Sublime

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

shivering twelve-year-old and suddenly had no taste for a public fight, agreeing with the boy’s flaky-scalped lawyer, Doc Solomon, that this was essentially a mercy killing and, so, made a quick deal for manslaughter—a two- or three-year jolt at the most for, as the ADA described him, “an otherwise decent kid like this one.”