Winter Brothers Read Free Page B

me for a Scotchman & as I had just left Scotland I could talk to them finely.
London proves to be downright wondrous,
Walked two hours this morning in one direction & every step of the way the street was crowded with people & vehicles.
His young American eyes have not seen the like except possibly on a Boston market day when a drawbridge over the Charles River would hold up traffic,
the crowd then is just the same as the streets are here all the time from sunrise to sunset.
He glimpses the young queen, Victoria, trundling out of the Buckingham Palace grounds on her way to church:
had a good sight of her face as she was looking out the carriage window she had on a little blue silk bonnet.
He is drawn back and back to the stupendous dome of St. Paul’s, even though the Easter service there seems to him
mumbled over in a very bad manner.
Tours the new museum of wax figures
shown by an old French woman & her son
—the Tussauds—
who are making a deal of money out of this affair.
Rides the night mail train from London back to Liverpool:
they go with the greatest velocity sometimes
50
miles an hour—
about as fast as you could travel on the planet at the time—
only stopping to get water.
    Swan-among-the-Britons arrives at the last line of his journey having viewed
a great deal to admire & much to censure,
and that already is the exact Swan style I have begun to find amid his accumulating day-by-day pages on my desk, here at our shared ledge of the American landscape: banquet of details, ready snifters of opinion.
    Something else of moment happened to Swan that year of 1841. He married rather above himself. Matilda Loring, of a prominent Boston printing and publishing family, a small, neatly built woman with a firm line of jaw, became his bride on the twenty-sixth of October.
    Of the courtship and its aftermath Swan’s archival heap of paper is all too conspicuously silent. But from the circumstances, this reads as one of those marriages in which it is unclear whether the wife chided because the husband took on the world’s whiskey as a personal challenge or the husband fled into the bottle because the wife was a shrike. What is plain enough even in the thumbing scan of his life I have been doing these first days is that Swan continued to court the bottle long after, in the eighth year of marriage to Matilda, he pointed himself west across America.
    I hunger to have overheard just how he said that pivoting decision. Swan and Matilda were living apart by the year 1849—he in a Boston boardinghouse handy to his waterfront life; she in Chelsea with the two children of the divided household, four-year-old Ellen and seven-year-old Charles—and did Swan simply come onto the porch one day and offer,
Matilda, I have been thinking I will go to California?
    The many weeks to round Cape Horn in 1850, the long climbing voyage along the Pacific shores, arrival: then Swan, to judge by his readiest recollection, was like a good many of us ever since in not quite knowing what to make of California. Dozens, scores of deserted ships clogged the San Francisco harbor he sailed into, a fleet of
Marie Celestes
left ghostly by crews which had swarmed to the goldstrikes.
    Swan, too, completed the pilgrimage up the Sacramento to the mining camps, but only as a purser on a river steamer. I find that he hesitated in that job, and at a maritime firm’s dockside office in San Francisco, for only a matter of weeks, then signed onto a schooner bound for Hawaii to take aboard a cargo of potatoes.
    Why Swan so promptly went sailing off for spuds is not at all clear to me, but his ear must have heard sweet somethings out there in the Pacific. The abrupt jaunt into the ocean does seem to have been instructive. (A proclamation from this period of his life:
I never yet found that information was useless to any one.)
He managed to linger at Lahaina on the Isle of Maui for twenty-five days, and one of his rare surviving letters to