Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume. Take a nice deep breath and off we go.

Before we begin with tonight's reading, I'd like to give a special shout out of thanks to a new

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Brian, thank you so much for supporting this podcast.

It's much appreciated.

If you're interested in the exclusive perks available to subscribers, including monthly episodes found nowhere else,

you'll find a link to the Patreon in this week's podcast description. Now let's get to tonight's reading.

This evening we're reading a book of adventure. The North Pole, its discovery in

1999 under the auspices of the Perry Arctic Club by Robert E. Perry, with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, and a forward by

Gilbert H. Grovener, director and editor of the National Geographic Society, Greenwood Press Publishers, New York.

Originally published in 1910 by Frederick A Stokes Company.

Let's begin.

Dedicated to my wife. Introduction

Some years ago I met at a dinner in Washington,

the famous Norwegian Arctic Explorer Nansen,

himself one of the heroes of Polar Adventure.

And he remarked to me,

Perry is your best man. In fact, I think he is on the whole the best of the men now trying

to reach the Pole, and there is a good chance that he will be the one to succeed. I cannot give the exact words, but they were to the above

effect and they made a strong impression on me.

I thought of them when in the summer of 1908 I as President of the United States

...