Excerpt from The Bostonian Society Publications, Vol. 2 There may be an impression that The Graves were so called because of many lives lost there, that does not appear to have been the fact. The name is found on a chart as early as 1687, and it has been thought that the ledges were named after Admiral Thomas Graves, * who, in 1643, commanded the Tryal, the first Boston ship, and comparatively few vessels seem to have been wrecked on them. Unfortunately, lighthouses and like devices are merely aids to navigation. They cannot prevent storms or eliminate marine disasters, and shipwrecks have oc curred in and about the harbor notwithstanding the precautions of the government. Indeed, it would almost appear that the risk of ocean travel has kept pace with the improvement in the instrumentalities of navigation. It was very recently that the government undertook to dig the channel in Broad Sound which made The Graves Light a necessity. Until that work was done - for more than two centuries in fact - the main entrance to Boston Harbor lay between Point Allerton and The Brewsters, which serves to show why the town of Hull, with the long stretch of Nantasket Beach, and the bight of Stony Beach, connecting Point Allerton with the village and swept by northeast storms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.