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Between 1921 and 1924, Knud Rasmussen led a small band of colleagues in a journey of investigation across arctic North America, from Hudson Bay to the Bering Strait. The full scientific report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, as it was called, fills ten volumes. This single volume, Across Arctic America, is Rasmussen's own reworking and condensation of the larger series and gives the essence of the Arctic and its people.
In his introduction, Terrence Cole says, "On his journeys Rasmussen explored both the visible world of ice and snow and the invisible world of mind and spirit, recording an incomparable wealth of data about Eskimo intellectual and spiritual life" (p. xi). Rasmussen's basic principle in his work was to "earn the trust of local people by showing understanding and patience: living with the people and not apart from them, sharing their work and their food, even when it was not the most palatable" (p. xvii). The expedition name "Thule" was derived from "the legendary name of Thule, after the mystical land that the ancients believed was the end of the earth" (p. xx).
The story of Rasmussen's journey from region to region and from tribe to tribe becomes rather philosophical as he compares and contrasts what he finds with his own experiences and those of his colleagues. Throughout the book, he tells of finding the local angakoq, an older person bequeathed with...