Winter Brothers Read Free Page A

of Bunker Hill,
the Revolutionary War battleground.) Merchants, doctors, educators, lawyers populate the erect generations. Swan’s own older brothers stayed standard, Samuel as physician, Benjamin a minister.
    But not James. He evidently reached down the excuse that occasional seafarers had cropped up in the family—his own father, said to have been lost in a gale while captaining a brig back from Africa in 1823; a legendarily adventurous uncle who had sailed in an early fur-trading vessel to the Pacific Northwest—and in his midteens started in on the try of a waterfront life in Boston.
    Dallying around the docks, first as a clerk with a shipping firm and eventually as a merchandiser of ships’ supplies, must have suited the young Swan comfortably enough. With forests of sail sweeping back and forth before his eyes and the new steam vessels shuddering to life around him, this adventurer of the waterfront shows no sign that he made any ocean voyage of his own until he was twenty-three. Then he embarked on a Boston-to-Liverpool jaunt with a chore or two of his employer’s business attached and seems to have been content to do it just the once.
    That once to Britain, however, jarred Swan’s writing hand into motion, and by my terms the wan sheaf of paper that has survived comes as ancient and entrancing and intriguingly hued as a cave painting. The thirty brownish tatty-edged long manuscript pages are by a decade the earliest of all Swan’s surviving paperwork, and must be a version he copied from a pocket notebook—it would have been the start of that habit, too—as soon as he returned to America. Any comparable paperwork having to do with my family would be drily governmental, in the Scottish archives, and likely would show sundry Doigs irretrievably in arrears on croft taxes or enlisting one of our number to die an infantry death in Madras or the Crimea. A bonus of archival magic, it is for me, that the pages of Swan’s life from his own hand begin here on the second of March 1841 and recite the two months in which he sailed the Atlantic and rambled interestedly around Britain.
    The wilderness of waters which surround us
on his crossing; the storm which tossed a fellow passenger beneath the table and his breakfast after him,
his head was covered with a shower of fried eggs which looked for all the world like doubloons stuck in his hairk
arrival to Liverpool and St. Patrick’s Day,
the Irish have been walking in procession the whole day...all rigged out with green sashes and sprigs of shamrock, a species of weed similar to the chick weed.
Weather, conveyance, schedule, meals, roadside fields, birds of those fields, even Swan’s morning disposition:
I was very stupid today
, the sixteenth of March,
from the want of sleep last night and for the first time since I left home I felt really homesick & would have been glad to have been home but as soon as I walked out I felt much relieved & hope to get my thoughts on a business train after a good nights
rest.
All, all come on report at the nib of his pen. So, too, the social impress of Britain of Dickens’s time. Liverpool astounds and horrifies this Bostonian with the hurly-burly of its streets:
female scavengers...go round with baskets and collect all the manure & offal in the city which they put in heaps & offer then for sale. Their heaps are bought by the gardeners for a few pence to enrich the garden beds—It struck me as the filthiest work I had ever seen a woman engaged in & more especially as they used nothing but their hands to work with.
Then the proverbial fishwives,
a queer lot of beings & probably the lowest of the human race.
Quickly the unsurprising exclamation:
Liverpool is a shocking dirty place & I am sick enough of it.
But Edinburgh is beguiling,
the streets are laid out with a good deal of taste,
and the trip southward a lark:
In the carriage with me were a party of Irish Gentlemen & Ladies....They all took