464 HISTORY OF COH ASSET. 



more passengers wer.e drowned in their desperate endeav- 

 ors to get into the longboat which saved the captain and 

 crew. Ten others, upon a piece of the deck which was 

 wrenched off by the waves, were floated safely to shore, 

 seven men and three women. 



The St. John was only an hour in tumbling to pieces 

 under the incessant banging of the waves upon her. 

 Ninety-nine lives were lost and twenty-two were saved. 

 One of the survivors was a young woman who afterwards 

 settled in Cohasset, marrying a man whose name was by 

 strange coincidence St. John. 



The account of this wreck, told by the famous Hermit 

 of Walden, Henry D. Thoreau, who was an eyewitness, is 

 as follows : — * 



We left Concord, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, October 9, 1849. 

 On reaching Boston, we found that the Provincetown steamer, 

 which should have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, 

 on account of a violent storm ; and, as we noticed in the 

 streets a handbill headed, " Death ! one hundred and forty-five 

 lives lost at Cohasset," we decided to go by way of Cohasset. 

 We found many Irish in the cars, going to identify bodies and to 

 sympathize with the survivors, and also to attend the funeral which 

 was to take place in the afternoon ; and when we arrived at 

 Cohasset, it appeared that nearly all the passengers were bound 

 for the beach, which was about a mile distant, and many other 

 persons were flocking in from the neighboring country. There 

 were several hundreds of them streaming off over Cohasset com- 

 mon in that direction, some on foot and some in wagons, and 

 among them were some sportsmen in their hunting-jackets, with 

 their guns, and game bags, and dogs. As we passed the grave- 

 yard we saw a large hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there, and, just 

 before reaching the shore, by a pleasantly winding and rocky 

 road, we met several hay-riggings and farm wagons coming away 

 toward the meeting-house, each loaded with three large, rough 

 deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in them. The 

 owners of the wagons were made the undertakers. Many horses 



* Thoreau's Cape Cod, pp. 3-10. 



