The Maple Frog was without question the ugliest boat twenty-year-old Walter Paine had ever seen. It may even have been (as its captain and co-owner Percy DuGreen often claimed—more strenuously the more he drank) the ugliest boat currently afloat on any of the five Great Lakes. No small claim: in 1871 there were plenty of wrecks heaving around those waters, and Walter often felt they’d spent their day jockeying among a flotilla of leaky longboats, wounded schooners, leprous tugs, and rancid fishing launches, each a unique and horrible spectacle of maritime decrepitude.
