Henry David Thoreau

Cape Cod Henry David Thoreau

"A man may stand there and put all America behind him."

Wishing to get a better view of the ocean, Thoreau made three walking trips across the Cape beaches between October of 1849 July of 1855. Sometimes he walked alone, other times he travelled with his friend William E. Channing. He met local fishermen, wreckers, lighthouse keepers and other native Cape Codders. He watched ships wrecked by storms, stayed a night at the Highland Light, and engaged a Wellfleet oysterman in a long conversation about daily life amid the sands of Cape Cod.

He related stories of these encounters, as well as of the shipwrecks and the natural history of the Cape, in a series of lectures around New England. His sister Sophia, aided by his friend Channing, edited and published them as Cape Cod after his death. These tales of the Cape are balanced between the uncontrollable energy of the Atlantic Ocean and the fragile beauty of the landscape.

Anyone who, like Thoreau, believes Cape Cod to be "a place of wonders" and who secretly believes (or wants to believe) that the Cape is best visited during "a storm in the fall or winter" will find here the Cape when it was "wholly unknown to the fashionable world".