Coast to Coast by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online

the bridge, pulling up planks after them under the guidance of some stoic and disinterested sergeant; the eager Minute Men gathering behind the bushes on the other side (“Bloody wogs! Wot wouldn’t I give for a cuppa char!”); the first tentative shots (Isaac Davis of Acton was the first to die); and the fusillade. Often and again, in distant and disagreeable dependencies, such a first fusillade has led eventually to a convulsion and a reluctant withdrawal, the last ceremonies on the quayside, the troopships sailing gallantly elsewhere, and the establishment of yet another Independence, Emancipation or Evacuation Day.
    “The minute-men did not pursue their advantage at first,” we are told, “but crossed the river and waited behind the Jones house until the British company returned from the Barrett farm and the whole body started to return to Boston. At Meriam’s corner, however, reinforcements started a running attack from behind houses and stone walls, and soon the British were in a disorderly rout.” Citizens of Concord watched the engagement from chinks in their shuttered windows. It was a lively little skirmish, which must have been (if it is not irreverent to say so) lots of fun for its participants.
    An American engaged me in conversation while I stood at the Concord bridge, and was amused to find that I was English. “Don’t take it
    to heart,” he said, “they were all Englishmen anyway.” In this mellow spirit we looked together at the celebrated statue of the Yankee minuteman, standing nobly beside his plough with his gun in his hand, in an open-necked shirt. Below him is the famous inscription: “Here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.” As an expression of the times there are some better lines on a monument at Lexington, a few miles away, which begin: “The Die was Cast!!! The Contest was Long, Bloody and Affecting.” In 1875 James Russell Lowell was asked to write some lines for the common gravestone of the British soldiers killed in the fighting at Concord. How noble an opportunity for generosity, for soothing old squabbles and ending recriminations! But the American can still be unpredictable, and the pangs of creation brought forth:
    They came three thousand miles and died,
    To keep the past upon its throne.
    Unheard beyond the ocean tide
    Their English mother made her moan.
    So there they lie, those poor profane soldiers, half of ’em liars and half of ’em thieves, commemorated in stone by four lines of lumpish verse, libelled in print by talk of disorderly routs, dominated by the minuteman and his air of unspeakable virtue, the first of a whole multitude of pedestalled colonials.
    Nevertheless they must have been a splendid people, the original Yankees, and the remaining specimens are splendid still. I met one at Gloucester, Massachusetts, who admirably looked and sounded the part. Gloucester is a famous fishing port, whose ships sail to the Newfoundland Banks, the Arctic, and many another far-flung fishing ground. I once saw a Gloucester boat tied up at Key West, the tropical port at the southern extremity of Florida. Not long ago the Gloucester boats were graceful two-masted schooners, such as Kipling described in Captains Courageous ;now they are all diesel craft, and not a single schooner remains at work.
    My Yankee was a watchman at a boatyard overlooking the grey shambles of the harbour. I had been told that one of the marine railways in Gloucester (used for hauling ships on to slipways) was powered by an engine originally installed in the monitor Merrimac ,the celebrated Civil War iron-clad; and more from sentiment than from any passionate interest in marine engines, I made a tour of the yards to find it. It was Saturday afternoon, and this particular yard was deserted except for the watchman, a tall and sinewy man, who was standing at theend of the pier looking fixedly at the water. His body was somehow wreathed in languorous coils, as if