"Our world then was both wide and narrow -- wide in the immensity of sea and mountain; narrow in that the boat was very small, and we lived and camped, explored and swam in a little realm of our own making."
-- M. Wylie Blanchet

The 50th anniversary edition of this coastal British Columbia classic, now in beautifully illustrated hardcover, will make a timeless keepsake. This is a biography and astonishing adventure story of a woman who, left a widow in 1927, packed her five children onto a 25-foot boat and cruised the coastal waters of British Columbia, summer after summer. Muriel Wylie Blanchet acted single-handedly as skipper, navigator, engineer and, of course, mother, as she saw her crew through encounters with tides, fog, storms, rapids, cougars and bears. She sharpened in her children a special interest in Haida culture and in nature itself.

In this book, she left us with a sensitive and compelling account of their journeys.

M. Wylie Blanchet was born Muriel Wylie Liffiton on May 2, 1891, in Montreal, Quebec. She married Geoffrey Orme Blanchet in 1909, but was widowed in 1926, leaving her to raise five children on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. For several summers Muriel, her children, and the family dog set off in a twenty-five foot motorboat, the Caprice, to explore the waters between Vancouver Island and the rugged Canadian mainland. They were on their own, with Muriel as captain, anchoring in secluded coves to tramp the wilderness, examining architecture and burial grounds in deserted native villages, and meeting the region's various human and animal inhabitants.

Muriel wrote about their journeys, and was successful in having articles published in magazines such as Blackwood's and Atlantic Monthly. In 1962, the year Muriel died, Blackwood and Sons of Edinburgh, Scotland published The Curve in Time, which described several summers of the family explorations. In 1968, Gray Publishing in Canada printed a second edition of The Curve in Time, and since then it has earned a reputation as a Canadian classic.

M. Blanchet's profile page

Gray's Publishing Ltd. of Sidney published 61 titles between 1962 and 1982. It was established by Gray Campbell, born on Februrary 4, 1912, in Ottawa. He served in the RCMP (1932-1939) and the RCAF (1939-1945) before turning to cattle ranching for 12 years in the Alberta foothills. He published a memoir about his ranching life, We Found Peace, in 1953. He was greatly assisted in his ranching and publishing business by his war bride Eleanor Russell (Benson) Campbell, his partner for "59 glorious years". They moved to the West Coast for health reasons, after which Gray Campbell only entered publishing because a blind war veteran named John Windsor was unable to get his memoir accepted by eastern Canadian publishing houses. Gray Campbell published Windsor's Blind Date using a down payment of $250 won in a CBC-TV show called Live A Borrowed Life, forerunner to Front Page Challenge. His office was established in a converted chicken coop behind his house in Sidney. The company's second title was a silly, comic memoir by Hazel O'Neail, Doukhobor Daze, that did little to engender respect for the much misunderstood and persecuted Doukhobors at the time. In 1964, Campbell published his first bestseller, The Pacific Gardener.

In his retirement, Gray Campbell co-authored Yukon Memories: A Mountie's Story with Jack 'Tich' Watson and a parish history called St. Andrew's Parish of Sidney (Sidney: St Andrew's Anglican Church, 1996) with Marcia LeClair. His own self-effacing memoir was Butter Side Up.

Gray Campbell died on June 10, 2000, not long after he was able to attend and fully enjoy the presentation of the first Gray Campbell Award in March of that same year to Alan Twigg, publisher of BC BookWorld. Subsequent winners have included former bookseller Thora Howell of Nanaimo, Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of BC and former head librarian at UBC, Basil Stuart-Stubbs.

Gray Campbell's profile page

Eileen Blanchett's profile page

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of seven books, most recently Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, named Best of the Month by Amazon.com. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly opinion column for the New York Times.

Timothy Egan's profile page