Excerpt from Finding the North Pole: Commander Peary's Discovery, April 6, 1909 and Cook's Own Story of His Claim The arguments against the winter night march were as fol lows: That we could not procure fresh water to drink by melting the snows with our alcohol lamps because the snow where we found it in the winter season was saturated with salt; the grinding and pulverizing of the salt-water hummocks, by the wind-driven snow acting as a sand blast, mixed the salt ice with the snow. As a point to remember I will here state the fact that during the whole of the drift of the jeannette, twenty-two months, we were never able to procure one pound of fresh-water snow, not even out of the ship's tops, that was fresh enough when melted to make potable water. Every ounce of water used in the Jeannette for drinking purposes was distilled. To travel in the Arctic darkness heretofore had always seemed impossible because of the inability to see how to go, or follow a compass course. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.