The mountains became higher, the valley narrower. Soon the water increased and the canoe sped onwards among the little waves and rapids like a winged thing.
In one passage, savoring the solitude of the trip, he writes:
There Blackwood writes about those things we have come to expect in nature writing: the urge to flee the modern city, the peace of solitude in nature, encounters with rural village life along the way, and the many scenes of majestic natural landscapes. Traveling by canoe and bringing with him only the sparsest of supplies, Blackwood’s voyage began “not one hundred yards from the Black Forest” for a “journey of four and twenty hundred miles to the Black Sea.” This was not the first such voyage Blackwood had taken, nor was it in any way unusual for him though he was in many respects a modern, cosmopolitan figure-traveling widely, he worked as a farmer, bartender, hotel manager, business investor, radio presenter, and journalist-Blackwood, by his own account, was more apt to be found hiking in the mountains, camping in forests, or drifting down the isolate and languorous byways of winding rivers.īut the Danube boat trip seemed to make a particular impact on Blackwood, so much so that he would later write about it in a two-part article, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe,” published in Macmillan’s Magazine in the autumn of 1901. In the summer of 1901, 32-year-old Algernon Blackwood made two trips down the Danube River: the first with a friend and the second alone.