HAVERHILL — After Peter Serrano, 43, told his girlfriend about the odyssey he and his brother endured in childhood she appeared unconvinced.
It was an unlikely story, and, though he and Sarah had been together, off and on, for years, he had never mentioned it to her before.
Now he described how he and his older brother, Carlos, had been essentially exiled from their birth country, the United States, at 13 and 15 years old — taken from Lawrence and deposited in a hardscrabble port near Santa Domingo, in the Dominican Republic.
He told her how they were rescued by a stranger, a merchant seaman from Lynn who returned them to the United States.
“She was like, ‘Yeah, well what was his name?’” Serrano recalled.
“His name was John, John Nicoll,” he told her.
Sarah promptly located a John Nicoll on Facebook.
“Is this him?” she asked.
“That’s him, that’s the guy, John Nicoll,” Serrano told her.
A reunion was arranged with Nicoll, who most people know as Captain John.
In November, Nicoll, now retired and living in New Hampshire after 40 years in the merchant marine, and a U.S. Navy Reserves veteran, met Serrano and his girlfriend in Haverhill, where they live.
They walked around town, and Serrano and Nicoll caught up on each others’ lives after not having seen each other for 30 years.
Then, on Dec. 29, at the Haverhill train station, the two got together again, this time with The Eagle-Tribune, which got wind of the story through a third party.
Serrano and Nicoll shared the circumstances of how they crossed paths all those years ago.
The brothers’ reverse migration sheds light on the fickleness of life, the value of a secure place to live and how a chance encounter changed the course of two lives.
“I was lucky, I ended up with a good person who didn’t have ulterior motives,” Serrano said. “It was God. Jesus had my back and Jesus brought John.”
The meeting
On a Thursday night in March 1992, Peter, who looked much younger than his 13 years, buttonholed two merchant marines in the Seaman’s Club, an open-air bar where on occasion a patron would ride in and out on horseback.
This was in Rio Haina, Dominican Republic, a port where container ships hauled everything from sneakers to frying pans, electronics to socks.
Locals lived on the sharp edges of poverty, many of them hustling by any means necessary to get through another day.
“Can you help me out with a couple bucks?” Peter asked the sailors, one of whom was wearing a crisp, white deck-officer’s uniform.
The man, John Nicoll, was shocked. Not to be asked for money, but to be asked for it by a child in a language other than Spanish.
“What the hell, you speak English,” Nicoll said.
Nicoll, who had a Spanish girlfriend, spoke the language fluently and knew the culture. He wondered how a kid who sounded like a Massachusetts youth came to be begging for money in a poor Dominican port?
Peter told him.
Exiled
Six months earlier, he and his brother Carlos and their siblings had been living in Lawrence attending public school. Peter was going to the Leonard School.
Their mother, Nancy Rodriguez, originally from the Dominican Republic, got sick with pneumonia and died in the hospital. It turned out her immune system had been compromised from HIV infection.
The boys’ father, Carlos Serrano, originally from Puerto Rico, was living in New York City. He too was sick, and the children were placed in the care of their mother’s half sister, their aunt, in Lawrence.
Soon the aunt got Peter and Carlos passports. She sat them down and informed them they were going to visit their maternal grandmother in the Dominican Republic.
A friend of the aunt — a woman whom the boys had never met — brought them on a plane to the grandmother.
Once there, the woman told the grandmother that the young teens were hers to care for until they were 18.
Peter and Carlos, who had never been out of the U.S., were confused and disoriented.
They were in a Caribbean country living in squalor. Boxes served as furniture, broken glass was piled in the bathroom. Having food wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
The grandmother was very poor, and while she was nice to the boys, she told them that she was unable to care for them and they would have to fend for themselves.
They toted their luggage to the streets and sat on it.
“He looks at me, I look at him and we are crying,” Serrano said. “I saw my brother like that and I said ‘I can’t let him go, just die like that.’”
Peter told Carlos he would be back. He had no idea what he was going to do.
“I just took a blind walk,” he said. “I took a blind walk down to the port.”
There he saw young people, kids bumming change, approaching sailors and other visitors. It gave him a thought.
“I am like, they are begging for change, but they don’t speak English,” he said. “I’m going to start speaking English to see if this will improve my situation.”
He found a niche, not just panhandling, but acting as a street intermediary, a translator.
He spoke both the English and Spanish languages and pointed people to locals who could get them whatever they were looking for.
He covered the waterfront, ducking into taverns and food joints.
Peter and his brother — who got sick with jaundice — made enough money to rent a shack from an older couple.
They lived like that for three or four months. Surviving on the streets.
The goal even among the local kids was to get away, to swim to the ships, climb an anchor chain and stowaway.
“I watched a lot of my friends try to swim and hide on those boats and drown,” Serrano said.
Sometimes Peter would swim with them and watch their moves so that he’d know what to do in case things got so desperate that he and his brother needed to stowaway.
“We use to think about that all the time,” he said.
A way out
In 1992, John Nicoll was 39 years old and had already been a merchant marine for 18 years.
The sea had been a lifeline for him.
By the time he was in elementary school an older brother had been sent to a reformatory in Lawrence and two sisters had been arrested. His mother left the house when he was 13. She later returned only to leave again, a recurring pattern.
That same year, 1967, Nicoll Joined the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets, which teaches youth about sea-going military service. He spent his first night on a Navy ship at 14, a minesweeper in Boston Harbor.
After high school he got a job on a merchant ship as a wiper, an entry level position.
“I went through the Panama Canal 3 times, and yet, I had never been to Connecticut,” he said.
Nicoll entered the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in 1974 and three years later graduated as a 3rd Mate, ensign in the Navy Reserve, with a bachelor’s degree in Marine Transportation. Later he earned his second and first mate licenses and captain’s license.
He had a patriotic streak. So in 1992, when Nicoll heard the story about these two American citizens, children, being whisked out of the country, he told Peter that he would help him and his brother.
Nicoll’s ship was leaving the next day but the next time it landed in Rio Haina, two weeks later, he visited the boys’ grandmother and told her that if she did not give him their passports he was going to take the matter to the U.S. embassy.
Then, two months later, Nicoll gathered the brothers, with their passports, and bought three plane tickets to the United States, Boston’s Logan Airport.
They cleared customs and he then brought them to the state social services office in Lynn.
The boys stayed at a foster home in Lynn for a while. Shortly after they returned to the United States, their father, Carlos Serrano, died in a New York City hospital.
The teens were pretty wild and ended up in numerous foster homes, moves that took them to the Merrimack Valley.
Nicoll returned to his life at sea and lost contact with the Serrano brothers.
Since then
Peter attended Lowell High School. He has worked in the building trades over the years, doing everything from installing wallboard and roofs, to frame carpentry and foundation work.
He now does autobody work, grinding and cutting under carriages and truck beds.
His brother, also in the building trades, lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, and has children, one of whom is in the U.S. Army.
Life hasn’t been smooth sailing for Peter.
“I didn’t always make the greatest decisions, but you know I lived with my decisions and walked through life with them,” he said.
It took him a long time to learn the difference between living for the moment, the fast life, and building a future, he said.
Nicoll’s life in the merchant marine took him to 41 countries and through the Panama Canal 24 times and the Suez Canal twice.
He lives in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, with his two collies Lance and Fusion, produces music, and volunteers for his horse rescue service.
Peter’s brother Carlos has talked with Nicoll on the phone.
The brothers were grateful as kids for the help Nicoll gave them but they wanted to reach out as adults.
“Just to thank him,” Peter said. Captain John was a lifeline.
“We would have died out there,” he said.
Language kept them alive and kindliness got them back to their home country.