Boston is a changing port city where the novel’s timber fortunes, family reinventions, and migrations repeatedly meet. It serves Charles Duquet first as a base for learning English and cultivating useful contacts, then as the commercial center where he becomes Charles Duke; later it anchors the Duke family’s business expansion and the wider timber trade. Its docks also draw Mi’kmaw characters seeking work, ships, or a way back to family and community, so the same waterfront that carries lumber toward distant markets becomes a threshold between displacement and return.

Commercial Base and Reinvention

After settling in a colonial city, Duquet spends a year practicing English and cultivating acquaintances who might grant him favors, with Benton Dred-Peacock introducing him to them. He does not fully trust Dred-Peacock, but regards him as a capable woodsman and keeps their practical association alive. Recovering from cholera, Duquet plans another voyage to China before buying old Maine land claims and paper townships; first, he has business to attend to farther north. Boston thus belongs to a larger commercial itinerary, not an isolated local enterprise.

The city becomes the setting for Duquet’s deliberate transformation. In Boston, Duquet et Fils becomes Duke & Sons, and Duquet takes the name Charles Duke, though he retains both his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He and Dred-Peacock meet at the Pine Dog, their favored tavern after a conflagration destroys the Sign of the Red Bottle, their earlier gathering place near the wharves. The change of name and venue makes Boston a stage for reinvention, while the surviving New France holdings show that the new identity does not erase the older commercial base.

Dred-Peacock visits Duke at a cavernous warehouse near the docks, stocked with pine, oak, furs, and roots. That inventory brings together the different materials and markets on which the enterprise depends. The warehouse makes Boston more than a meeting point: it is where forest products and other goods become accumulated commercial power, close to the harbor through which they can move.

The Port in a Wider Trade Network

The novel repeatedly connects Boston’s waterfront to routes extending well beyond New England. During a voyage that includes India, Captain Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks for vegetables, fruit, spices, and a chest of Patna opium intended for medicinal trade in Amsterdam. Duquet, occupied again by thoughts of forests, registers the commercial possibilities around him. The episode situates his timber ambition within a mobile world of cargoes and exchange, even when Boston itself is not the destination named in the scene.

Boston is also tied to the overseas market for timber. Much later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia. Lawyer Flense travels to San Francisco to meet a buyer seeking a ten-year supply contract, and the buyer also mentions an interest in kauri. The transaction illustrates how a business rooted in North American forests can reach across oceans; read alongside the Boston warehouse and Duquet’s early plans, it places the city within a long commercial arc rather than making it the sole source or endpoint of the trade.

The city’s commercial opportunities exist alongside the colonial taking of land. In a separate political scene, Père Crème tells an official that Indigenous people suffer as France takes their country and imposes its goods and forceful ways. Boston’s timber growth belongs to the same broader colonial world of expanding settlement and resource extraction. The contrast is structural: the commercial imagination treats forests as a source of lasting wealth, while Indigenous speakers insist that the land is already home to generations of people and communities.

A Center of Business and Family Life

Boston is an operating center for the Duke family as well as a port. When the company prepares to move its offices west, Cyrus Hempstead is to head the new Detroit office, while Lavinia Duke remains in Boston for a year as a clerk. She is assigned to arrange markets for Michigan lumber and bring order to the work at the Boston office. Her position establishes her as both a member of the family and a capable participant in its business, at a time when the enterprise is extending its reach into Michigan.

The family’s business arguments turn on the geography surrounding its markets. James Duke and Lennart Vogel promote the Michigan opportunity by describing its pines and waterways, Detroit’s position between Lakes Huron and Erie, road expansion, and the connection through the Erie Canal to Albany and New York City. Boston is part of this eastward commercial network: Lavinia’s work arranging markets there helps link distant forests to buyers, while the office move shifts the company’s operational center west. The city therefore figures not only as a source of timber wealth but as a place where new routes and markets are organized.

Boston also holds the family’s domestic and financial history. James reviews the household accounts and totals Posey’s expenditures, recalling the strict allowance he once imposed and the change in her manner after Lavinia’s birth. Posey reads stories and poems to the child each night, extending her care to the household. These details place the city’s commercial dynasty within ordinary household routines and changing relationships; Boston’s importance is not limited to warehouses, contracts, and expansion.

That household base is eventually relinquished. A buyer offers $90,000 for Black Swan and its grounds, and James sells the property, including its contents except for a small inlaid table he plans to take to Detroit. He then places the homes of Edward, Freegrace, and Lennart Vogel in the agent’s hands as well, and begins his own return passage shortly before Thanksgiving. Boston is thus a home and store of accumulated property, but also a place the family can leave when its business and fortunes shift elsewhere.

Waterfront Crossings and Uneasy Returns

For Mi’kmaw characters, Boston’s waterfront has a different force: it is a place to look for passage, employment, and connection, without promising that return will be easy. After two restless years in Mi’kma’ki, Aaron Sel goes back to Boston and looks for his father, Jinot, who is still in New Zealand. He drifts around the waterfront, caught between family ties and the wider movements of work and travel. His search makes the port a space of waiting as much as departure.

Aaron’s route through London sharpens that uncertainty. After weeks of asking at the wharves for a ship, he recognizes a change in himself and wants to return to Kuntaw’s Mi’kmaw band with a more willing heart. He has come to understand that he cannot presume himself to be the central figure in every encounter. In another later scene, Aaron, Etienne Sel, and other members of the family sail to Boston with barrels to sell because prices there are better. The trip gives the port a practical role in family livelihood, while also showing how economic necessity repeatedly draws people back toward it.

Other crossings carry different prospects. Marie Antoinette Nevin leaves by boat for Boston, and Elise Sel fears the young woman will fall into drink and come to harm. Egga Sel, a runaway boy and descendant of Charles Duquet and René Sel, travels south in stages after escaping school: he boards a fishing boat for Rockland, Maine, then continues along the coast until fishermen give him a ride toward Martha’s Vineyard. There he finds other homeless boys at the docks and begins working on boats, learning to haul traps for weakfish and whiting. Boston belongs to the larger coastal world of boats, fish, and precarious mobility through which these characters move, whether or not it is their final destination.

Across these episodes, the port’s meaning remains divided. Its warehouses and office work help convert distant forests into commercial supply, while its wharves receive people whose movements have been shaped by family separation, colonial pressure, and the search for work. Boston connects places, but connection does not guarantee belonging: characters may find a route, a market, or a job there, while the larger forces driving their journeys remain unresolved.