The river runs southeastward, with New Hampshire to the south and west and Maine to the north and east, and empties into the Gulf of Maine east of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The last 6 miles (10 km) before the sea are known as Portsmouth Harbor and have a tidal current of around 4 knots (7.4 km/h; 4.6 mph).[1] The cities/towns of Portsmouth, New Castle, Newington, Kittery and Eliot have developed around the harbor.[2]
Named by the area's original Abenaki inhabitants, the word Piscataqua is believed to be a combination of peske (branch) with tegwe (a river with a strong current, possibly tidal).[3] The first known European to explore the river was Martin Pring in 1603. Captain John Smith placed a spelling similar to "Piscataqua" for the region on his map of 1614. The river was the site of the first sawmill in the colonies in 1623, the same year the contemporary spelling "Piscataqua" was first recorded.
In the mid 1630s some of the region's earliest European settlers built a sawmill in what is today's Berwick, Maine, on a tributary above the head of tide of the Piscataqua.[4] Thought to be the first over-shot water-powered site in America,[5][6] it became known as the "Great Works", giving name to today's Great Works River.
U-234, by far the greatest prize, arrived on May 19, seized off Nova Scotia by the U.S. destroyer escort Sutton. It had left Germany with a cargo bound for Japan of a disassembled Messerschmitt Me 262 jet plane, the most sophisticated fighter of World War II; two top Japanese scientists; and two high-ranking Nazi officers. While this was enough to create a media sensation, it was decades later before the U.S. government revealed that the sub also carried a top secret load of uranium oxide produced by the German atomic weapons program bound for a last-ditch Japanese effort. Instead, the extremely valuable nuclear material was diverted to the U.S.' top secret Manhattan Project, and ended up part of the bomb the U.S. Army Air Corps dropped over Hiroshima to hasten the end of the Pacific war.[9]
The shipyard is located on Seavey's Island in Kittery, Maine near the Piscataqua's mouth. Long regarded by some as being in New Hampshire, the yard was claimed by that state into the 2000s. However, the Piscataqua River border dispute over Seavey's Island was settled by a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision which cited a 1977 decision affirming New Hampshire's claim that the state borders met at the center of the river's navigable channel as described in a 1740 decree, thus placing the island in Maine.[10]
^Palmer, Ansell W., ed. Piscataqua Pioneers: Selected Biographies of Early Settlers in Northern New England, pp. 67, 116-7, Piscataqua Pioneers, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2000. ISBN0-9676579-0-3.
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