gS HISTORY OF COHASSET. 



nearly three hundred years. He speaks of the " white 

 cliffs of rocks," and mistakes our granite for limestone, 

 such as he was familiar with in Devonshire, England. 

 One can almost imagine him looking at White Head 

 while he makes this blunder. 



He even noticed our black dikes of diabase, which he 

 thought to be slate stone, and speaks of the ledges being 

 "strangely divided with tinctured veins of divers colours." 



He probably noticed the familiar diabase dike on Little 

 White Head,* which is so conspicuous from the water side. 

 Smith's prophecy of slate quarries for us could hardly 

 come true, seeing that it is not slate after all, but 

 only diabase and porphyrite that make the dark veins 

 of our rock. His prediction of salt manufacture, however, 

 did come true within two centuries, as we shall see in 

 another chapter. 



Between the visit of Captain John Smith and that of 

 the pioneers who settled here, a frightful pestilence swept 

 away the greater part of the Indians along the Massachu- 

 setts coast. It was in the year 1617, three years after 

 Smith's visit. No one is sure to this day just what the 

 disease was, but the natives sickened and died so fast and 

 so mysteriously that the terrified remnants left the yellow 

 corpses unburied, and fled from their villages throughout 

 the whole region from Buzzard's Bay to Maine. 



The old Indians told Gookin that the warriors of the 

 Massachusetts tribe numbered about three thousand be- 

 fore the plague and only three hundred after it. 



It was a terrible calamity, which, however, our fore- 

 fathers counted a Divine providence toward them in deci- 

 mating the enemy. 



The proximate cause for the plague might have been 

 the filth of overcrowded wigwams, for nature permits the 

 expanse of population only upon rigorous observance of 

 sanitary laws. 



*See p. 25. 



