“Byrd and Bennett decided to stake everything on that last trial. They decided to give the engine all the speed they could, so that at the end of her run she’d either rise into the air, or crack up once and for all. Even as they planned, they hoped against hope that it would be the former, and not the latter. The weather was perfect. It was a little past midnight. The men of the expedition were gathered about, anxiously awaiting the take-off. Byrd and Bennett shook hands with them, stepped into the cabin of the ship and started down the runway. The great ship rose laboriously into the air. There was a shout from their comrades. They were off for the North Pole! Those on the ground cheered lustily. The Great Adventure, for which one of those men in the air had been preparing all his life, had begun. “They had to navigate first by dead reckoning, following the landmarks in the vicinity of King’s Bay. They climbed to a good distance so that they could get a perfect view of the land below them, and looked down upon the snowy mountains, scenery grander than any they had ever seen before, and terrifying, too. In a short time they left the land behind, and crossed the edge of the polar ice pack. “There are no landmarks on the ice, and when they reached the ice pack, they had to begin their careful navigating. In the first place, they had to hit the Pole exactly, chiefly because that was the place they had set out for, and then because if they didn’t hit it exactly, they would have no way of reckoning their path back to Spitzbergen, and would be lost in the arctic wastes. “But expert navigating was Dick Byrd’s strong point. He had developed a sextant by which the altitude of the sun could be gaged without reference to the horizon line, and that was exactly what he needed now, because due to the formations of ice, the horizon was irregular. But figuring out position by means of the sextant requires at least an hour of mathematical calculation, and by the time the position had been figured, the men in the airplane had advanced about a hundred miles or more. So they used a method that they had learned, whereby their position could be judged by means of taking the altitude of the sun and laying down the line of position on a sort of graph.