Afloat

'Prose that is precise and beautiful as northern light … this book is an absolute delight' MOYA CANNON

Join David Gange on a seabound journey along Atlantic coasts and islands, exploring places and ways of life that have been built on small rowed or paddled boats.

These small boats outnumber decked ships by at least fifty to one. Yet almost all history writing is about big boats. This is a strange misrepresentation of maritime history that this book seeks to put right. From Ireland and Shetland to the Faroes and across to Greenland, Newfoundland, the US and the Caribbean, Árdras is the story of eight journeys in search of ocean-going rowed and paddled boats.

Gange, an award-winning historian, joins community pilgrimages to tiny islands on their saints’ days, and races and regattas that express revivals of commitment to local boats and the community ideals they sustained. Along the way he encounters whales, sharks and icebergs – as well as journeys beneath skies filled, from horizon to horizon, with tens of thousands of seabirds.

Small traditional boats fulfil roles in their communities unlike any other supposedly inanimate things. Often treated as living members of the family, with minds and lives of their own, they’ve been essential to many cultures’ ways of living with the seascapes that surround them. This gorgeous and lyrical book offers not only a journey into the past, but a vision of how these ways of life might inform our futures.