Since the 1940s when Scuffy the Tugboat and the canoe in Paddle-to-the-Sea made their epic journeys down the eastern waterways to the Atlantic, the idea of a little boat crossing the vastness of North America has had great imaginative appeal. While Paddle-to-the-Sea and Scuffy stayed in the water, travelling through the system of rivers and lakes to the ocean, McGinty’s boat – a Newfoundland dory – makes the trip by train. McGinty addresses his dory with feeling as Heart’s Content, but the man rather than the boat is the focus of this picture book.

McGinty has a problem: he has been cod fishing every day for 60 years, but now there are no more fish. Eventually he decides to go to live with his granddaughter on Vancouver Island. But McGinty cannot leave his boat, so he becomes a stowaway inside the dory on the railway car. Finally arriving at Cowichan Bay, he puts his boat in the water, catches a salmon for breakfast, pours Atlantic Ocean water from his teapot into the Pacific, and utters a prayer of hope for the fish of Newfoundland.

Through McGinty’s story, Hartry gently touches on two of our great national problems – Canadian unity and the loss of the East Coast fishery. A map of Canada on the end papers charts the coast-to-coast journey, and colourful illustrations show the train passing through famous Canadian scenery. The double-page picture of prairie wheat fields (also used on the jacket) is particularly striking and humorous, showing the train snaking through the fields and McGinty sitting up in the dory rowing “the waves of gold grain.”

The ending of the book, however, is troublesome: Hartry, a Toronto lawyer, seems unaware of the dismal state of the B.C. salmon fishery, and her solution to McGinty’s problem will irritate some adult readers. She does, nevertheless, give a lovely sense of the old fisherman’s dedication to his work and the rhythms of his traditional way of life.