Spadina Literary Review — edition 5 page 20
- Notes
* Page 8: Oliver’s “autobiography” is a hand-written document, reaching just 24 pages when typewritten, that was discovered among Goldsmith family documents in 1938 by Rev. Wilfrid Myatt of Sacred Heart College in New Brunswick. The manuscript had not been meant for publication but merely, according to Oliver's own words, to keep a record of dates and events.
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* Page 12: "Till empires rise and sink, on earth, no more" is from the 1834 version of "The Rising Village." In the 1825 version, Oliver took the whole universe down. The concluding line was: "Till sun, and moon, and stars shall be no more."
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* Page 15: The Howqua seems to have been jinxed. Newly launched in 1844, the clipper was named for Canton merchant Wu Bingjian, known by his trading name as "Howqua," who had died the previous year. Wu Bingjian was numbered among the world's richest men in his day. The ship's owner was Abiel Abbot Low, who had made his fortune as a partner in Russell and Company, a leading opium trader in Canton. The Howqua served in the Asian Pacific for 20 years, incurring odd accidents such as getting grazed by a meteor. On August 15, 1864 she left Yokohama bound for New York and simply disappeared.
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