Vagrant Viking

"/ have heard it said that Arctic explorers are inferior men who would be lost in the civilized world."

So said Arctic Explorer Lorenc Peter Elfred Freuchen. who never understood what a man wanted with the steam-heated creature comforts of civilization. Yet in civilization or out. inferior was hardly the word for Freuchen. who managed to fashion successful careers as newspaperman, lecturer, travel writer and novelist (Eskimo ). During World War II, the vigorous Dane found time to fight in his country's anti-Nazi underground. Last summer he became a familiar figure across the U.S. as the fifth contestant to hit the jackpot on television's The $64,000 Question.* Later, at the start of one more Arctic expedition, peg-legged Peter Freuchen died of a heart attack at 71.

Although his ashes have long since been scattered over his beloved Greenland settlement of Thule, Freuchen's restless mind still seems alive. After four months on the counters, his encyclopedic Book of the Seven Seas (Julian Messner; $7.50) remains a bestseller. Probably headed for the list is Freuchen's final work. The Arctic Year, written with Ornithologist Finn Salomonsen (Putnam; $5.95). It deserves a place alongside Freuchen's earlier, bulky volumes of autobiography as a classic study of life in the North.

The Seven Seas is the product of Freuchen's long, dark winters in Greenland, when his mind sailed off with the big bergs "as they floated eternally to their doom." Wrote Freuchen: "Little by little it dawned upon me that there is a logical connection between everything that happens in that immense connected body of salty water that covers 71 percent of the surface of the earth." That logic led Explorer Freuchen to learn the lore he put into his book. He studied the science of the tides, waves and winds, learned about history's great sea battles. He came to know the tales of the great seaborne adventurers, from Bjarni Herjulfson. reputed to be the first Viking to see America, to Boston Harry Adams, the ugly Ohio farm boy who became a legend among the polyglot pearlers of Thursday Island.

While mastering his knowledge of the sea. Freuchen also found time to study the Arctic. The result was The Arctic Year, a month-by-month account of everything those white wastes have to offer. Nothing is missing--from January storms that sweep the landscape and uncover food for such delicate songbirds as Hornemann's redpoll, to the May migrations of barnacle geese coming home to lay their eggs. Attuned to the frigid, lonely rhythms of northern life. Freuchen filled the book with his affection for a land he loved all the more because civilized men with all their technology have never really been able to change it.

Even for Freuchen the North could be hard. He lost a leg to frostbite and he grew his beard not because he was an eccentric but because long exposure had left his face too tender for a razor. But, he wrote, "those who have been to the Arctic always long to go back. The unrest never leaves them and they will sacrifice much to once again glimpse the ice."

* By identifying such familiar arctic objects as a walrus tooth and a harpoon head, a task Freuchen found far simpler than naming his half-Eskimo children: Mequsaq Avataq Igimaqssusuktoranguapaluk and Piplauk Jette Tukuminguaq Kasaluk Palika Hager.

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