Massachusetts Travel Journal (Day Four—Boston)

With the temperatures moderating somewhat, climbing all the way to 60 degrees, I decided it was a good day to experience Boston by boat.

I really have this thing for boat tours. Years ago, having dinner with other members of a writing group, we shared the first memories of our childhood we had used in our writing. All involved bodies of water—a harbor, a river, or, in my case, a creek near my house.

Something of the same yearning for the origins of a life probably underlie my fascination with rivers. I relate to the great closing line of the film and movie A River Runs Through It: “I am haunted by waters.”

My host at my bed and breakfast had suggested the prior day that I try the Boston Duck Tours. The name sounded a bit odd at first, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I was. I wasn’t disappointed.

I bought a ticket for the one-hour, twenty-minute tour--$29, with tax—at the Prudential Center. The boat was the “Beantown Betty,” and our guide—or, as he cheerfully put it, “guru”—was a genial fellow named Fred. (That’s him with the duck on the walking stick, in the photo I took that accompanies this post.)

As the tour continued, I was delighted not only to learn about history but also to ride on a vehicle that participated in it. The “Ducks,” you see, were converted WWII amphibious vessels. The term is, in effect, a serviceman’s mongrelization of the military acronymn DUKW (D stands for designated, U for utility amphibious cargo carrying vehicle, K for front wheel drive, and W for double rear axle drive).

The Beantown Betty was one of 21,000 similar vehicles built between 1942 and 1945, being used most notably at D-Day. Our boat still had notations reminiscent of the period, including three cartoons with the once-ubiquitous inscription, “Kilroy Was Here,” and another inscription from a British Army commando at D-Day who had ridden on the vehicle years later.

That vet wasn’t the only person from the British Isles to join our intrepid little crew. In fact, the boat seemed full of them. I thought it was mighty nice of them to prop up the American economy, especially considering those unpleasant little matters we had with them from 1775 to 1783 and again from 1812 to 1815.

In any case, Fred kept up a running commentary as we went around the city, through such areas as Back Bay, Copley Square, Boston Common, the Boston Public Library, Beacon Hill, Government Center, the Longfellow Bridge, Bunker Hill, the North End, Faneuil Hall, the “Cheers” bar, and Newbury Street. He gave this film fan a particular thrill by pointing out the location filming, on Beacon Hill, of the upcoming Mel Gibson movie, The Edge of Darkness.

(Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve witnessed location filming of a major motion picture on Halloween. The first was nine years ago, when, unlike this time—when I did not get a glimpse of Mr. Gibson—I saw, in Savannah, Robert Redford, Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron on the set of The Legend of Bagger Vance. I just hope Gibson’s project is less of a disappointment than Redford’s.)

When this fun and informative tour concluded, I ate a fast lunch in the food court at Prudential Center, then took the T train to the Government stop, walked several blocks to the North End, and visited the Old North Church and the Paul Revere House. Both Revolutionary War sites are worth talking about at greater length, which I’ll do in future posts.

For now, it’s worth mentioning another point about Longfellow’s immortal poem about Revere. In prior posts, I mentioned some issues that made this ride not quite the stuff of legend (e.g., the famous lantern signal was not devised for Revere’s benefit but for others, and he never made it out to Concord because he was apprehended by the British).

Well, there’s another legitimate bone to pick with Longfellow. The poem mentions “a friend” of Revere that hung the lantern. That “friend” bit marginalizes not one, but two people who took risks as significant as Revere’s: Captain John Pulling and Robert Newman, sexton of the Old North Church, who hung the two lanterns for up to a minute in the steeple window. (The church was then the highest structure in Boston).

The problem was this: If the patriots could see the lanterns, so could the redcoats, and they immediately began wondering why they were being put up at that hour of the night. By the time Newman came down the stairs, they were waiting for him. To evade capture, he came down the center aisle of the church, then jumped through the window to the right of the altar—now called “Newman’s Window” in his honor.

Newman could not escape arrest for long—General Gage figured out pretty easily who did and didn’t have access to the steeple at that hour—but eventually had to release him for lack of evidence—the same thing that kept them from holding onto Revere himself indefinitely.

Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day Three (Cambridge)

Maybe if you live in an area long enough you get used to such matters as a crazy quilt of roads and parking garages of endless levels. But I was a tourist, so getting around Cambridge posed something of a problem for me today.

When I finally found a space in the Aylwife parking garage, I went down to the T station and took the Red Line to Harvard Square. The day was as raw as yesterday, so I clutched my scarf even harder than before.

Next to the information booth kiosk at Harvard Square, I took a Cambridge Advantage Tour offered by Vince Dixon. Dressed in a green shirt and black tricorn hat, Vince offered a fact-filled two-hour walk through the Co-Op, Harvard Yard, Radcliffe Yard, and Cambridge Commons.

On Cambridge Commons, I was surprised—and glad to see—a statue commemorating Ireland’s Great Hunger of the 1840s—the first statue of its kind in New England. (Former Irish President Mary Robinson came to its dedication in 1997.) My photo accompanies this post.

At the conclusion of that tour, I walked down Brattle Street until I came to the Longfellow House. How could a mere poet afford such a magnificent structure? On the National Park Service tour, I found out: he’d married the daughter of a textile manufacturer, whose daughter prevailed upon him not merely to buy this house, but all the land stretching in a line from here to the Charles River!

Nearly 60 years before the happy couple moved in, the house had been abandoned by a notorious Loyalist and taken over by George Washington as his headquarters during the siege of Boston. Longfellow’s study had been the room where Washington conferred with Henry Knox about hauling the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga that were used to force the British out of Boston, and the rooms Longfellow had rented briefly as a young Harvard professor where the same ones where Washington had slept during his months here.

Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day Two (Minute Man National Park and Concord)

Breathless traveling from one end of this blustery, gray day to the other for me. After being fortified for the day by a great breakfast at my Lexington B&B, I headed toward Minute Man National Historical Park. This was what I had wanted to see the most yesterday anyway, and I felt as if I hadn’t even scratched the surface of this subject. I didn’t realize how right I was.

But first, a word of caution. For any prospective historical travelers reading this, make sure you understand that, if you hope to see certain sites associated with literary figures here, you do so before the end of October. Both the Ralph Waldo Emerson House and The Wayside—an establishment associated with three different Concord literary figures (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Lothrop/Margaret Sidney)—were closed for the season.

At some point, maybe later in the year, I’ll write about the two literary homes I did get to see—Orchard House, the home of the Alcott family for 20 years, and Hawthorne’s Old Manse. But for now, I’m going to concentrate on the sites associated with the Battles of Lexington and Concord that occurred on April 19, 1775.

Minute Man Park sprawls across several towns—Lexington, Lincoln (where the Visitors Center is located), and Concord. It’s fitting because, as Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride indicates, the alarm was spread “to every Middlesex village and farm.”

Nowadays, historians decry Longfellow for taking poetic license. (One instance was “One if by land, two if by sea”—the signal was not meant for Revere, but was devised by him for others.) But when it comes to myth, everybody’s gotten into the act, from both sides of the historical spectrum. From the far right, the Militia Movement made its impact felt with the ghastly Oklahoma City bombing; from the far left, Michael Moore diminished any effectiveness he might have made in his case against George W. Bush by calling Iraqi insurgents/terrorists “the Revolution, the Minutemen.”

But visiting the park made me aware that there are two other ways that the events of Lexington and Concord can speak to us. One is the issue of intelligence gathering and dissemination; the other, how news is reported of atrocities.

If there’s one thing that the last decade has demonstrated to Americans, it’s the extreme inadequacy of our intelligence system. At the dawn of the American Revolution, the British and Americans struggled to set up their own networks, with varying degrees of success.

British General Thomas Gage sought to make use of several relatives of his American-born wife, Margaret, as well as a source far more insidious because he was so highly placed: Dr. Benjamin Church, a member of the patriot inner circle. After all that effort, however, everything came to naught. As Lt. Frederick MacKenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers noted afterward: “The fact is, General Gage…had no conception the Rebels would oppose the King’s troops in the manner that they did.”

(Incidentally, MacKenzie is a fascinating study in his own right. The son of a Dublin merchant, he had received his first commission 20 years before. He drew the only contemporaneous map of the day’s events, and the diary he assiduously kept has likewise served historians trying to make sense of this chaotic day.)

One colonist who fared far better than Gage in creating an intelligence system was Dr. Joseph Warren. What a loss when this patriot was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In the period leading up to the war, he had been one of the most intelligent, energetic and resourceful members of the Committees of Correspondence. He showed his talents anew in the 48 hours before that fateful day of April 19, 1775.

From an informer, Warren got wind that Gage was planning a raid on the rebel supplies in Concord. He immediately made plans to alert the two leading radicals, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. He sent William Dawes on one long, primarily land-based route, going through Brookline and Roxbury—but, because that route involved so much danger, he dispatched a second messenger, Paul Revere, going by boat until he mounted a waiting horse.

Both Dawes and Revere made it to Lexington, but it took a third rider—yet another surgeon, Samuel Prescott—to make it to Concord. Ten redcoats came upon the trio, around 1:30 am. Dawes wheeled around and got back to Lexington; Revere was detained by the British before being released without his horse; Prescott—who had been out courting a lady when he bumped into Revere and agreed to help out—got the news to the colonists in Concord.)

And now, about the atrocity stories.

Whoever fires the first shot in a war usually gets the onus for whatever happens next. (That’s why Abraham Lincoln was so careful to maneuver the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.) Warren wanted to make sure that the news spread instantly about the British firing first.

The trouble was that at Lexington, people are still not sure who fired first. At North Bridge in Concord, at least one jumpy British soldier let loose with his rifle, against express orders not to shoot. Then all hell broke loose.

To spread news of the atrocities, Dr. Warren made sure riders were spreading the word as far as New York and Boston within 48 hours of the event, and that his version of the events (the British fired first, without provocation, in both instances) reached London on a fast ship, the Quero, by May 29—two weeks before General Gage’s account reached England.