In that image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature. Together with the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become simplified and inspirational. Now put the foundations under them.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”Įxtracted from their contexts, such declarations read like the text on inspirational posters or quote-a-day calendars-purposes to which they are routinely put. Like many canonized works, it is more revered than read, so it exists for most people only as a dim impression retained from adolescence or as the source of a few famous lines: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost that is where they should be. Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm? This was Henry David Thoreau, that great partisan of the pond, describing his visit to Cohasset in “Cape Cod.” That book is not particularly well known today, but if Thoreau’s chilly tone in it seems surprising, it is because, in a curious way, “Walden” is not well known, either. Surely, he admonished, “its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.” If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?” This impassive witness also had stern words for those who, undone by the tragedy, could no longer enjoy strolling along the beach. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. “On the whole,” he wrote, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected.
The visitor from Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin. The living were trying to identify the dead-a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. They had been at sea for a month now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. On the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished? Illustration by Eric Nyquist