Swan Boats

About this audio guide

This guide to the Boston Public Garden's Swan Boats traces them back to 1877, when an Irish-born shipbuilder named Robert Paget, who already held a license to row small boats on this pond, went with his wife Julia to see Wagner's opera Lohengrin and could not shake its image of a knight ferried across a river by a swan. It follows how Paget fused that image with Boston's bicycle craze into a pedal-driven boat with its mechanism and pilot hidden entirely inside a molded copper swan, and what happened to the business after he died of tuberculosis just a year later, at forty-two, while Julia was pregnant with their fourth child. She had to collect signed letters from the male shopkeepers around the Garden simply vouching that she was capable of running it.