Anticipating a lecture by Bayard Taylor, 300 passengers board the steamboat Equator at Afton for a trip up the St. Croix River to Stillwater. However, forty-mile-per-hour winds force water into the hatches and drown the boilers, and Captain Asa Green and his crew are compelled to ground the ship near Hudson, unloading the passengers just before a wind gust rips the cabin off the boat. Unfortunately, the passengers miss Taylor's lecture, "Life in the North."