Agree that Sigurd Olsen and John Muir have written very well... the sense of wilderness comes through and the descriptions are believable. After finishing The Lonely Land, Olsen has taken you there, now the trip is over and time to return home... a little sad that it's over but that's how well it works... the magic is there for a while and after it's over it's back to plain old reality.
Adding on to some of the historical accounts in this thread, I found this chapter in Gabriel Sagard's account of a year spent in Huronia at Indian villages on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, 1623-1624... describing the return journey by canoe to Quebec. Maybe more heroic than inspirational as a result of the hardship and endurance, and throughout the book, the details written describe a very different time in service to God, the French King, and dealing with the realities of the land and Huron life in those times.
At the beginning of the book, "The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons", the description of canoe travel into Huronia from Quebec on the St. Lawrence, up the Ottawa river, through Nipissing and into Lake Huron is very brief and simply mentions the difficulties... Sagard may have been too exhausted to document the journey in.
The return is covered in greater detail, when he seems to have become hardened to travel after a year spent with the Hurons (for example, inbound, he could not stomach the sagamite, the Huron boiled corn staple eaten along the canoe route, but on the return had become used to it).
Included are descriptions of the leakiness and fragile character of birchbark canoes, an Algonquin sturgeon feast at Beausoleil Island, taking the wrong channel at the French river delta, the difficult portage through wetlands near Mattawa, the dangerous rapids and portages along the Ottawa river, being harassed by Algonquins for trade and payment of passage through their lands at Allumette Island, eating wildlife killed along the way, and eventually the arrival at Quebec where ships were waiting to sail back to France.
Link to the first page of about a dozen describing the canoe travel, but the entire book is well worth reading, the beginning includes the account of the long sea journey from France to Canada, with descriptions of pirates, storms, illness, calms, fishing, and islands and features along the Canadian coast and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence:
http://link.library.utoronto.ca/cha...=sagard&searchtype=Title&startrow=1&Limit=All
Illustration from the 1636 original that gives some sense of the times... IIRC the French was translated into English about 1930.
http://www.library.mcgill.ca/rarebook/EXHIBIT/GRANV18.JPG
