A first-person travel narrative recounts a 2,500-mile waterborne route from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico undertaken in 1874-75 to test how continuous a navigable waterway the continent offered to light-draft craft. The voyager began with a wooden canoe, switched at Troy to a specially constructed fifty-eight-pound paper canoe, and then paddled alone about two thousand miles, relying on detailed charts from the United States Coast Survey. After completing that run he also made a separate solo trip by cedar duck-boat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and along the Gulf coast to Cedar Keys, logging over five thousand miles between the two voyages. Both boats survived the journeys and were exhibited at the Centennial and Smithsonian. Maps engraved at the Coast Survey (scale 1:1,500,000) and numerous illustrations accompany the account.
The book documents geography, navigation, and human encounters along inland and coastal waterways: ice and whales in the St. Lawrence; Lake Champlain and Hudson passages; Delaware Bay storms and a capsize; the Outer Banks, sounds, and inlets; Cape Fear, Carolina rice swamps, Georgia sea-islands, and the Suwannee wilderness. It describes paper-boat construction and performance, local characters from oystermen to rice planters and freedmen, wildlife (alligators, panthers, snakes), and practical observations that demonstrate the feasibility of long, low-draft water travel and the value of accurate coastal surveys.
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