To The Editor:
One of the last of the Gundalow men was skipper Edward Adams of Durham, N. H. He died on April 9, 1951 at the age of ninety. In the gay nineties, he owned and piloted the Gundalow, Fannie M., from Portsmouth, loaded with coal to Newmarket and to Exeter, and with the same Gundalow he hauled wood to the brick yards on the Bellamy and the Piscataqua rivers.
The life of the Gundalow men was not always pleasant. There were always tides and squalls or something to contend with, yet they kept on going and brought their boats to harbor.
Capt. Adams, Capt. Harry Watson of Newmarket, and Capt. Fernald made history on the river and Little and Great Bay with their Gundalows in the eighteen nineties.
In 1659, Gundalows came to the mill of John Cutt on Islington Creek in Portsmouth.
Before 1696 William Furber of Newington was by permission of the Royal Council granted the right to keep a sufficient boat or Gundalow for a ferry from his home at Welsh Cove to transport travelers over to Oyster Pond" (now Durham).
It was in the Gundalows that the powder from Fort William and Mary in New Castle was brought to Durham and later used at the Battle of Bunker Hill, when the Patriots of New Hampshire rose in arms against Great Britain in December, 1774.
"THEY WERE WONDERFULLY HANDY CRAFT," Willie says, looking at a picture of a locally-built gundalow owned and operated years ago by Captain Edward Adams of Durham Point. "My father's gundolow was just like this 'un." Willie feels that the Great Bay area suffered when freight began to move inland by rail, and the oldtime navigators and their ships disappeared. ''It was a time that ought to be remembered," he adds, "because waterborne traffic built all these towns and developed this part of the state."
New Hampshire Profiles (February 1954) pp. 16-19
The Past Lives on - Potrait of a Changeless Way of Life
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It was in the Gundalows that the cotton for the mills in
Exeter, Newmarket, and Dover was brought up the turbulent
waters of the Piscataqua and the Bay, and down the river to
the tide water in Portsmouth went the cloth and the finished
products of the mills to be shipped to the ports of the world
in the eighteen hundreds.
The skippers of the Gundalows are almost gone, and
the Gundalows are all gone, but what man or women would
not enjoy seeing Gundalows going somewhere, or
schooners going to Exeter or Newmarket, loaded with coal or
lumber or brick on the waters of Great Bay, and I humbly
submit Great Bay as the finest body of water in the world.
Capt. Adams has gone to be with us no longer. We
will miss him. Many will remember the Gundalow launched at
island cove on his ninetieth birthday. Many will miss seeing
him at his old home. Yet he would want us to carry on.
As near as I know the last of the Gundalow, men on
the Great Bay is Capt. Willie Watson of Shackford Point on
the Lamprey River, who has piloted us up that winding river
to Newmarket many times. May the Lord God of the
righteous protect Him. Gundalow men are few on the bays.
Frederick Mathes Pickering, Newington, N. H.
* Mr. Pickering is to be commended for his fine tribute to
the gundalow men - who so adequately symbolized "free
enterprise" as it was known in this country's not too distant
past . - Ed.
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