Explore "A Negro Explorer at the North Pole" by Matthew Henson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If you will get out your geography and turn to the map of the Western Hemisphere you will be able to follow me. Take the seventieth meridian, west. It is the major meridian of the Western Hemisphere, its northern land extremity being Cape Columbia, Grant Land; southward it crosses our own Cape Cod and the island of Santo Domingo, and runs down through the Andes to Cape Horn, the southern extremity of South America.
The seventieth meridian was our pathway to the Pole, based on the west longitude of 70°. Both Professor Marvin and Captain Bartlett took their observations at their respective farthests, and at the Pole, where all meridians meet, Commander Peary took his elevations of the sun, based on the local time of the Columbian meridian.