no substantial movie industry and no television, either, for three decades after his death in 1923. Other countries had applauded him, but his own country had ignored him. The Russians decorated him with the Order of St. Anne and the Order of St. Vladimir; France awarded him the Croix de Guerre. Britain gave him the Distinguished Service Order, while Romania went all out with three decorations: Crown, Grand Cross, and Star. But Canada turned her back on him. The army tried to take away his uniform and his rank; the bureaucrats tried to order him back home, but Boyle went his own way. It was not until the early 1980s that a popular campaign was finally mounted, thanks to Leonard Taylor, to move his body from Hampton Hill in Middlesex, England, to Woodstock, underlining the truth that this is not a land that indulges enthusiastically in hero worship except for hockey players.
From the acres of print devoted to his character and career, Boyle emerges as a romantic who found it difficult to sit still for long. This restlessness, a by-product, perhaps, of his Celtic blood (half Irish, half Scottish), is the key to his character. Some of it may have come from his father, a breeder of fine horses whose calling made it necessary to leave home in season and follow the racing schedule wherever it took him. Boyle’s childhood seems to have been serene enough. He came from a middle-class family of four siblings, and there is no suggestion that his upbringing in the quiet ambience of Woodstock was anything but happy. There were signs of that serenity in his later years when on occasion he found himself at risk. He feared no man but held no grudges. He got along with his opponents, both legal and financial, and they got along with him.
And yet there are cracks in the Boyle legend. He was certainly not a family man. In 1884, at the age of seventeen, just out of Woodstock College, he visited his two elder brothers in New York City. Their relationship cannot have been close. One day the brothers returned to their quarters on lower Broadway to find a scribbled note on the table: “I’ve gone to sea. Don’t worry about me. Joe.” That was all: no explanation, no fond farewells, no hint of his plans or even the name of the ship, nothing. He was gone for the best part of three years, and in all that time they had no word of him—not a whisper, not a note, not a clipping, not a telegram, not even a message for his mother, “a sweet little woman from Dumfries, Scotland,” in Flora Boyle’s words. Toward the end of his absence they believed he had been lost at sea.
This callousness toward his blood relations—for that is what it was—was a blemish on Boyle’s character that would manifest itself time and again during his career. With one exception he didn’t seem to care greatly for those who were closest to him. Outwardly, he was always the life of the party—gregarious, hearty, an accomplished storyteller, so affable that even his critics and business rivals warmed to him and basked in his persona. Yet he was very much his own man with his own goals, to the exclusion of those who might have been near and dear to him. It is ironic that when at last he reached out for true love and companionship they were to prove unattainable.
He had haunted the Manhattan waterfront, tramping the docks and watching the three-masters come into port to unload or take on cargo, when adventure beckoned. With the impetuousness that was to mark his later years, the teenaged youth, hungry for action, climbed aboard the barque Wallace and was hired as a deckhand. He left as a callow youngster; when he returned, equally suddenly and unexpectedly, he was clearly mature beyond his twenty years. Where had he gone? What had he done? What had happened?
There are hints, but only hints. Boyle was not one to boast. At the end of his life at the Middlesex home of his oldest friend, Edward Bredenberg, he did indulge in a few moments of nostalgia: “We would sit