Fieldnotes from America’s waterways
Seaborn Pilot is a series of guidebooks devoted to the cultural and natural history of America’s waterways. Launching in early 2025, Seaborn Pilot strives to capture the essence of what Melville described as “the extremest limit of the land”—that place, both literally and figuratively, where man and water meet, where stories and traditions are shaped over generations by the flow of a creek, the bend of a river, the height of a tide, or the life that clings just beyond the harbor’s edge.
Each volume of Seaborn Pilot will serve as an interpretive guide to a specific waterway (or a region of waterways), using maps, archival material, writing, interviews, and scientific literature to illustrate the characteristic identity of that place.
Seaborn Pilot follows in the rich tradition of the pilot book, a tool that has, since 1490, been an indisposible companion to mariners, serving as an aid to navigation through the bound publication of maps, courses and distances between ports, and data related to tides and currents.
As our shorelines continue to change amidst human development, sea level rise, climate change, and natural dynamics, and as the need for interventions to protect the plants and animals, communities and cultures that populate these shorelines increases, it is critical that we better understand the nuanced complexities—human, ecological, and otherwise—of our nation’s waterways. And in this sense, like the pilot books of old, Seaborn Pilot serves as an aid to navigation in the modern world.
BOOKS
Through essays, interviews, artwork, maps, and archival material, each Seaborn Pilot book strives to capture the essence of our shared waterways. By telling the stories of the cultures and traditions that have been shaped by the physical conditions of our nation’s creeks, rivers, harbors, and coastlines, Seaborn Pilot hopes to introduce a new readership to the often dense topics of hydrology, hydraulics, geomorphology, chemistry, biology, and ecology, thereby empowering a new field of stewards to better understand, love, and protect these special and essential places.
Not since the Rivers of America Series was introduced in 1937 has there been such an effort to share the cultural and natural history of our nation’s waterways with such a wide audience of readers.
Seaborn Pilot plans to publish two books in its first year (Charleston and Cape Cod) and four books per year thereafter.
CHARLESTON (SC) - WINTER 2025
Memories of the final days of the Santee Gun Club by the late Peter Matthiessen (cofounder of The Paris Review). Words from the last member of Charleston’s Black Mosquito Fleet. Etchings of waterfowl along the Bohicket River. The old crab factory of Jeremy Creek. The last lighthouse keeper of the Cape Romain Lighthouse. Running ‘shine up Bass Creek. A decoy artist’s heirloom tools. Oystering at Breach Inlet. The old ferry boats of the Cooper River. Cooking creek shrimp the way we used to. Tailing reds on Lowcountry flats. The plight of Gadsden Creek. E. E. Just and the muse of the salt marsh.
CAPE COD (MA) - SUMMER 2025
The four seas. The Great Marshes of Barnstable. John Hay’s herring run. The great fire at Crosby’s Boatyard. The graveyard and the shifting sands of the outer beach. Tuna fishing the traditional way. Henry Beston’s Outermost House. Woods Hole and the great discoveries of its Oceanographic Institute. Seals and sharks. 12-foot tides of Cape Cod Bay. Mildred’s clam chowder. The Portuguese of Provincetown.
How each book will be organized will depend on the material and market. The Mississippi River may warrant an entire book, for example, while another book may include the entirety of the Boundary Waters (a network of waterways that transcends national boundaries). But regardless of geographic scope or organizational formatting, each Seaborn Pilot book will serve as an aid to navigation, presenting a waterway’s physical characteristics through the prism of the people and traditions it has shaped.
Lobstering on the Maine coast, flyfishing on the Colorado River, the buried streams of New York City, surfing at Mavericks, the Skipjacks of the Chesapeake Bay, the America’s Cup and the mouth of Narragansett Bay, the shrimp po’ boy of New Orleans, canoeing the Boundary Waters, Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
So many of the identifying stories of place are direct expressions of the physical characteristics and the flora and fauna of a specific waterway. Seaborn Pilot will serve as your guide down and through and over our nation’s waters, exploring the science, literature, art, folklife, recreation, and vernacular that have been shaped over the flow of time.
Why physical books? In the age of the Internet, so much of the information we have access to is presented in overwhelming and arbitrary ways, often lacking structure, something that we believe is inherently physical. And the places that have managed to build appropriate structure to present information are oftentimes overly saturated, wherein one bit of information is having to compete with every other bit of information on the Internet. This is a hopeless task.
We believe that value is created by contextualizing information, and we believe that no piece of technology has served as a better medium to contextualize information than the book.
The material in Seaborn Pilot, since it is shaped by the forces of water, will be relatively evergreen, forming over geological time (or, at least, over generations) and not prone to trends.
The stories and material we present in Seaborn Pilot will be built on the most indelible part of civilization: nature. Steward Brand, co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, visualized the concept of “Pace Layering” (see diagram to the left), explaining, “I wound up developing a pace-layer diagram of civilization where there’s the fast-moving parts like fashion and commerce, and it goes slower when you get to infrastructure, and things move really slow in how governance changes. And then, you get down to culture, language, and religion, which move really slowly, and nature – with tectonic forces, climate change, and so on – is really big and slow. What’s interesting about that is that the fast parts get all the attention, but the slow parts have all the power.”
Seaborn Pilot will give attention to these slow parts, showing how they shape and inform the fast parts of civilization, underscoring the essential need to focus our energies on protecting the natural world.