gundalows

Updated: May 3, 2025

Under us the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests, and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind them; and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream, showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the limit of the shores.

Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 63, January, 1863