68 OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS 



site and felsite-porphyries so common in the 

 region about Boston. Here and there are a few 

 big boulders, believed by geologists to have been 

 dropped by stranding icebergs and without 

 doubt natives of Greenland. 



The island holds vegetation also imported from 

 far distant areas and established long before 

 man, civilized man at least, came to it. 



On favored uplands one finds the Scotch 

 heather and he might think it had been brought 

 by the loving hand of some Scotchman were it 

 not for the fact that the earliest settlers found it 

 here. They came, these earliest settlers, in 1659, 

 Thomas Macy and his wife, Edward Starbuck, 

 James Coffin and Isaac Coleman, a boy of twelve, 

 storm-tossed about Cape Cod and over the shoals, 

 all the way from Salisbury. For them the merry- 

 men breakers on the shoals danced as they do 

 for the incomers of today. They were not 

 sailors, not even the master of the ship. Per- 

 haps that is why they kept on to the end of the 

 two hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they 

 did, and they found the Scotch heather here. 

 Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plenti- 

 ful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the 



