Cape Cod

Thoreau walked the outer beach of Cape Cod several times between 1849 and 1855, and the book he made of it is at once his funniest and his bleakest. It opens with a shipwreck, the bodies of Irish emigrants laid out on the sand at Cohasset, and it never quite loses that view of the ocean as something wholly indifferent to whoever stands at its edge. In between come wreckers and oystermen, lighthouse keepers, dry Yankee talk copied down word for word, sand, and more sand. Published in full only after his death, this is Thoreau at his most reportorial, less the moralist of Walden than a man walking a bare shore and looking hard. Free as a PDF and EPUB.