EPILOGUE

I am an old man now, looking forward soon to joining those shipmates of long ago. Many honors have come my way, and for sixteen years as an admiral in the Navy, I have had charge of designing and building the throbbing engines which drive our every warship. That mighty fleet which so proudly showed the American flag in every ocean on the globe and has just returned to confound the doubters at home and abroad who foresaw those ships with broken-down machinery cluttering every port from Rio to Yokohama, was my design. The engines and the boilers which so sturdily drove the Oregon twelve thousand miles around South America under forced draft in time to take her place in the forefront of the battle-line at Santiago and deal the death blows to Spanish sea power, were my creation.

From that day in 1861 when as a young engineer officer I joined the Navy, until the day forty-two years later when I retired full of honors as its Engineer-in-Chief, machinery had been my life and I had hoped that my name might as a result find its place with that of Ericsson as one who had done much to advance the application of power to our warships. But as the years since my retirement weigh me down, and I see my proud Oregon already vanished from the fleet, and that fleet itself ere long destined to disappear before the creations of newer and better engineers than I, more and more do I realize that it is the men themselves and how they lived and died, rather than their puny handiwork, which those who come after us will ever have reason to cherish as the true measure of any man.

And so that huge cross I reared in the Lena Delta amidst the polar snows looms larger and larger in my mind and now I only humbly hope, as approaching the end of my long days I look back over my life, that the name of George Wallace Melville may be a little remembered as one of those who served on that far-off cruise in the Jeannette, when my science and machinery faded from all importance, engineering went wholly by the board, when first with only our stout ship to shield us and then without her, face to face with Nature in her fiercest mood for endless months we battled the Arctic ice beneath the banner of George Washington De Long, and in his life and death I learned what truly makes the man.