948 with his wife, Dagmar.

Where to even start?

He was an explorer, a writer, an anthropologist and an all round man of action.

He was 6′ 7″ tall and he once killed a wolf with his bare hands. In the photograph above he’s wearing a polar bear that also had the misfortune to run into him one day.

When the Nazis occupied his native country, Denmark, he joined the resistance.

The Germans captured him and sentenced him to death.

He escaped.

Towards the end of his life he somehow popped up as a contestant on the American TV quiz The $64,000 Dollar Question.

He won.

The. Entire. Sixty. Four. Grand.

You may be getting a sense of why he is often called The Real Most Interesting Man in the World.

When I was read about him, I thought I’d share this famous story about him. The text below is pasted from History Daily:

“In 1926 during one of his Arctic expeditions, Freuchen was caught in a blizzard storm, so he took cover beneath a dog sled. But the snow and ice overtook him and he was trapped under the sled for days.

He started to run out of food, and his shelter became a cocoon of ice, so tightly packed around him that he could barely move. His breath began to condense into ice.

His escape plan?

Mold his own frozen poop into a chisel.

And then use it to carve through the solid wall of ice.

Once outside, he realized that one of his legs was no longer working. He crawled for three hours back to his camp. By the time he made it back, gangrene had set in.

And so he amputated his own toes with a pair of pliers and no anaesthesia.”

Did I mention that he fought the Nazis?

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Postscript:

Eventually I thought if there was a book about Peter and so I went looking - and I actually found his autobiography, entitled Vagrant Viking. Here’s his own description from the book:

“What a way to die…I gave up once more and let the hours pass without another move. But I recovered my strength while I rested and my morale improved. I was alive after all. I had not eaten for hours, but my digestion felt all right. I got a new idea! I had often seen dog’s dung in the sled track and had noticed that it would freeze as solid as a rock. Would not the cold have the same effect on human discharge? Repulsive as the thought was, I decided to try the experiment. I moved my bowels and from the excrement I managed to fashion a chisel-like instrument which I left to freeze…I was patient. I did not want to risk breaking my new tool by using it too soon…At last I decided to try my chisel and it worked!”