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to the Arctic: “In this voyage I was not only
without the necessary books and instruments,
but also felt myself deficient in the sciences of
astronomy and navigation. I didnot hesitate,
therefore, to undertake a winter’s voyage in
order to procure the one and acquire the
other.”

If his new expedition was to be of real
value he had to be able to plot his course and
fix his position on the map with the greatest
possible accuracy. The determination of lati-
tude was fairly easy, but longitude had been
the bugbear of explorers for centuries. The
longitude of a place was found by comparing
local time at the point of observation with
Greenwich time; from the difference of times
the distance east or west of Greenwich could
be easily calculated. Local time was ascer-
tained fairly simply by observing the sun or
the stars. The difficulty was to discover
exactly, while in some remote region, what the
time was at Greenwich. Before the era of
cable and wireless it was by no means an easy
matter, and the British Government had
offered in 1714 a prize of no less than £20,000