Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 edition

Source

Date: 1836-07-04
Eras: Early Settlement era
Concepts: historiographymaritimeshippingtoponymy

Scanned document page: Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage — Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 editionHarriet Martineau; 1837 public-domain volume digitized by Internet Archive.

Summary

On 4 July 1836, Harriet Martineau wrote that the vessel carrying her north from Chicago passed the Fox and Beaver Islands. Her published account provides a dated, firsthand travel-narrative connection between the two island groups on a Lake Michigan route shortly before the Strang era.

The sentence supports a passage-by observation and the paired names used by the author. It does not identify a particular Fox Island, establish a landing or course, describe conditions on either group, or define the archipelago’s boundaries.

Evidence and limits

The paragraph immediately after the Fox-and-Beaver sentence shifts to Mackinaw: its stated location in the strait between Lakes Michigan and Huron makes that referent clear. Its fur-trade, mission, garrison, and scenic descriptions therefore are not attributed here to Beaver Island.

This is a published travel narrative, not a navigation log, survey, or island census. The project holds a digitized 1837 second-edition OCR derivative and a checked scan of p. 277, not Martineau’s manuscript or the vessel’s log.

Read the document

428 pages, rendered from the held scan.

Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 edition — p. 1 — Page 1 of 428Harriet Martineau, *Society in America*, vol. I, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), p. 277.Open the page image · Download this page

Jump to a page — 428 in all

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143 of 428 pages linked here — every page to 32, then every 4th, then the last 16. With JavaScript, every page.

Sources

Harriet Martineau, *Society in America*, vol. I, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), p. 277.
Checked page image. In a narrative dated 4 July 1836, Martineau writes that her vessel passed the Fox and Beaver Islands. The next sentences describe Mackinaw, identified by its location between Lakes Michigan and Huron; they are not a description of Beaver Island.
page_evidence · martineau_society_in_america_1837_p277_leaf303
Harriet Martineau, *Society in America*, vol. I, 2nd ed. (1837), Internet Archive item societyinamerica0001unse_m3v2, DjVu text derivative.
Held OCR derivative used to locate and read the passage in context; the page image is the checked evidence for the quoted sentence.
internet_archive · societyinamerica0001unse_m3v2
Project provenance sidecars for the held Martineau OCR derivative and page image, retrieved 2 August 2026.
Records the archive item, edition, retrieval date, checksums, and the relationship between printed p. 277 and scan leaf 303. Path corrected 2026-08-08: this sidecar describes the OCR derivative and now sits in the _djvu slot, the convention used throughout data/books/internet_archive. It previously occupied the item-stem slot only because no scan PDF was held; retrieving the scan put a second file in that slot. No public copy of this file is known; the archive holds one and can provide it on request.
internet_archive · societyinamerica0001unse_m3v2

Added 2 August 2026 · revised 4 August 2026. Recent changes

Cite this article

Beaver Island Archive, “Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 edition”, https://beaverislandarchive.org/documents/harriet-martineau-fox-beaver-islands-1836/, accessed [date], citing Harriet Martineau, *Society in America*, vol. I, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), p. 277. (and 2 further sources listed on the page).

Last revised 2026-08-04. Fill in [date] with the date you read it — this page is static and cannot know that.

BibTeX for “Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 edition”RIS for “Harriet Martineau’s Fox and Beaver Islands passage, 4 July 1836; 1837 edition”