6 
CAPE COD. 
It appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to 
make the wreck of a large vessel in this cove alone, and 
that it would take many days to cart it off. It was sev 
eral feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet or a 
jacket on it. In the very midst of the crowd about this 
wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the 
sea-weed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it 
beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often 
obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and 
they might at any moment have found a human body 
under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that 
this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck 
had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of 
society. 
About a mile south we could see, rising above the 
rocks, the masts of the British brig which the St. John 
had endeavored to follow, which had slipped her cables, 
and, by good luck, run into the mouth of Cohasset Har¬ 
bor. A little further along the shore we saw a man’s 
clothes on a rock ; further, a woman’s scarf, a gown, a 
straw bonnet, the brig’s caboose, and one of her masts 
high and dry, broken into several pieces. In another 
rocky cove, several rods from the water, and behind 
rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the ves¬ 
sel, still hanging together. It was, perhaps, forty feet 
long, by fourteen wide. I was even more surprised at the 
power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, 
than I had been at the sight of the smaller fragments be¬ 
fore. The largest timbers and iron braces were broken 
superfluously, and I saw that no material could with¬ 
stand the power of the waves; that iron must go to 
pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be era ;ked 
'ap like an egg-shell on the rocks. Some of these tim- 
