Inspired by John Cheever's classic short story, 'The Swimmer', Roger Deakin set out from his home in Suffolk to swim through the British Isles. The result of his journey is this personal view of an island race.

"Sky, water, wave-lashed rock, that lovely shore ... for a time they are all yours, and they set you free," writes Allan C. Fisher, Jr., in praise of boating, at the start of his voyage down the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

In the spirit of nineteenth-century photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, Michael Kolster uses the old collodion process to reveal anew four Atlantic rivers, from source to sea.

This book is the story of people of vision and courage, of a small group of prominent Saint Augustine investors who conceived of the Florida waterway and began the first dredging work; of an obscure group of New England capitalists who provided significant financing and obtained a million acres of undeveloped Florida public land in pursuing what was, at best, a speculative enterprise; of innumerable citizen groups like the Florida east coast chamber associations and the larger Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association that demanded at the turn of the last century what they believed was the peoples right-a public waterway, free of the burden of tolls; and finally, of the U>S> Army Corps of Engineers, who conducted all of the Florida waterway's early surveys and assumed the project's control in 1929 to convert what was once a private toll way into Florida's modern-day, toll-free Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

Contents:The Age of Discovery and SettlementThe Canal EraRiver and Harbor ImprovementThe Intracoastal Waterway: Atlantic SectionChronologyNotesBibliography