Preface
The first two volumes of this series divided the journeys in Wassersport by the way the boats were driven: under oar on inland water, under sail at sea. This third volume gathers what the first two had no room for, and it follows the water rather than the rig. Most of its journeys go down a river or along a coast, and many of them go from one to the other: from Berlin to the Baltic in a single sculler, from the Spreewald to the open sea off Usedom in two canoes, from Einbeck down the Leine to Bremen in a canoe.
The book follows the journal roughly in the order the journeys were made, from 1883 to 1895. It begins with two racing boats taken out to sea for a day and with a scientific expedition, half in jest, to a coral island off Madagascar. Then come the great rivers. Four old members of a Berlin club row from Ulm to Budapest, and a Viennese sculler, alone, rows the same Danube upstream to Linz and comes home in one day. Three Alsatians take a pair down the Rhine from Strassburg, and two Berlin oarsmen photograph the Spreewald. Three middle-aged canoeists from Leipzig paddle to Stettin, and two members of the Berliner Ruder-Club defend the Rob Roy canoe against its critics. Four sailing chapters follow: a squadron of tiny English yawls in Holland, the Berlin students’ cutter on its fourth Baltic voyage, two naval officers on holiday, and a Stettin cutter round the island of Usedom. The last part belongs to the 1890s. It holds the longest journey in the book, the painter Otto Protzen’s summer of 1893 in his sculler Elfe, with his own drawings. It also holds a canoe on the wild upper Leine, two Berlin canoeists who let the Danube carry them from Ulm to Vienna in ten days, a dinghy and a sculler in the Mecklenburg lakes, and a Bonn four that rowed up the Rhine against the current for the pleasure of it.
The rules of choice are those of the earlier volumes. Only finished accounts in which something happens have been included; serials broken off before the end have been left out, however promising. The texts are given in full. The writers were oarsmen, canoeists and yachtsmen, a painter, a technician, students; they kept their clock times and distances carefully, and these are kept here. Every figure that matters has been checked against the page image of the journal. Their rivers have since been straightened, dammed and bridged, and many of their towns now have other names in other countries. The water is still there.
— Leonid Dudakov
