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May 9, 2000
The year? 1858. The place? A dugout canoe on the Ottawa River in what was then called "Upper
Canada." The big, outgoing man in the canoe was a London barrister, a well-to-do lawyer with an
undemanding practice. His name was John MacGregor, and he was indulging in a favorite pastime
— travel. MacGregor did nothing by halves. His 1858 tour of the Americas took him from the
eastern United States all the way north and west to the Bering Sea.
The London barrister was also a Protestant evangelist, with a keen interest in the slavery
question. As he traveled across America, he missed no opportunity to talk to black preachers and
white abolitionists. He was alarmed by what he learned. "There will be a Civil War about these
slaves," he wrote, and he proved a good prophet. On February 8, 1861, delegates from seven
southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, where they lost no time in proclaiming the
Confederate States of America. Just sixty-three days later, on April 12th, Confederate shore
batteries at Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter. The Civil War that John
MacGregor had foreseen three years earlier had begun in earnest.
Four more years passed, as armies marched and countermarched across the continent. Half a
million men and boys died. Some died of bullet wounds or dysentery, some of burns or typhus. Some
drowned in the mud of flooded trenches, and some screamed their lives out as surgeons' saws cut
into their shattered limbs. On April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy,
boarded a train to take him safely out of reach of the Union troops advancing on his Richmond,
Virginia, capital. He took half a million dollars in gold and silver from his treasury with him.
Five days later, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, his encircled troops now starving for want of
rations, borrowed a white towel from a subordinate — there were no white flags to be found
in Lee's army! — and sent an emissary through Union lines to ask for a meeting with General
Ulysses S. Grant. The Civil War was over. The guns fell silent.
Back in London, John MacGregor, too, was turning away from military pursuits. A captain in the
Central Company of the Royal Volunteers, he had been an enthusiastic rifleman for years, once
winning the regimental prize for marksmanship. Now, however, a train accident had left him unable
to hold his rifle steady. MacGregor was not a man accustomed to idleness. He hungered for
physical challenge. With his days as a competition marksman at an end, he needed a new diversion.
He found one in the memories of his northern travels.
Sketching out a design resembling the agile and seaworthy skin-covered kayaks he had seen in
Alaska and Kamchatka, MacGregor commissioned a new type of craft from a Lambeth builder. Decked
and double-ended, the boat had an open cockpit in the center. From this sheltered "well,"
protected from splash and spray by a rubberized mackintosh-fabric apron, the seated occupant
could wield a seven-foot-long, double-bladed paddle with ease. "She was," MacGregor wrote later,
describing his first "canoe," "made just short enough to go into the German railway wagons; that
is to say, fifteen feet in length, twenty-eight inches broad, nine inches [deep], and weighed
eighty pounds." Built from oak and cedar planks, overlapped and nailed together — a type of
construction known as lapstrake or clinker — the boat was promptly christened Rob
Roy, in honor of the celebrated Scottish outlaw who took the same name, and from whom John
MacGregor claimed descent.
On a stiflingly hot day at the end of July 1865, the Rob Roy began her maiden voyage.
She was launched onto the River Thames at London, where she "bounded away joyously on the top of
the tide through Westminster Bridge, and swiftly shooting Blackfriars,…danced along the
waves of the Pool, which looked all golden in the morning sun." The world's first kayak tour had
begun.
And it wasn't just a day-trip or a weekend outing. MacGregor had no use for tentative
beginnings. His planned itinerary took him across the English Channel to Ostend, Belgium —
the Rob Roy crossed the Channel in a steamship — and continued on from there through
Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and France. All in all, it was a journey of
On his return to London, MacGregor sat down, put pen to paper, and wrote up the story of his
adventures. The result was a book entitled A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe on Twenty
Lakes and Rivers of Europe. Illustrated with woodcuts made from MacGregor's own drawings and
published in January 1866, it was an immediate best-seller. Sequels appeared in short order,
beginning with The Rob Roy on the Baltic later in the same year. 1867 saw MacGregor
temporarily abandoning the canoe for a 21-foot sailing yawl, but he returned to his double-paddle
craft not long thereafter, and The Rob Roy on the Jordan, Nile, Red Sea and Gennesareth,
etc. appeared in 1869. Two more trips followed — to Holland in 1871 and to the Northern
Isles of Scotland in 1872 — but neither of these was ever written up for publication.
MacGregor had a new boat built for each voyage he made, altering the design in small ways to
improve performance or meet anticipated conditions. All his canoes bore the stamp of the original
Rob Roy, however. Each was decked, double-ended, and propelled with a double-bladed
paddle. Each, in short, was a kayak in all but name. (Each could also be fitted with a small sail
to take advantage of any favorable slant of wind.)
The Rob Roy books were enormously popular. By 1879 MacGregor had earned more than
£10,000 from his writing and related public appearances. Already comfortably off, MacGregor
was a keen philanthropist. He gave all of the earnings from his books (equivalent to more than $1
million today) to charity. A man who loved the limelight, MacGregor thought himself amply
rewarded by public recognition and acclaim.
He wasn't disappointed. His books weren't just best-sellers — they were
international best sellers, and their influence was felt in some very unlikely places. The
French Emperor Napoleon III read an early copy of A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe.
No sooner had he turned the last page, than he hit upon the idea of sponsoring a Paris Boat
Exhibition "to encourage a taste for the exploration of solitary streams and lonely currents
among the youth of France." Not surprisingly, MacGregor decided to attend, and he immediately
matched action to thought, sailing single-handed from London to Paris, while distributing
Protestant tracts along the way to any fisherman, deckhand, or seaman who could be persuaded to
accept one.
It's unlikely that these religious pamphlets ever converted a single reader to MacGregor's
muscular Christianity, but his canoeing tales persuaded thousands to take to the water in search
of pleasure. One of his new disciples was a Mr. A.H. Siegfried, the business manager of a
Louisville, Kentucky, newspaper. Eager to replicate MacGregor's paddling feats in American
waters, Siegfried had two touring canoes built to the English pattern by a most unlikely
craftsman — a diminutive shoe clerk turned boat-builder in the little northern New York town
of Canton.
That diminutive clerk was J. Henry Rushton. His story comes next.
Copyright © 2000 by Verloren Hoop Productions. All rights reserved.
In the Beginning
The Well-Traveled Barrister
By Farwell Forrest
farwell@paddling.net
a Thousand Miles…on the Rivers Thames, Sambre, Meuse, Rhine, Main,
Danube, Reuss, Aar, Ill, Moselle, Meurthe, Marne, and Seine, [and] the Lakes Titisee, Constance,
Unter See, Zurich, Zug, and Lucerne, together with six canals in Belgium and France, and two
expeditions in the open sea of the British Channel.
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