Big Dane Tamed

IT'S ALL ADVENTURE--Peter Freuchen --Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Other explorers have contributed more to geographical knowledge, but the most picturesque, the heartiest and the biggest storyteller of the lot is 52-year-old Peter Freuchen (Eskimo, Arctic Adventure). A giant, bearded, Danish Jew. Freuchen quit medical school at 20 to join a Greenland expedition, married an Eskimo woman by whom he had two children, lived 18 years among the Eskimos as trader and hunter.

It's All Adventure, sequel to Arctic Adventure, covers the period from 1924, when Freuchen went home to Denmark, till 1932, when he went to Alaska with a Hollywood cinema crew to film his novel Eskimo. Domesticated in Denmark, Freuchen had a hard time curbing his grizzly-bear strength. (Hugged impulsively by Freuchen, the wife of a German cinema director slumped to the floor unconscious, was taken to the hospital with two broken ribs.) In Denmark Author Freuchen went to work to make money with as much frank delight as if he were harpooning a fine catch of seals. Marrying a beautiful margarine heiress, he began lecturing, wrote Polar news for a Copenhagen newspaper, became editor of a magazine started by his in-laws to lend prestige to the margarine business. When Freuchen was gypped, as when he bought his island estate, Enehoje, or when a lecture fell through, or when his money-making schemes (such as eel and fox farms) collapsed, he roared with frustration. Absentminded, Freuchen tucked his pencil in his beard when preoccupied.

Freuchen went after a good living, but he continued to like freedom and excitement. Confinement and routine cramped him like a vest several sizes too small for his barrel chest. As editor of his in-laws' magazine, forced to compromise between literature and margarine sales, he tore out his beard by the fistful. As a landowner he relieved the baronial monotony by inviting troops of guests, among them a radical poet who worked for the revolution by urging wealthy landowners to commit suicide.

When in 1927 he had to have a leg amputated--it had been frozen in his last Greenland expedition--it looked as if Freuchen would have to take things easier. Informal, he stomped around the house on his peg leg, wore his artificial limb only when he went out in society. But soon he was going stronger than ever. He made two trips to Greenland, where he revisited old friends, brought their stories up-to-date, dug up many a new tale. A special part of his pleasure, the reader suspects, was his wife's slightly sick astonishment at Eskimo food (year-old whale, blue-green eggs, etc.),at such hospitable Eskimo customs as wife-trading.

Most subdued parts of Freuchen's autobiography are those telling of his son Mequsaq (now 21, a hunter), first child by his well-beloved Eskimo wife who died in 1920. An Eskimo to the marrow, he could not, like his sister Pipaluk, now 19, adapt himself to life in Denmark. When, on one of his visits to Enehoje, Mequsaq set fire to the estate just to see it burn, Freuchen decided to send him to Greenland for good. But although Mequsaq could not learn white men's ways, neither could he learn to be happy away from his father, who knew, each time they parted, that Mequsaq, for all his poker-faced Eskimo reticence, suffered the special heartbreak of an orphan and an exile.

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