Coasting Trade follows the voyage of a Yankee trading schooner circumnavigating the island of Newfoundland, with navigation notes adapted from Sailing Directions for the Island and Banks of Newfoundland by J.S. Hobbes (1865). 

As the vessel puts in at various ports, the lyrical narratives weave back and forth through a century of change. A smuggler who studies angels, a woman who knits a stove, green martyrs, a homesick immigrant, and a biologist studying the sexual characteristics of caplin all come to the attention of the navigator before he turns southward, to the joy of glad returning.