Explore "David Goes to Greenland" by David Binney Putnam on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On August twenty-eighth after a long time in very thick fog we at last saw land only a little way off. For a couple of days we had been working down the coast of Devon Island and Bylot Island, wanting to get to Pond's Inlet where there is a station of the Northwest Mounted Police and also a post of the Hudson Bay Company.
Cap'n Bob had not been able to see land or to take any observations but we knew pretty well from dead reckoning that we had reached the south shore of Pond's Inlet. "Dead reckoning," you know, means finding out where you are by the record of the number of miles the log shows the ship has travelled. The log itself is a little instrument like a small propeller which is let out on a long rope at the stern; it turns around fast or slow according to the speed at which the boat travels, and the revolutions it makes are recorded showing the number of knots, or sea miles, covered.