Considering accounts written by Northwest Coast marine tourists between 1861 and 1990, Nancy Pagh examines the ways that gender influences the roles women play at sea, the spaces they occupy on boats, and the language they use to describe their experiences, their natural surroundings, and their contact with Indigenous peoples.

Nancy Paugh, an accomplished marine tourist and scholar, offers an engaging text that makes fresh and relevant links between diverse areas of inquiry including Western Canadian Western Canadian and American history, feminist geography, post-colonial theory, and women and environments. She seamlessly integrates her own personal narrative into the text and beautifully evokes the complexity and singular qualities of Northwest Coast geography and ecology.

Nancy Pagh was born in Anacortes, Washington, and currently teaches at Western Washington University. She grew up travelling the San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands by boat, and, with this book, she turns a critical eye to the writings of other travellers. Dr. Pagh earned degrees in creative writing and literature from the University of New Hampshire and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia.

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The work is a mistress-piece of lean and personable prose. It will set the precedent for all future books on the social/spatial place of women at sea.

—Jo Stanley, Gender and History

Nancy Pagh has altered the course of nautical traditionalism with her book . . . At Home Afloat is a lively, intelligent analysis of, if you will forgive the pun, heretofore uncharted waters.

—Lorna Hutchinson, Canadian Literature