Cape Cod

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

"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".