After her husband died in 1927, leaving her with five small children, everyone expected the struggles of single motherhood on a remote island to overcome M. Wylie Blanchet. Instead, this courageous woman became one of the pioneers of “family travel,” acting as both mother and captain of the twenty-five-foot boat that became her family’s home during the long Northwest summers. Blanchet’s lyrically written account reads like fantastic fiction, but her adventures are all very real. There are dangers—rough water, bad weather, wild animals—but there are also the quiet respect and deep peace of a woman teaching her children the wonder and awesome depth of the natural world. “Filled with observations on natural history and the wonders of the wild, (Blanchet's) prose, like the waterfall she describes, sings.”—Kliatt

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 & 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. In 1982 Harbour Publishing printed A Whale Named Henry, a children's story Muriel wrote for her family in the 1930s. Harbour has also published Edith Iglauer's informative profile of Blanchet in The Strangers Next Door.

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