Having owned, and thoroughly tested in the waters of Barnegat and Little Egg Harbor bays, five of these boats, I became convinced that their claims for the good-will of the boating fraternity had not been over-estimated; so when I planned my second voyage from northern America to the Gulf of Mexico, and selected the great water-courses of the west and south (the Ohio and Mississippi rivers) as the route to be explored and studied, I chose the Barnegat sneak-box as the most comfortable model combined with other advantages for a voyager’s use.  The sneak-box offered ample stowage capacity, while canoes built to hold one person were not large enough to carry the amount of baggage necessary for the voyage; for I was to avoid hotels and towns, to live in my boat day and night, to carry an ample stock of provisions, and to travel in as comfortable a manner as possible.  In fact, I adopted a very home-like boat, which, though only twelve feet long, four feet wide, and thirteen inches deep, was strong, stiff, dry, and safe; a craft that could be sailed or rowed, as wind, weather, or inclination might dictate,—­the weight of which hardly exceeded two hundred pounds,—­and could be conveniently transported from one stream to another in an ordinary wagon.

A Nautilus, or any improved type of canoe, would have been lighter and more easily transported, and could have been paddled at a higher speed with the same effort expended in rowing the heavier sneak-box; but the canoe did not offer the peculiar advantages of comfort and freedom of bodily motion possessed by its unique fellow-craft.  Experienced canoeists agree that a canoe of fourteen feet in length, which weighs only seventy pounds, if built of wood, bark, canvas, or paper, when out of the water and resting upon the ground, or even when bedded on some soft material, like grass or rushes, cannot support the sleeping weight of the canoeist for many successive nights without becoming strained.

Light indeed must be the weight and slender and elastic the form of the man who can sleep many nights comfortably in a seventy-pound canoe without injuring it.  Cedar canoes, after being subjected to such use for some time, generally become leaky; so, to avoid this disaster, the canoeist, when threatened with wet weather, is forced to the disagreeable task of troubling some private householder for a shelter, or run the risk of injuring his boat by packing himself away in its narrow, coffin-like quarters and dreaming that he is a sardine, while his restless weight is every moment straining his delicate canoe, and visions of future leaks arise to disturb his tranquillity.

The one great advantage possessed by a canoe is its lightness.  Canoeists dwell upon the importance of the light weight of their canoes, and the ease with which they can be carried.  If the canoeist is to sleep in his delicate craft while making a long journey, she must be made much heavier than the perfected models now in use in this country, many of which are under seventy-five pounds’ weight.  This additional weight is at once fatal to speed, and becomes burdensome when the canoeist is forced to carry his canoe upon his own shoulders over a portage.  A sneak-box built to carry one person weighs about three times as much as a well-built cedar canoe.