In 1925, Knud Rasmussen thanked his fate that he was ‘born in a time in which polar exploration by dogsled was not yet obsolete’. That year, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and American Lincoln Ellsworth almost reached the North Pole by aeroplane; the next year they were successful. By the 1930s, mapping and exploration were conducted increasingly by air. Rasmussen died in 1933, just in time to witness – and, in his final expedition, participate in – this new era. But before then, the Danish-Greenlandic explorer had become the first to cross the Northwest Passage by dogsled, and from his base in Thule he did more than anyone to map and explore the north of Greenland. Through his investigations of the Inuit language and culture, he is widely considered the founder of Eskimology. He spent his career travelling across the extreme north and presenting his findings to a mesmerised public.

Rasmussen was born in Greenland in 1879, in what was then called Jakobshavn (Ilulissat), a small village on Greenland’s west coast which had grown around a trading station over the course of the 19th century. His father was a Danish missionary; his mother had grown up in Greenland, and Rasmussen was therefore part Inuit. The population of Jakobshavn was overwhelmingly Inuit, and he grew up with Greenlandic tales and dogsledding, though his father refused to give him a kayak. He later praised his childhood for preparing him for his ‘life’s great work’.

When he was 12 he moved to Denmark to continue his education, as was customary, but the academic sphere was not his strong suit. Rasmussen’s childhood hero was the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who was the first to cross Greenland’s vast interior in 1888. After a few attempts he barely passed his exams, and soon thereafter a job as a journalist at Kristeligt Dagblad began to take him back to colder regions. At this time he developed his longstanding reputation as a womaniser – his Greenlandic roots were part of his charm. He travelled to Finland and Iceland, but Greenland maintained its grip on his imagination.

The idea for his first expedition to Greenland was born when he met Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen on his trip to Iceland. Mylius-Erichsen was a journalist at the broadsheet Politiken and had written critically about the Danish administration in Greenland. He ran in Copenhagen’s radical circles, and, along with collecting ethnographic data, he wanted to write about the political situation on the ground. In practice, Greenlandic affairs were then run by the Royal Greenland Trading Department, and at the beginning of the 20th century there was an increasing push to separate administration from trade. Rasmussen often held his views close to his chest, but in time he became an advocate for the Inuit, supporting measures to increase their political influence and representation.

The expedition arrived in Greenland in 1902, just after Rasmussen’s 24th birthday. Under Mylius-Erichsen’s leadership, a team of four spent two years conducting research, and Rasmussen was tasked with documenting Greenlandic myths and sagas. On the small two-year expedition each man had his own mission, but it was not without tension. As a native speaker he could conduct his research without a translator, and this allowed for a certain spontaneity, something Mylius-Erichsen perhaps envied. Upon his return, Mylius-Erichsen published a poem called ‘Knud Rasmussen’ – surprisingly hostile to his expedition mate – which began with the ‘poison of mistrust’ that flowed from the rift in their friendship. Rasmussen was not as affected, but he never again played second fiddle on an expedition.

After his return, he published his first book on Greenland, New People (1905). Their observations of the customs in the south of the island, where the Danes were most present, were perhaps more valuable to the political questions on the Danish administration. But Rasmussen’s focus was on the peoples of the polar north. These faraway regions also captured the imagination of the Danish public, and he published both scientific and popular books from his journeys.

The Danes were not the only ones concerned with polar exploration. Fridtjof Nansen was Norwegian, and in this period the American Robert Peary was trying to reach the North Pole via Greenland. On one of his voyages, Peary believed he had discovered a channel separating the mainland from an island he christened ‘Peary Land’. These discoveries and their veracity were important for who claimed the north. While a sense of adventure often motivated the explorers themselves, their nationalities and discoveries mattered. Denmark controlled Greenland, but its boundaries were unclear, and because of the harsh climate, what was most important – especially when it came to the north of the island – was the will and ability to reach and study it. Mylius-Erichsen disappeared in 1907, while investigating Peary’s claim.

More Danish presence in the north in this era of exploration was part of Rasmussen’s justification for the establishment of the Thule trading station. It became his base of operations, and was supposed to provide financial support for later expeditions. He did not want Denmark to lag behind in the bid for the north. For Rasmussen, financial matters were at best an afterthought – and while many of his backers hoped for profit from the trading station, his eyes were always on his next expedition. He made more plans than he could carry out. From Thule, he set off on the celebrated Thule expeditions, the first of which investigated Mylius-Erichsen’s fate. Ultimately he was able to determine that the ‘Peary Channel’ did not exist, and that Peary Land was contiguous with the rest of Greenland.

From the middle of the 19th century, polar exploration had entered a new era when explorers adopted the methods of the Inuit. Rasmussen’s expeditions were always accompanied by Inuit hunters, usually with their own reasons for taking on the journeys, especially to find new hunting opportunities. In the big debate over whether Peary or Cook ever reached the North Pole, he thought it pertinent to remind the public that none of their feats would have been possible without their Inuit companions. Before his second major expedition, Rasmussen admonished his fellow Europeans that they were equal to the Inuit on the ice, and that no one but him, the leader of the expedition, was to give orders.

Inevitably, Rasmussen has come to play a role in Danish and Greenlandic debates over the colonial past. In 2020, red paint was doused over his bust in Hundested. He saw his life’s work as bridging the gap between the inevitable wave of civilisation and the lives of the ‘New People’, and documented his ‘motley experiences amongst the world’s strangest people’. Despite his Greenlandic blood, his perspective was Danish. The fifth Thule expedition, his most ambitious yet, set out to test whether the Greenlanders were related to the North American Inuit. The Danish king was the protector of the trip. When they arrived in Godthåb (now Nuuk), it was the 200th anniversary of the landing of the first Danish missionary Hans Egede – whose statues in Nuuk and Copenhagen also got a 2020-style paint job. The king was visiting his Arctic colony for the first time, and met the explorers in Nuuk for the celebrations.

The expedition got into trouble from the off. The ship which was carrying their gear and some of their crew capsized. The king’s ship came to the rescue. Rasmussen’s wife, who had followed them for some of the journey, was picked up by the king’s ship, and the royals sent for new provisions. Rasmussen’s efforts were bolstered by the highest orders, both in word and in deed. Once they had been restocked, they set out.  This trip would give Rasmussen the material for what would become his proudest achievement.

He noted the difference between coastal and interior peoples – the presence of gramophones was a sure sign that a group had been touched by civilisation. Often, these meetings came from whale boats that had been stranded for the winter. Further inland, he documented the traditions that were slowly being lost to the gramophone’s dancing tunes and Christianity. Most importantly, he established that the peoples of the Arctic were bound together by a shared language and prehistory. His account of these three and a half years, Fra Grønland til Stillehavet (1925), is full of his wonder at the peoples of the Arctic north. He was then received well both in America where he met with President Coolidge, and back home, where he was greeted in the harbour by prime minister Thorvald Stauning alongside his wife and children.

In 1917, the Americans recognised Danish sovereignty in northern Greenland as a condition for purchasing the Virgin Islands from Denmark, and other countries followed suit. Only Norway held out. In 1931 the Norwegians occupied a part of the east and dubbed it Erik the Red Land after the first Norse settlers of the 900s. By then, Denmark had begun to take more of an interest in exploration, funding Rasmussen’s final missions and giving him police powers in the area. Just a few years earlier he had stood shoulder to shoulder with Norwegians in exploration; now they were adversaries.

In 1933, the Danes challenged Norway’s occupation at The Hague. Knud Rasmussen’s work on the final expedition was central to Denmark’s claims – and Denmark’s longstanding commitment not to profit from Greenland worked in their favour. In the Danish context, Rasmussen had been at the forefront of criticism of the various affairs in Greenland – and his work had often been used by the opposition to the government. In the proceedings, the Norwegians tried to use this against the Danes, by claiming that the Greenlanders felt themselves poorly treated. In The Hague, Rasmussen made himself the symbol of Danish-Greenlandic relations, emphasising his childhood among the Greenlanders, and his life split between Greenland and Denmark. There was much, he said, to criticise in Denmark’s administration of Greenland, and he often had been the first to do so – but Greenlandic prospects were better served under unified Danish governance which, since the turn of the century, had involved increasing Greenlandic participation. The Norwegians’ interest in fishing rights was hardly more sympathetic. In 1933, the court sided with Denmark.

Rasmussen died later that year, just before the premiere of his last project – a full-length film he wrote in Greenlandic, acted by Inuit against the backdrop of the harsh and wonderful natural landscapes. His whole career had been dedicated to the study and promotion of the Inuit, and stimulating Danish interest in their colony in the North. Palos Brudefærd was an attempt to do this with a new medium. While he cherished the old ways, he embraced the new era of exploration by air, and new communication with moving pictures. Rasmussen’s life and work speak to the enduring – if sometimes fraught – bond between Greenland and Denmark.