page_title: Gundalow
hierarchical_section_title: Gundalow
caption_attribution_description: English: Model of the gunboat Philadelphia in the National Navy Museum
context_page_description: A gundalow is a type of flat-bottom sailing barge once common in Maine and New Hampshire rivers. They first appeared in the mid-1600s, reached maturity of design in the 1700 and 1800s, and lingered into the early 1900s before vanishing as commercial watercraft. Up to 70 feet long, they characteristically employed tidal currents for propulsion, with a single huge lateen sail brailed to a heavy yard to harness favorable winds.
  Common cargoes were bricks, timber, cattle, sheep, and other bulk raw materials downriver, and finished goods up. Gundalows were very active delivering cordwood to brickworks to fire their kilns, picking up cargoes of finished bricks in return.
  A form of sailing barge similar to a scow, gundalows were fitted with a pivoting leeboard in lieu of a fixed keel, giving them an exceptionally shallow draft and allowing them to "take the hard" both for loading and unloading cargoes and maintenance. A gundalow's yard was attached to a stump mast and heavily counterweighted, pivoting down while still under sail to shoot under bridges while maintaining the boat's way.
context_section_description: A gundalow (also known in period accounts as a "gondola") is a type of flat-bottom sailing barge once common in Maine and New Hampshire rivers. They first appeared in the mid-1600s, reached maturity of design in the 1700 and 1800s, and lingered into the early 1900s before vanishing as commercial watercraft.  Up to 70 feet (21.34 m) long, they characteristically employed tidal currents for propulsion, with a single huge lateen sail brailed to a heavy yard to harness favorable winds.
  Common cargoes were bricks, timber, cattle, sheep, and other bulk raw materials downriver, and finished goods up.  Gundalows were very active delivering cordwood to brickworks to fire their kilns, picking up cargoes of finished bricks in return.
  A form of sailing barge similar to a scow, gundalows were fitted with a pivoting leeboard in lieu of a fixed keel, giving them an exceptionally shallow draft and allowing them to "take the hard" (settle into sand, ledge, or mudflats) both for loading and unloading cargoes and maintenance.  A gundalow's yard was attached to a stump mast and heavily counterweighted, pivoting down while still under sail to shoot under bridges while maintaining the boat's way.
  Cannon-sporting gunboat style gundalows with fixed masts and square yards were built and deployed on Lake Champlain by both British and American forces during the American Revolutionary War, meeting in combat at the Battle of Valcour Island.
  A replica gundalow, the Piscataqua, is maintained by a Portsmouth, New Hampshire non-profit and employed extensively in both grade school educational programs and raising environmental awareness among neighboring New Hampshire and Maine seacoast communities.  Its precursor, the Captain Edward Adams, built with traditional materials and methods in the 1980s, is preserved as a memorial in Dover, New Hampshire along the Cocheco River, one of the tidal headwaters of the Piscataqua River separating the states of Maine and New Hampshire.
caption: A model of the USS Philadelphia (1776), sunk in the Battle of Valcour Island
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