Christopher Columbus has a lot to answer for. Whether in fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue or in fourteen hundred and ninety three Columbus sailed the deep blue sea, the fact is he never set foot on North American soil, having sailed round the Caribbean and landed on the north coast of South America. Nonetheless, today is Columbus Day, and a public holiday (some suggest it’s just an excuse for a public holiday in October!). His name pops up all over the place. There are several cities called Columbus. The US capital is Washington D.C. (which stands for the District of Columbia). One of New York’s universities is Columbia and one of the nationwide broadcasters is the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

In spite of this, after a relaxing morning, we drove south to a big car park in Wellington next to the subway and made our way to central Boston. We wandered around the Park Street end of Boston Common. Something noisy was going on at the other end. The Massachusetts State House looks impressive with its gold dome. We wandered past the Congregational Library building, closed for the holiday and down to King’s Chapel. I had ignored this on my last visit as it is Unitarian. But I should have thought more carefully. Unitarianism developed in the latter 18th century with the rise of rationalism (the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’ even though it brought greater darkness). But King’s Chapel goes back further than that. The burial ground next to it includes several Winthrops (including the first Governor of Massachusetts) and, more importantly for me, the last resting place of the bones of John Cotton, native of Derby, graduate of Cambridge, vicar of St Botolphs, Boston, for twenty years before being hounded out of the country by William Laud’s persecutions. On arrival at Trimountain, it is said, it was renamed Boston in his honour (though I think it was changed a couple of years earlier because of the large number of people who had come from Boston, and this is probably why Cotton settled there. The headstone above is his, with the marker next to it. Unfortunately I couldn’t move the sun to make the text more readable!

We then wandered along the Freedom Trail marked out by a red painted line or red bricks along the pavement (=sidewalk for American readers. Pavement in America means the road and a lorry is a truck. So to tell an American child to get onto the pavement or they’ll be run down by a lorry will result in total befuddlement on the part of the child who will probably be flattened by the truck coming towards him!). We occasionally encountered organized groups with a guide explaining where they were. So we constantly heard that ‘the British did this’ or ‘the British did that’ and that ‘we finally won our freedom from Britain’. What they don’t add is that it was a very complex situation. ‘Britain’ really means the British government which was totally unrepresentative of British people (some boroughs had no representation in Parliament, others may have had as few as 3 voters, a situation not resolved until the 1830s). The British government had spent a lot of money supporting the colonies and defended them from raids by the French and the Spanish. It was partly to pay for these wars that taxes were raised, most notably on tea which resulted in the well-known Boston Tea Party. The whole situation seems to have been exploited by those who already wanted independence and now had a pretext and a rallying cry—’no taxation without representation’. Yet the ordinary man in the street in Britain paid tax but had no representation at all. It took until the late 19th century for this to get fully sorted out, and even then women couldn’t vote (details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832). The great pity is that the Englishmen inhabiting the American colonies did not think of helping out their fellow Englishmen back home when they declared independence. Some would say that the English are still far from free, though in a better state than in the late 18th century.

Anyway, off my soap box! We followed this trail as far as Copp’s Hill Burial Ground. This was Boston’s second burial ground and it the location of the remains of several members of the Mather family, Richard Mather, from Liverpool (hence Mather Avenue near Mossley Hill), who wrote The True Use of Synods which I hope to rerprint as part of a collection of works on Congregational church government), Increase Mather, his son who married John Cotton’s daughter, and Cotton Mather, Increase Mather’s son (who wrote Maglia Christi Americana—Great Works of Christ in America a history of the American churches up to his time, reprinted by the Banner of Truth Trust).

With limbs weary by this point we staggered off to the nearest subway which just happened to be the one we needed on the Orange Line and were sped quickly back to the car at Wellington and then back here to the hotel. As you can see, the sky was VERY blue.

We were supposed to have a complementary evening meal here, but the manageress decided to cancel it as it was a public holiday. So we investigated nearby restaurants and decided on Texas Roadhouse (which, as you would expect, was founded in Indiana!). On entry we were warned to watch out for peanut shells. They were all over the floor! The practice is to take the complementary peanuts and throw the shells on the floor (which are swept up nightly). Marianne has threatened to punch me if I try this at home. I thought I’d treat myself and so had the 16oz Cowboy Sirloin, with baked potato and vegetables. Marianne went for the salmon. Both were enormous, but we managed to finish it all (I’d expected to have to take some back with us in a doggy-bag). So back here to update this and crash into bed. Tomorrow is either Boston again, Plymouth, Ipswich or Newburyport. Decisions for the morning. ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz z z z z zz z z z z.