The history of the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, By a committee of the Dorchester antiquarian and historical society ...

HISTORY OF DORCHESTER. 3
which accompanies it. He makes the bay an inlet
running in a southwesterly direction towards the
Blue Hills (called Cheviot Hills), receiving no rivers whatever, but he makes a broad straight river
some miles to the north of the inlet, and separated
from it by a promontory. This river runs directly
into the sea, through a broad mouth, and he says
that he had no occasion to examine " if the river
doth pierce many days journey the entrails of the
country."
In his " advice to inexperienced planters of New
England," published 1631, he says, "I took the
fairest reach into this bay for a river, whereupon I
called it Charles River " a direct contradiction of
the map and the first record. This sentence doubtless caused the entry in the Charlestown records,
made in i664, fifty years after Smith's voyage, which
has misled several recent writers in this matter.
The probability is, that the quarrel which Smith
mentions as occurring between himself and the Indians who followed him to Cohasset rocks, hastened
his departure, and his explorations were very imperfeet, and that his only knowledge of the great river
called for Prince Charles, which he represented to
the king as equal in importance to the river he had
previously discovered in Virginia and called by the
name of King James, was acquired in his intercourse
with the Indians, or possibly from some European
fisherman or fur trader who had preceded him.*
Smith's first description of Massachusetts, or Boston Bay, printed
1616 (see Mass. Hist. Col. vol. 6, 3d series, p. 118 and 119), reads thus:
" Then the country of Massachusetts, which is the paradise of all
those parts, &c.,-the sea coast as you pass shows you large cornfields,