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The only “lyric” to commemorate the affair came from the pen of Captain Thomas Swan of Bristol, one of those who took part in it. His effusion has never appeared in any history of American literature, for good and sufficient reasons, but it is printed in full in Munro’s “History of Bristol.” The participation of the Bristol men in the Gaspee affair is often denied by “out of town” people. I have no doubt respecting the matter. My own grandmother, born in 1784, the daughter of a soldier of the Revolution who was born in 1762 and lived until 1821, and whose grandfather, born in 1731, lived until 1817, firmly believed in it. She had had opportunities for talking the subject over with two generations who were living on June 10, 1772.

In January, 1881, Bishop Smith of Kentucky, born in Bristol in 1794 and a graduate of Brown in 1816, wrote to me calling my attention to a slight difference between the “Swan Song,” as I had given it in my “History of Bristol,” and a version pasted upon the back of a portrait of Thomas Swan’s father by Thomas Swan himself. Capt. Swan was Bishop Smith’s uncle. The Bishop wrote, “I should not have troubled you on so inconsiderable a point had not the tradition in our family been that the Bristol boat was manned by men in the disguise of Narragansett Indians.”