There have been historic wrecks, historic storms. As early as 1669 a quarrel over the salvage of a wreck was settled in court. Bradford, in 1635, records such a storm “as none living in these parts, either English or Indians, ever saw, causing the sea to swell above twenty feet right up.” “Tall young oaks and walnut trees of good bigness were wound as a withe.” And “the wrecks of it will remain for a hundred years.” It was this storm, raging up and down the coast, that threw Anthony Thacher and his little family upon the rocks of Cape Ann. And some Connecticut colonists, wrecked in Manomet Bay and wandering for days in the snow, finally reached Plymouth and were hospitably entertained there for the winter. Bradford’s storm “took the roof of a house at Manomet and put it in another place”; and Rich reports the great gale of a later year that washed a house from its moorings on the Isles of Shoals and landed it at Truro so far intact that a box of linen and some papers were preserved to tell its story. He seems to think that if the family had had the courage to stand by their house, they might have made the voyage to Cape Cod in safety. After a savage September gale in 1815 that centred in Buzzard’s Bay, a coasting schooner was found upright in some large trees, and another, lifted clean over a bluff, blocked the door of a house. Everything ashore was laid waste; even springs became brackish; but some land was enriched by its flooding and where only moss had been grass was to grow. In 1703 the body of Captain Peter Adolphe, cast upon the shore at Sandwich, was there decently buried; and his widow, in grateful acknowledgment, presented the town with a bell cast in Munich and inscribed, “Si Devs pron bvs [_sic_] qvis contra nos 1675,” which was later sold to Barnstable where it is preserved as a relic. In 1723 “The Great Storm” that “raised the tide three or four feet higher than had been known aforetime,” was reported by Mather to the Royal Society of London. In 1770 and 1785 were similar storms. Bradford records that “the moon suffered a great eclipse” the second night after his storm; there were comets, portents of evil, during the Indian troubles, and earthquakes—in 1638 one so violent that “people out of doors could scarcely retain a position on their feet”; and the dating of subsequent events as so long “after the earthquake” was “as common for many years as once with the Children of Israel.” In 1727 a heavier shock still was “reformatory of some loose-livers in America who became apparently devout penitents”; and in 1755 was the worst earthquake that ever was known.