n section is best
begun with Captain John Smith.

Captain John Smith was born too early. If ever a hero was brought into
the world to adorn the moving-picture screen, that hero of the "iron
collar," of piratical capture, of wedlock with an Indian princess, was
the man. Failing of this high calling he did some serviceable work in
discovering and describing many of the inlets on the coast of New
England. Among these inlets Cohasset acted her part as hostess to the
famous navigator and staged a small and vivid encounter with the
aborigines. The date of this presentation was in 1614; the scenario may
be found in Smith's own diary. Smith and a party of eight or more
sailors made the trip between the ledges in a small rowboat. It is
believed that they landed somewhere near Hominy Point. Their landing was
not carried out without some misadventure, however, for in some way this
party of explorers angered the Indians with whom they came in contact,
and the result was an attack from bow and arrow. The town of Cohasset,
in commemorating this encounter by a tablet, has inscribed upon the
tablet Smith's own words:

"We found the people on those parts very kind, but in their fury no less
valiant: and at Quonhaset falling out there with but one of them, he
with three others crossed the harbour in a cannow to certain rocks
whereby we must pass, and there let flie their arrowes for our shot,
till we were out of danger, yet one of them was slaine, and the other
shot through the thigh."

History follows fast along the ledges: history of gallant deeds and
gallant defense during the days of the Revolution and the War of 1812;
deeds of disaster along the coast and one especial deed of great
engineering skill.

The beauty and the tragedy of Cohasset are caught in large measure upon
these jagged rocks. The splinters and wrecks of two and a half centuries
have strewn the beaches, and many a corpse, far from its native land,
has been found, wrapped in a shroud of seaweed upon the sand, and has
been lowered by alien hands into a forever unmarked grave. Quite
naturally the business of "wrecking"--that is, saving the pieces--came
to be the trade of a number of Cohasset citizens, and so expert did
Cohasset divers and seamen become that they were in demand all over the
world. One of the most interesting salvage enterprises concerned a
Spanish frigate, sunk off the coast of Venezuela. Many thousand dollars
in silver coin were covered by fifty fee