Sublime

It was as if the oceans had been turned into puddles. Men who’d never left their home states zipped busily around the planet, with two thousand “little Americas” rolling out like a red carpet underfoot.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

The Dover Boat was discovered in September 1992 as part of the building of the A20 Dover bypass.5 It’s probably no exaggeration to say that she’s one of the best, earliest and most completely preserved of prehistoric seagoing vessels. Radiocarbon dates carried out on the outer growth rings of the timbers suggest that she was built sometime between

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

Except for some magnificent excursions into the deserts of Libya and up the slopes of Chapultepec, the US Marine Corps—from the American Revolution to the American Civil War—was mostly an indentured adjunct of the blue-water American Navy. In peace, a ramrod insurance against mutiny; in battle, mast-clinging marksmen intended to replicate Admiral

Outside this planking, to keep her from being chafed by the ice, there was a sheathing from stem to stern of greenheart, a wood so heavy it weighs more than solid iron and so tough that it cannot be worked with ordinary tools.