M. Wylie Blanchet · 1961 · sea

Capi Blanchet was widowed at thirty-five in 1926 and left with five children on Vancouver Island. For fifteen summers she put all of them and the dog aboard a twenty-five-foot cedar motorboat and took it up the inside passage as far as Cape Caution - and wrote it up thirty years later, in the year she died.

1. 1
   Curteis Point

   The Little House at the tip of the Saanich Peninsula, where a widow of thirty-five was left with five children in 1926 - and every summer for fifteen years she put all of them and the dog in a small boat and went north.

2. 2
   Princess Louisa Inlet

   Up Jervis Inlet through Malibu Rapids into a fjord with walls rising four thousand feet and Chatterbox Falls at the head - which Blanchet writes about better than anyone has since, and which is now a marine park.

3. 3
   Desolation Sound

   Named by Vancouver, who hated it, and where the Blanchets went every year because the water is warm enough to swim - Melanie Cove and Laura Cove and the hermits who lived in them, one of whom read Plato.

4. 4
   The Yuculta Rapids

   The tidal narrows off Stuart Island, which run at nine knots and have to be taken at slack water with a boat that makes seven - the passage the whole coast fears, and she took it every year with five children aboard.

5. 5
   Knight Inlet

   Seventy miles into the Coast Mountains, one of the deepest inlets on the coast - and the grizzly country, and the ice-cold outflow winds that come down it without warning off the glaciers at the head.

6. 6
   Mamalilaculla

   The deserted Kwakwaka'wakw village on Village Island, where the family walked among the houses and the mortuary poles - and Blanchet, who had wanted to study archaeology, said afterwards that perhaps that was what she had done.

7. 7
   Blunden Harbour

   The mainland shore of Queen Charlotte Strait, and the last sheltered water before the open coast - a place that had a village and by then largely did not, which is the note the northern chapters keep striking.

8. 8
   Cape Caution

   The furthest north they got, where the inside passage runs out and the Pacific comes in unbroken from Japan - a name given by Vancouver, and the point at which a woman in a cedar boat with five children turned round.

9. 9
   Curteis Point

   Home each September to the Little House and the school year - fifteen summers of it, written up thirty years later and published in 1961, the year she died at her typewriter aged seventy.