COASTAL ADVENTURE: A BOOK ABOUT MARSHES AND THE SEA; SHOOTING AND FISHING; WILDFOWL AND WADERS AND MEN WHO SAIL IN SMALL BOATS. By J. Wentworth Day. With fifteen plates in half-tone.

1949 1st edition. 8vo (148 x 221mm). Pp256. B/w photograph plates. Red cloth, spine titled in gilt.

"This book is for those who love sea-marshes and the lonely fringes of the tide. It is a book of wildfowlers and fishermen, of marsh farmers and those hermit bretheren of the longshore mudflats who live precariously by ancient arts of gun and net and fish-spear, of winkle-basket and crab-pot - Englishmen most primitive and most English. The reader is taken round the Essex coast from that saintly village with the uncompromising name of Mucking, in a barge yacht which sails the creeks of 'the Islands' - Foulness, Havengore, New England, Potton, Wallasea, and the rest - up the shallow valley of the Crouch where Canute's long-ships sailed, back to the lonely seaways off the Dengie Flats, and so to the Blackwater, noblest estuary on all the English coasts - or so I like to think. There is much inconsequent digging into history on this voyage: the humble local history of smugglers and fowlers, of marsh graziers and island pugilists, of robust eighteenth-century squires, parsons, and bygone decoy-men - none of it, you may say, of any great importance, but all, to my mind, part of the very weft of English history.. ..The reader will find also such diverse matters as 'Big-class' yachting, tunny-fishing, and sea fisheries generally, because these too are all part of the picture of life on the coast. They are as much a means of earning money as they are of training skilled sailors, or lending high adventure to everday scenes. There is a great deal about duck-shooting, about punt-gunning - that most dangerous of all sports - and of fowling in the cold beauty of winter. And this, again, is of East Coast life, for there men shoot for a living as earnestly as other men ply a pen, add up figures, or plough a furrow. Like all life on the coast, even shooting for the market is often a matter of high adventure.. ...So here is Coastal Adventure, a record of things seen, done, and remembered, of little adventures by wind and tide, which will, I hope, bring to the weary townsman some breath of the older England, a scent of our salt winds straight off the mudflats".