For hundreds of years,
My first exposure to the waters of the Great Bay was both literal and unintended. Fifty years ago this fall I entered Exeter as one of Hammy Bissell's scholarship boys. In view of my modest size-I was five feet tall and 90 pounds-he promptly dispatched me to the boathouse as a prospective coxswain. Two months later in November, 1951, our club four capsized into the Squamscott River and I emerged cold, wet and with a new and abiding appreciation for soccer. It would be almost a half-century before I again returned to the waters of the Great Bay, this time as a trustee of The Nature Conservancy of New Hampshire. In this, my second immersion, I have learned of the fascinating maritime history of the Piscataqua/Great Bay estuary and the impressive collaborative effort to protect the land, waters, fish and wildlife of one of the nation's most unique estuaries. An Ecological Treasure House Approximately 15,000 years ago, the last glacier to cover what is now New Hampshire retreated, leaving a coastal valley that slowly flooded under rising seawater, reaching its present level about 5,000 years ago. The result was the Great Bay: a remarkable estuarine area, with fresh water from seven rivers and numerous creeks draining one-quarter of New Hampshire, coming together with ocean water from the Gulf of Maine at Portsmouth. New Hampshire only has 18 miles of open-ocean coastline, but the Great Bay estuary created 150 miles of interior tidal shoreline. Many biologists consider the protected waters of estuaries, where fresh and salt water mix, among the most productive environments on earth. The Great Bay was no exception. By the time of the first European settlers in the 17th century, Great Bay was an ecological treasure house, with thousands of acres of salt marsh, eelgrass beds, mud flats, fens, white cedar swamps and flood plain forests with enormous stands of white pine, oak and red maple. The estuary teemed with salmon, shad, alewives, bass, cod, haddock, flounder and many others, as well as shellfish of every description. The wetlands and forests provided sanctuary for an abundance of waterfowl and wildlife. American Indians, including the Piscataqua and the Msquamskek (Squamscott) occupied the shoreline of Great Bay for hundreds of years before Europeans first came to the region in the first decades of the 17th century. By the 1630s, a settlement had taken root at Strawbery Banke, so named because of the abundance of strawberries found at the site of what became Portsmouth in 1653. Unlike the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans in Boston, the early settlers to the Piscataqua region came not for reasons of religion, but to fish and trade. By the 1650s, a thriving economy built on lumber, fishing, shipbuilding and trade had taken form, activities that would distinguish the region and bring it wealth for the next 200 years. Shipmasts, Shipyards and Sawmills In the 1930s, William G. Saltonstall '24-then a young history teacher at the Academy, who would later go on to become the Academy's ninth principal, from 1946 to 1963-explored the Piscataqua River and its tributaries by canoe, kayak, shell and Cape Cod catboat. His love of the region and its history resulted in the publication in 1941 of Ports of Piscataqua, which tells the story of the extraordinary maritime history of the region from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the latter part of the 19th century. From the very beginning, writes Saltonstall, the Piscataqua/ Great Bay region had something of great value-150- to 200-foot-tall white pines that made the finest masts and spars in the world. At a time when the English supply of mast trees was exhausted, the area had an abundance of trees, many with diameters 36 to 40 inches at the base-a size required by the British Navy's largest ships of the line. Unlike Norway pines, they retained their suppleness, often lasting 20 years, four times as long as their Norwegian cousins. From the mid-17th century to the American Revolution, the region surrounding the Piscataqua and the Great Bay produced most of the great masts for the British Navy. The ample supply of first-growth trees also provided an impetus to sawmills, the timber trade and shipbuilding. Many settlements developed where fresh water reached tidewater, such as the falls at Exeter. With this ample waterpower, notes Saltonstall, by the 1720s the region had 90 sawmills. In the prosperous decade after the Revolutionary War (1791-1801), the region exported 880 million feet of pine boards, 80 million feet of oak planking and 280 million barrel staves. But it was in shipbuilding that the region would make its greatest mark. As early as the 1630s and 1640s, the settlers, many of whom were skilled English shipwrights, were building smacks for the fishing trade and ketches and sloops of 30 and 40 tons or more for the West Indies trade. In 1651, Edward Gilman Jr. of Exeter had a 50-ton vessel on the stocks in the Squamscott. With excellent supplies of timber and skilled shipwrights, notes Saltonstall, New Hampshire shipyards could build vessels at half the cost of those built in England. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the Piscataqua was launching as many as 50 vessels a year, half of them square-rigged. The most notable: the sloop Ranger, designed by William Hackett of Exeter and commanded by Captain John Paul Jones from November 1777 to July 1778, during which time it played havoc with English commerce in the Irish Sea. Exeter's 'Road' to the Sea
Exeter merchants and traders played a major role in the maritime trade of the late 18th century, and shipping records of the period are filled with such Exeter family names as Gilman, Swazey, Ladd, Lampson, Giddings and Conner. In all, 21 vessels were built at Exeter between 1791 and 1800, the largest the 500-ton Hercules, at 112 feet in length and 31 feet in beam the biggest vessel ever built on the Squamscott. For the better part of two centuries ship and lumberyards stretched from the lower falls of the Exeter River down the west side of the Squamscott to the end of what is now Swazey Parkway. There was one final golden period for area shipbuilders. For a brief decade, from 1843 to 1853, Portsmouth shipyards launched more than 50 clipper ships for owners in Boston, Salem and New York. But by the time of the Civil War and the advent of steam, the great age of shipbuilding in the Piscataqua/Great Bay region was largely over.
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