WE REACH THE POLE 289 



6 p.m., Columbia meridian time, in case the sky should 

 be clear, but at that hour it was, unfortunately, still 

 overcast. But as there were indications that it would 

 clear before long, two of the Eskimos and myself made 

 ready a light sledge carrying only the instruments, a 

 tin of pemmican, and one or two skins; and drawn by 

 a double team of dogs, we pushed on an estimated 

 distance of ten miles. While we traveled, the sky 

 cleared, and at the end of the journey, I was able to 

 get a satisfactory series of observations at Columbia 

 meridian midnight. These observations indicated that 

 our position was then beyond the Pole. 



Nearly everything in the circumstances which then 

 surrounded us seemed too strange to be thoroughly real- 

 ized; but one of the strangest of those circumstances 

 seemed to me to be the fact that, in a march of only a 

 few hours, I had passed from the western to the eastern 

 hemisphere and had verified my position at the summit 

 of the world. It was hard to realize that, in the first 

 miles of this brief march, we had been traveling due 

 north, while, on the last few miles of the same march, 

 we had been traveling south, although we had all 

 the time been traveling precisely in the same direction. 

 It would be difficult to imagine a better illustration 

 of the fact that most things are relative. Again, 



is equal to the distance of the center of the sun from the zenith, plus the declination 

 of the sun for that day and hour. 



The declination of the sun for any place at any hour may be obtained 

 from tables prepared for that purpose, which give the declination for 

 noon of every day on the Greenwich meridian, and the hourly change in the 

 declination. 



Such tables for the months of February, March, April, May, June, and July, 

 together with the ordinary tables for refraction to minus 10° Fahrenheit, I had with 

 me on pages torn from the " Nautical Almanac and Navigator." 



