George W. Sears

George Washington Sears (December 2, 1821 – May 1, 1890) was an American writer for Forest and Stream magazine in the 1880s and an early conservationist.

His stories, appearing under the pen name "Nessmuk", popularized self-guided canoe camping tours of the Adirondack lakes in open, lightweight solo canoes and what is today called ultralight camping or ultralight backpacking.

He was fascinated by the few books about Native Americans his family possessed, which left him with an abiding interest in forest life and adventure.

A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens.

At age twelve he started working in a commercial fishing fleet based on Cape Cod and at nineteen he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the South Pacific; it was the same year (1841) that Herman Melville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds.