Boston is one of the novel’s principal points of passage between colonial authority, family inheritance, and the expanding timber economy. It is both a crowded Atlantic port and a place where courts and businesses negotiate the claims of empire; across generations, its commercial constraints prompt plans to seek forests farther west, while its homes and streets become settings for inheritance, illness, and family reunion.

Port, Court, and Colonial Politics

Boston’s role is not confined to trade. In the dispute over John Frost’s land, William Leighton cut mast pines under a license issued by the Crown, although Frost held title to the property. After a court found for Frost, a royal order sought to reverse the outcome. In June 1738, the provincial court declared it lacked authority to execute that order, treating it as a foreign judgment. The episode makes Boston a stage for a jurisdictional conflict: timber rights could draw the Crown into local affairs, but the provincial court asserted that its authority had limits.

The political implications reach beyond the courtroom. Jan Duke describes Boston as constrained by England’s control and points to punitive acts and taxes as threats to the region’s livelihood. He also observes that colonists already evade restrictions in timber, shipbuilding, smuggling, and molasses. The Dukes’ business response is pragmatic rather than openly partisan: they aim to stay cordial with English, French, and colonial interests while watching for changes in policy. Boston is thus both a center of commerce and a place where imperial rules are contested in practice.

A Port in an Atlantic Business Network

In 1758, the Duke party sails from Boston for Amsterdam aboard the Dutch merchant frigate Bladwesp, carrying the company’s cargo of dike timbers. War makes a planned stop at La Rochelle impractical, so the party intends to proceed directly to Amsterdam. The voyage places Boston within a shifting network of Atlantic routes, where commercial plans must adapt to military conditions.

The same city later receives urgent news from overseas. After Bernard Duke is buried at sea, Nicolaus Duke sends word to Jan, Piet, and George Pickering Duke, demanding that they return from Europe. The company faces more than bereavement: orders are piling up, its bookkeeper and woodland overseer are absent, Sedley is ill, and Bernard’s widow is grieving. Boston is the point to which the family is summoned to reorganize both household and enterprise.

That vulnerability leads to a strategic reassessment. Sedley’s son argues that the family’s holdings are too concentrated in New England and that Boston’s business prospects are restricted by England’s control. He identifies the lack of banks, insurance, regulated markets, and a stable currency as obstacles, and notes that skilled workers are moving to other towns as business languishes. His proposed answer is to explore timberland in the Ohio Valley and farther west. The forest, he insists, must be considered years before it becomes money; the plan begins in Boston but looks beyond it.

Arrival, Inheritance, and Family Property

Boston is also where James Duke returns to his family’s history. On a freezing first day of February, he reaches the city and, two days later, walks through snow and icy streets to the offices of Trumbull & Tendrill. The lawyer Hugh Trumbull remarks on James’s resemblance to his late father, Sedley, before explaining Sedley’s will. The inheritance gives James half of a substantial estate, including a Boston dwelling north of Tremont Street, six acres of garden land, an orchard, meadows, a stable, and other property, as well as nearly two million acres of Maine forest, Ohio timberlands, lumber warehouses, factories, ships, and financial assets. The city is the place where a distant, complicated inheritance becomes a tangible set of keys and responsibilities.

The estate also records the transformation of Boston’s surroundings. The house called Black Swan once stood amid rough forest; by the time James inherits it, the district has become a landscape of handsome estates. The account links family wealth and urban improvement to the conversion of woodland into property. The broad collection of inherited goods, from books and tableware to lumber interests and forestland, makes the estate both a domestic legacy and a business system.

At a gathering hosted by Trumbull, James meets cousins Freegrace and Edward Duke and their wives. The relatives repeatedly compare his appearance to Sedley’s, a resemblance James dislikes even though he recognizes its truth. Boston’s family gathering turns inheritance into a question of likeness and continuity: James has received property from his father, but he is also confronted with the physical resemblance that makes the past seem present.

A City of Encounters and Forest Commerce

In a later generation, Boston provides the setting for Jinot Sel’s reunion with his sister Elise. After receiving word from Francis-Outger Sel that Elise lives in the city with Dr. Hallagher, Jinot travels there without announcing himself. He finds the family’s plain brick house, marked by the doctor’s sign, and Elise recognizes him immediately. Their reunion opens into an exchange of family news and memories. Dr. Hallagher initially receives Jinot guardedly, but relaxes after hearing that he is independent and is not seeking a loan. The visit reconnects siblings separated for years and leads to plans for a family gathering.

The city’s commercial reach also makes it a point of connection to distant forests. Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of high-quality pine to Sydney, Australia, and Lawyer Flense goes to San Francisco to meet a buyer seeking a decade-long supply contract and a partner for lumber camps in New Zealand. This outward movement follows the company’s earlier search for timber beyond New England. Boston’s significance therefore lies not only in the goods that pass through its port but in the business decisions that link its families and firms to forests and markets overseas.

Across these episodes, Boston changes function without losing its centrality. It is a provincial court confronting royal authority, a port vulnerable to war and commercial disruption, a city whose economic limitations encourage westward expansion, and a home base for inheritance and reunion. Its prosperity and pressures are bound to the forest economy: urban property grows out of cleared land, while business leaders treat distant forests as the answer to local constraints. The city connects personal legacies to a larger system of trade, law, and extraction.