Though the expedition failed to find the hoped-for papers, in a speech at a dinner given in Schwatka's honor by the American Geographical Society in 1880, he noted that his expedition had made "the longest sledge journey ever made both in regard to time and distance" Schwatka (1965), pp.115–116 of eleven months and four days and 2709 miles and that it was the first Arctic expedition on which the whites relied entirely on the same diet as the Inuit.