KNUD RASMUSSEN*

1879-1933 | Cross-arctic

ACOLLEAGUE of Rasmussen’s once remarked: “No matter whether it was Greenlanders or [Inuit] in Canada and Alaska, he came as one of them. They unfolded their soul to the greatness and warmth of his being, and in return he received their simple tales of life and its struggles with the mysterious powers, their wild legends and fine poetry.” Raised a product of two worlds, fluent in both Greenlandic and Danish, Rasmussen was accepted equally by shaman and scientist. As a person, he preferred hardship to boredom, danger to inactivity, the knife blade of hunger to the dull satisfaction of gluttony. Most importantly, he was an explorer of both place and people, and this is what made him great.

Above all, he was curious about the entire civilization of the “Polar Eskimo.” Between 1912 and 1933, he launched the seven Thule expeditions from the Arctic trading station he had built at Cape York, Greenland. (Over more than 20 years of harrowing travel and exploration, only two men died on Rasmussen’s watch. Few could match such a record.) It was the Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-24) that established him as the greatest scholar in the history of Arctic ethnography, for he had conceived to “attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race.” In 3½ years, he travelled more than 30,000 kilometres, traversed the top of North America and became the first to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled. There had been nothing like it since Lewis and Clark. From this expedition came a 10-volume account condensing his insights and discoveries, natural history, prehistory and archeology, linguistics and ethnography.

Unlike so many other explorers, he had no interest in self-aggrandizing yet pointless adventures. The history and culture of the Inuit was his Holy Grail.

*Rasmussen spent less than three years in Canada, but his discovery of the interrelation of Inuit across the Arctic was so momentous, we are fast-tracking his “citizenship” and including him here. — Ed.