From Ireland and the Shetlands up to Greenland, across to Baffin Island, Newfoundland, the US, and the Caribbean – prize-winning author David Gange embarks on a seabound journey through North-Atlantic coasts & islands, exploring ways of life that have been built on small rowed or paddled boats.

A true and verified story, Afloat also offers a vision of how those ways of life might inform all our futures.

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 in the land- and seascapes that surround them.

Wherever we have statistics, small rowed and paddled boats outnumber decked ships by at least fifty to one. Yet almost all history writing is about the big boats, a strange misrepresentation of maritime history. And one this book puts right.

Afloat is the story of eight journeys in search of ocean-going rowed and paddled boats. Gange kayaks thousands of miles, and spends hundreds of miles in wooden, canvas, and birch-bark boats, dozens of nights sleeping at the shoreline, and weeks in boat builders’ workshops learning, with saw or plane in hand, the songs and stories of these charismatic vessels. He joins community pilgrimages to tiny islands on their saint’s 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, dolphins, sharks, turtles and icebergs, as well as journeys beneath skies filled, from horizon to horizon, with tens of thousands of seabirds. Most of all, though, these journeys involve learning from the worldviews of small communities who have suffered intensely from the nation- and empire-building of modern states, but whose knowledge and ethics are far more important for the future than those of the inland bureaucracies that marginalised them.