Edited with a new Introduction and Notes by R.H. Cockburn.
In an age when bush planes and the outboard motor were opening up previously inaccessible regions of the Canadian North, Prentice G. Downes, a graduate of Harvard who worked as a schoolteacher just outside Boston, chose to traavel alone by canoe to explore the Great Barren Lands. Sleeping Island is the sensitively written and moving account of one of his trips, a journey made in 1939 to remote, and at that time unmapped, Nueltin Lake.
In Sleeping Island, Downes records a North that was soon to be no more, a landscape and a people barely touched by the white man. Downes describes the excitement of wilderness canoe traavel, the delights of discovering the land, and his deep feeling for people met along the way. His respect for the Indians and the Inuit and their ways of life, and his love of their land, shine through this richly descriptive work.
Professor R. H. Cockburn, who has made a detaied study of this truly fascinating man, has provided a forword, notes, and a new and revised selection of photographs from Downe's extensive collection to enhance this edition of this classic work.
