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“Out of duty and obedience he pursued his engineering studies in good conscience; soon his health deteriorated seriously, he became terribly melancholy, his eyes took
on that look particular to sailors and voyagers, that veiled and unfathomable gaze which, even when it points straight into your eyes, seems to contemplate infinite expanses much farther away.”
Houses were made from empty wine bottles mortared together. “Alcohol is at the base of all the crimes and most of the pleasures of Punta Arenas,” Cook observed.
The ancient Greeks, who already believed the earth to be spherical, reasoned that there must exist a great landmass on the far end of the globe to counterbalance the known continents of the Northern Hemisphere.
The sea was barely 28.4 degrees, the freezing point of salt water.
Galilean moons had long served as a kind of celestial clock. The timing of their eclipses was predicted so precisely that navigators could set their chronometers by them and thereby determine a ship’s longitude.
Cook’s intervention is the first known instance of light therapy, regularly used today to treat seasonal affective disorder and other conditions.
The fail-safe had failed. There was no escape plan.
On top of everything the men were already struggling with, no one thought it wise to add the ever-present possibility of suddenly being blown up.
“There is a relation between the tongue and the harpoon. Both can inflict painful wounds. The cut of the lance heals. The cut of the tongue rots.”
Amundsen and his men also avoided snow blindness thanks to goggles based on those Cook had constructed after Inuit designs, using photographic filters as lenses.
