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Updated: May 29, 2025
To own the poorest boat is better than hiring the best. It is a link to Nature; without a boat, one is so much the less a man. Sailing is of course delicious; it is as good as flying to steer anything with wings of canvas, whether one stand by the wheel of a clipper-ship, or by the clumsy stern-oar of a "gundalow."
Then somebody on board would tell a story of children who had drifted away beyond the harbor-bar and the light-house, and were drowned; and our boyish helmsman would begin to look grave and anxious, and would turn his boat and row us back swiftly to the safe gundalow and tumbledown wharf. The cars rush into the station now, right over our riverside playground.
The next day we came to a wide river which it was impossible to ford, but mercy, which sometimes "tempers the blast to the shorn lamb," sent us relief in the shape of an antiquated gundalow floating on the tide. Like Noah and family of old, we managed to embark on this ancient ark, and paddled to the further shore. There we miraculously escaped the scalping knife and tomahawk.
He provided me with abundant store of the homely food already alluded to. He launched me in a vessel; known to some as a dug-out, to some as a gundalow. His devotion was really touching. It convinced me more profoundly than ever of the canine fidelity and semi-animal characteristics of his race. I floated down the Bayou. I was picked up by a cotton-ship in the Gulf.
So it was a river only half the time, but at high tide it was a river indeed; all that a child could wish, with its boats and its sloops, and now and then that most available craft for a crew of children a gundalow.
"What old wreck is it?" inquired Young, looking at the scarcely perceptible craft that was sinking near them. "It is the remains of the old canoe made by Thomas Ridgeley, in his day, I think," said Jonah. "Nothing of the sort," said Bart; "it is the remains of old Bullock's 'gundalow, that has been sinking and swimming, like old John Adams in the Revolution, these five years past.
"'Man! this thing is full of water: my feet are almost in it! shrieked Mrs. Beauchamp Brown as the gundalow lurched and heaved shoreward. "The White man looked over his shoulder, and slowly wrinkled his leathern cheeks into an encouraging smile. 'Like ter near killed a woggin, replied he sententiously. 'Will be ashore in a brace of shakes."
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