Travellers aboard Knight's Ferry felt the reluctance of spring to command winter in the icy breeze skimming the cold water of the Piscataqua River. Knight operated his ferry year-round, even during the coldest months of winter, courtesy of the rapid, fluctuating currents of the river, which rarely froze. The waters of half a dozen rivers of New Hampshire and Maine meet off Dover Point, which divides the currents flowing from the Squamscot, Lamprey, Back and Oyster rivers, which mingle in the estuaries known as the Great Bay and Little Bay, from the Piscataqua, formed from the Cocheco and Salmon Falls rivers. Added to the churning mix is the tidal brine of the Atlantic, which inexorably rises and falls through the maze of islands and narrows that mark the Piscataqua between Dover Point and the mouth of the river. Twenty years in the future the Piscat-aqua Bridge would make the ferry obsolete, but until then Knight's Ferry was the only way for the traveller to cross the river from the southern shores of Newington by way of Bloody Point to Dover Point. This year, 1775, was the seventieth that the Knight family had operated the ferry, the right to which Captain John Knight obtained in 1705.

Belknap was frequently at Knight's Ferry coming or going, as he was on Thursday 20 April.