A Week on the Broads: Four Victorian gents at sail on a Norfolk gaffer in 1889

During their holidays in the late 1880s, S. K. Baker and three of his college friends--clad in stripy blazers and braided straw hats--spent time sailing and camping on the Norfolk Broads, a unique, river-dazzled area of Britain. Baker, a keen artist and diarist, recorded their travels in watercolor in two small, leather-bound books.

The result is an entirely charming, funny account along the lines of the legendary Three Men in a Boat, with which the notebooks are entirely contemporaneous, although the protagonists are younger and possibly more mischievous. Baker records their evenings in the pub, their encounters with women (both ashore and afloat), skinny dipping, as well as culinary disasters, all while lovingly recording the landscape and the boats on which they sailed.

The notebook is published as a facsimile with an introduction by Michael Goffe, the son of one of Baker's fellow students, to whom it was gifted.