The story
Gosport occupied Star Island in the Isles of Shoals, the bare Atlantic rocks off Portsmouth, New Hampshire — a fishing settlement from the 1600s whose hard centuries of cod, storm and isolation ended in the 1870s when hoteliers bought the island; the Oceanic Hotel rose, and Star passed to the Unitarian-Universalist conference tradition that summers there still, Gosport's stone foundations, chapel and cemetery woven through the colony. The Shoals carry New England's densest island telling: Blackbeard's bride, left on neighbouring Lunging to guard treasure, pacing and crying 'he will return'; wrecked Spanish sailors' graves on Smuttynose; and on Star itself, old Gosport figures at the chapel and cemetery, footsteps in the hotel's off-season halls, and lights on the empty rocks — with the real 1873 Smuttynose axe murders nearby remembered as documented tragedy, told with restraint, never entertainment. Island access runs through conference seasons and boat arrangements. Present Gosport as Shoals heritage first — fishing centuries, hotel era, living colony — its telling the islands' salt-thick canon, hedged.