Such were the measures taken by our sagacious Navigator for procuring a purity of air. It remains only to see in what manner he supplied pure water; another article of so great moment, that the thirsty voyager, upon his salt and putrid diet, with a short allowance of this element, and that in a corrupted Rate, must account a plentiful provision of fresh water to be indeed the _best of things_.
Captain Cook was not without an apparatus for distilling sea-water, and though he could not obtain nearly so much as was expected from the invention, yet he sometimes availed himself of it; but for the most of his voyage he was otherwise provided. Within the Southern Tropic, in the Pacific Ocean, he found so many islands, and those so well stored with springs, that, as I have hinted before, he seldom was without a sufficiency of fresh water for every useful purpose. But not satisfied with plenty, he would have the purest; and therefore whenever an opportunity offered, he emptied what he had taken in but a few days before, and filled his casks anew. But was he not above four months in his passage from the Cape of Good Hope to New Zeeland, in the frozen zone of the South, without once seeing land? and did he not actually complete his circumnavigation, in that high latitude, without the benefit of a single fountain? Here was indeed a _wonder of the Deep_! I may call it the _Romance of his Voyage_! Those very shoals, fields, and floating mountains of ice, among which he steered his perilous course, and which presented such terrifying prospects of destruction; those, I say, were the very means of his support, by supplying him abundantly with what he most wanted. It had been said that those stupendous masses of ice, called _islands_ or _mountains_, melted into fresh water, though Crantz, the relator of that paradox, did not imagine they originated from the sea, but that they were first formed in the great rivers of the North, and being carried down into the ocean, were afterwards increased to that amazing height by the snow that fell upon them*. But that all frozen sea-water would thaw into fresh, had either never been asserted, or had met with little credit. This is certain that Captain Cook expected no such transmutation, and therefore was agreeably surprised to find he had one difficulty less to encounter, that of preserving the health of his men so long on salt-provisions, with a scanty allowance of corrupted water, or what he could procure by distillation The melted ice of the sea was not only fresh but soft, and so wholesome, as to show the fallacy of human reason unsupported by experiments. An ancient of great authority had assigned, from theory, bad qualities to melted snow; and from that period to the present times, this prejudice extended to ice had not been quite removed.