A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England.

"A breezy book"

First edition. A very difficult book to find in anything approaching collectable condition, Bruns describing it as rare. Toy is somewhat perfunctory; "A cruise in 1858 in a chartered 17-ton sloop. The boat, with a crew of two, cost 7.50 a day." But this is a well-written and highly appealing account, DAB refers to it as a "breezy book," and one of the first accounts of leisure cruising on the East Coast, a "voyage" that took Carter from Provincetown, Massachusetts to Bar Harbor, Maine. The author is an interesting figure, "his formal education was rather fragmentary he had known extreme poverty (DAB);" he was for a time W.H. Prescott's private secretary; he organized the Free-Soil party convention at which "a brief platform drafted by Carter was adopted, together with the name 'Republican' suggested by him"; worked with George Ripley and Charles A. Dana on the first edition of the American Cyclopedia; and at the time of publication was Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune. Carter died in 1879 "worn out by his ceaseless activity."