Our Week Afloat; or, How We Explored the Pequonset River

In the 21st century we have something called “free-range parenting” which promotes the concept of “raising children in the spirit of encouraging them to function independently and with limited parental supervision” (as Wikipedia states it); which is, in spite of its good intentions, more a sad commentary on the over-protective paranoia of modern society than a revolutionary parenting concept.  Imagine a time when two New Jersey boys, during their summer vacation from school, pondering what should be their next adventure and owning a little wooden sailboat they recently purchased for “five dollars each,” decide to take their boat on a week-long trip across the bay and up a tidal river to regions of which they know nothing.  They want to feel like explorers, you see.  This used to be the kind of thing parents encouraged.

Published originally in 1893, this is a 72,000-word trip back in time to an era when free-range parenting had another name: it was simply called parenting.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.