144 



CATTA is a Latin synonyrae forfeits, and Gov. Endicott, 

 who was enough of a linguist to -peak French, was not 

 averse to interjecting a fo:eign phrase now and then in 

 his manuscript records, a practice quite in accord with the 

 fashion of his times. Moreover, the word CATTA has 

 been used, the lexicographers tell us, as the name of a 

 sea-craft, at least since A. D., 1071, and probably mucli 

 longer. How much the uxaroff of Herodotus and Pindar, 

 the 'axd-it>y of Xeiiophoii and Thucydides, in which 

 Plutarch says Coasar made his escape from Alexandria 

 and the wiles of Cleopatra had to do with the origin of 

 this word for " boat," we must leave to conjecture. 



A century later, this spot inspired an interest somewhat 

 graver than questions of philology excite. 1773-4 was a 

 year of tumult. It was the year of the Boston Tea Party 

 and the Boston Port Bill. The people of this province 

 had lost confidence in the good faith of the only govern- 

 ment they had, and were not yet able to see their way to 

 the establishment of another. Lawless violence stalked 

 abroad, and society seemed, for the time, to be thrown 

 back upon its elemental forces. Week by week the feel- 

 ing about the importation of tea grew intenscr and 

 more threatening. The daily journals teemed with pro- 

 test and denunciation. Hutchinson's secret letters had 

 been sent home by Franklin and read in the assembly. 

 Accounts of burnings in effigy, and coats of tar and 

 feathers, were as frequent as are runaways and coasting 

 accidents to-day. In the midst of all this, as if to make 

 confusion worse f confounded, the scourge of small-pox, 

 absent for many years, reappeared in Massachusetts Bay. 

 The terror which the loathsome disease inspired, and the 

 relief experienced from the new mode of treatment by in- 

 oculation, arc well indicated in the narrative of an inci- 

 dent in the history of Cat Island, which we transcribe 



