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,