Hans Hendrik

Hans Hendrik was born in Fiskenæsset in Danish Greenland and was still a teenager when the American explorer Elisha Kent Kane recruited him in 1853 for his second Grinnell Expedition, sent to search for the missing Franklin expedition and probe further into the Arctic. Hendrik's skill at hunting seal and driving dog teams kept the ship's crew supplied through a brutal winter that killed several of Kane's men and nearly killed the rest.

He went on to serve on the Hayes expedition of 1860, then on Charles Francis Hall's Polaris expedition of 1871 to 1873, during which he was among those stranded on the drifting ice floe with his family after the ship was abandoned, surviving a winter adrift much as his fellow guide Tookoolito did on the same ice. He served a fourth time on the British Arctic Expedition led by George Nares in 1875 to 1876, again as hunter, again keeping men alive on food he alone knew how to find in the depth of an Arctic winter.

Across roughly two decades of expeditions organised, financed and later written up entirely by Europeans and Americans, Hendrik was paid a fraction of what the explorers received and was rarely named as more than a hired hand in official accounts, despite the expeditions' repeated dependence on his hunting and ice knowledge for their survival.

Late in life he dictated his own account of these journeys, later published in English as Memoirs of Hans Hendrik. It stands as one of the very few surviving records of nineteenth-century polar exploration told from an Inuit point of view rather than a European one. He died in Greenland in 1889.