There were no human beings there, only a few imaginary lines on a map.

July 7. 

July 7, 2017 9:04PM

Some of the inhabitants of the Cape think that the Cape is theirs and all occupied by them, but in my eyes it is no more theirs than it is the blackbirds', and in visiting the Cape there is hardly more need of my regarding or going through the villages than of going through the blackbirds' nests. 

I am inclined to leave them both on one side, or perchance I just glance into them to see how they are built and what they contain. 

I know that they have spoken for the whole Cape, and lines are drawn on their maps accordingly, but I know that these are imaginary, having perambulated many such, and they would have to get me or one of my craft to find them for them. 

For the most part, indeed with very trifling exceptions, there were no human beings there, only a few imaginary lines on a map.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 7, 1857

The inhabitants of the Cape. See June 20, 1857 ("I have now visited the Cape four times in as many different years, once in October, twice in June, and once in July, having spent in all about one month there."); June 16, 1857 ("I have found the compass and chart safer guides than the inhabitants"); July 6, 1855 ("Cape measures two miles in width here on the great chart.")

By steamer Acorn from Provincetown to Boston, in the fog.

June 22. 

the Acorn
(Courtesy Sandwich Glass Museum)

Monday. Took the steamer Acorn [?] about 9 a. m. for Boston, in the fog. 




The captain said that the mate to the whale taken on the 17th had been about the steamer all night. 

It was a thick fog with some rain, and we saw no land nor a single sail, till near Minot's Ledge. The boat stopped and whistled once or twice. 

The monotony was only relieved by the numerous petrels, those black sea-swallows, incessantly skimming over the undulating [surface], a few inches above and parallel with it, and occasionally picking some food from it. Now they dashed past our stern and now across our bows, as if we were stationary, though going at the rate of a dozen knots an hour. 

It is remarkable what great solitudes there may be on this bay, notwithstanding all its commerce, and going from Boston to Provincetown you might be wrecked in clear weather, without being seen by any passing vessel. 

Once, when the fog lifted a little and the boat was stopped, and the engine whistled, I thought that I saw an open sea without an object for three or four miles at least. We held on, and it suddenly thickened up again, and yet in three minutes, notwithstanding the fog, we saw the light-boat right ahead. This shows how deceptive and dangerous fogs are. I should have said we might have run half an hour without danger of striking any object. 

The greatest depth in the Bay between Long Point, Provincetown, and Manomet, Plymouth, according to Coast Survey charts, is about twenty-five fathoms. 

Get home at 5 p. m. 

It seems that Sophia found an Attacus Cecropia out in my chamber last Monday, or the 15th. It soon went to laying eggs on the window-sill, sash, books, etc., of which vide a specimen. Though the window was open (blinds closed), it did not escape. Another was seen at the window outside the house on the south side (mother's chamber) on the 21st, which S. took in, supposing it the first which had got out, but she found the first still in the chamber. This, too, she says, went right to laying eggs. I am not sure whether this, too, came from the other cocoon.

Neither was quite so large as the one I had. The second had broken off the better part of its wings. Their bodies were quite small, perhaps because they were empty of eggs. I let them go. The eggs are large, pretty close together, glued to the wood or paper.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 22, 1857

Attacus Cecropia . . . neither quite so large as the one I had. See June 18, 1857 ("They brought me an Attacus Cecropia . . . Its body was large like the one I have preserved, while the two I found to have come out in my chamber meanwhile, and to have laid their eggs, had comparatively small bodies. "); June 2, 1855 ("I gave it ether and so saved it in a perfect state. As it lies, not spread to the utmost, it is five and nine tenths inches by two and a quarter.")

It is plain for miles without a tree . . . That solitude was sweet to me as a flower.

June 21. 

Sunday. 

June 21, 2020

About noon it cleared up, and after dinner I set out for Provincetown, straight across the country to the Bay where the new road strikes it, directly through the pine plantation about one mile from the lighthouse. The pines have apparently not done so well here as in some other places on the Cape. 

I observed a tuft of crow-berry, together with poverty-grass, about one mile west of the light. This part of Truro affords singularly interesting and cheering walks for me, with regular hollows or dimples shutting out the sea as completely as if in the midst of the continent, though when you stand on the plain you commonly see the sails of vessels standing up or down the coast on each side of you, though you may not see the water. At first you may take them for the roofs of barns or houses. 

It is plain for miles without a tree, where the new telegraph-wires are a godsend to the birds, affording them something to perch upon. That solitude was sweet to me as a flower. I sat down on the boundless level and enjoyed the solitude, drank it in, the medicine for which I had pined, worth more than the bear-berry so common on the Cape. 

As I was approaching the Bay through a sandy hollow a mile east of High Head, I found two or three arrow-points and a rude axe or hammer, a flattish stone from the beach with a deep groove chipped around it. 

The beach on the Bay Side was completely strewn with seaweed (the grassy kind), which does not grow on the Atlantic side, as if the Bay were a meadow compared with the Atlantic. The beach was harder than the Back Side, the hardest part being on the weed at high-water line. The skulls and backbones of black-fish, their vertebrae and spinal processes, and disk-shaped bones, five inches in diameter, from the spine were strewn all along. These looked like rough crackers. 

Also the ribs of whale (probably humpbacked), — they get humpback and finback and right whales, I heard, — six feet long, lay under the bank, hardly to be distinguished from their gray rails. Some of those whale ribs, ten inches wide, were from time to time set up in the sand, like mile stones (or bones); they seemed to answer that purpose along the new road. 

They had taken a whale in Provincetown Harbor on the previous 17th, and stripped off the blubber at one of the wharves. I saw many dogfish whose livers had been extracted. 

At East Harbor River, as I sat on the Truro end of the bridge, I saw a great flock of mackerel gulls, one hundred at least, on a sandy point, whitening the shore there like so many white stones on the shore and in the water, uttering all together their vibrating shrill note. They had black heads, light bluish-slate wings, and light rump and tail and beneath. From time to time all or most would rise and circle about with a clamor, then settle again on the same spot close together. 

Soon after crossing the bridge, I turned off and ascended Mt. Ararat. It exhibited a remarkable landscape: on the one side the desert, of smooth and spotless palest fawn-colored sand, slightly undulating, and beyond, the Atlantic; on the other, the west, side, a few valleys and hills, densely clothed with a short, almost moss-like (to look down at) growth of huckleberry, blueberry, bear-berry, josh-pear (which is so abundant in Provincetown), bayberry, rose, checkerberry, and other bushes, and beyond, the Bay. All these bushes formed an even and dense covering to the sand-hills, much as bear-berry alone might. It was a very strange scenery. You would think you might be in Labrador, or some other place you have imagined. The shrubbery at the very summit was swarming with mosquitoes, which troubled me when I sat down, but they did not rise above the level of the bushes. 

At the Pilgrim House, though it was not crowded, they put me into a small attic chamber which had two double beds in it, and only one window, high in a corner, twenty and a half inches by twenty-five and a half, in the alcove when it was swung open, and it required a chair to look out conveniently. Fortunately it was not  a cold night and the window could be kept open, though at the risk of being visited by the cats, which appear to swarm on the roofs of Provincetown like the mosquitoes on the summits of its hills. 

I have spent four memorable nights there in as many different years, and have added considerable thereby to my knowledge of the natural history of the cat and the bedbug. Sleep was out of the question. A night in one of the attics of Provincetown! to say nothing of what is to be learned in entomology. It would be worth the while to send a professor there, one who was also skilled in entomology. Such is your Pilgerruhe or Pilgrims'-Rest. Every now and then one of these animals on its travels leaped from a neighboring roof on to mine, with such a noise as if a six-pounder had fallen within two feet of my head, — the discharge of a catapult, — a twelve-pounder discharged by a catapult, — and then followed such a scrambling as banished sleep for a long season, while I watched lest they came in at the open window. A kind of foretaste, methought, of the infernal regions. I didn't wonder they gave quit claim deeds of their land here. My experience is that you fare best at private houses. The barroom may be defined a place to spit. 

"Soon as the evening shades prevail,

The cats take up the wondrous tale."

At still midnight, when, half awake, half asleep, you seem to be weltering in your own blood on a battle field, you hear the stealthy tread of padded feet belonging to some animal of the cat tribe, perambulating the roof within a few inches of your head. 

I had already this evening called on Mr. Atwood, the Representative of the town and one of the commissioners appointed by the legislature to superintend the experiments in the artificial breeding of fishes. He said that he knew (I think) eighty-two kinds of fishes there. 

When Mr. Pool, the Doorkeeper of the House of Representatives, — if that is his name and title, — who makes out a list of the Representatives and their professions, asked him his business, he answered, "Fisherman." At which Pool was disturbed and said that no representative had ever called himself a fisherman before. It would not do to print it so. And so Atwood is put down as "Master Mariner"! ! So much for American democracy. I reminded him that Fisherman had been a title of honor with a large party ever since the Christian Era at least. When next we have occasion to speak of the apostles I suppose we should call them "Master Mariners"! 

Atwood said that his brother here took the bone shark recently which I read was thirty feet long. 

Fog again at night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 21, 1857

I have now visited the Cape four times in as many different years . . . and about one third the days were foggy

June 20.

Saturday. Fog still.

June 20, 2017

A man working on the lighthouse, who lives at the Pond Village, says that he raised potatoes and pumpkins there where a vessel once anchored. That was when they let the salt water into the pond. Says the flags there now are barrel flags; that the chair flag is smaller, partly three-sided, and has no bur; perhaps now all gone. 

Speaking of the effect of oil on the water, this man said that a boat's crew came ashore safely from their vessel on the Bay Side of Truro some time ago in a storm, when the wind blowed square on to the land, only by heaving over oil. The spectators did not think they would reach the shore without being upset. 


When I expressed some doubt of the efficacy of this, he observed in the presence of Small and others, "We always take a bottle of oil when looking for sea clams, and, pouring out a few drops, can look down six or seven feet." 

We dined on halibut caught on the ledges some three miles off the Back Side. 

There was a carpenter who worked on the lighthouse boarding at Small's, who had lived sixteen years on the extremity of Cape Ann. When I asked him about Salvages, he said it was a large bare rock, perhaps fifty yards long and a dozen feet high, about two miles from the shore at Sandy Bay, outside Avery's Rock. That he and all the inhabitants of the Cape always called it " Selvaygias." Did not know but it had some thing to do with salvage for wrecks. 

This man, who is familiar with the shore of New England north of Cape Cod, thought that there was no beach equal to this for grandeur. He thought August the most foggy month. 

Small thought that the shore at the mouth of Pamet River about held its own. 

I saw an extract in a Cape (Yarmouth Register) paper from a promised History of the Cape by Dr. Dix, an Englishman, who was owing Small for board, etc. (page 136 of it). There was also advertised "The Annals of Barnstable County and its several Towns," etc., by Frederick Freeman, to be in two volumes, 8vo, $4.00. This will probably be out first. 

A child asked concerning a bobolink, "What makes he sing so sweet, Mother? Do he eat flowers? " 

Talked with an old lady who thought that the beach plums were better than cherries. 

Visited the telegraph station, tended by one Hall, just north of the light. He has a small volume called the "Boston Harbor Signal Book," containing the names of some three thousand vessels, their owners, etc., and a code of signals. There were also the private signals of more than a hundred merchants on a large sheet on the wall. There was also a large volume called "The Universal Code of Signals," Marryat (Richardson, London), 1854, containing the names of some twenty thousand vessels of all nations, but chiefly English, and an extensive system of signalling, by which he could [carry on] a long conversation with a vessel on almost any subject. He said that he could make out the name seven miles off and the signal sometimes twenty miles. [The man at Hull July 24, 1851, said they could tell the kind of vessel thirty miles off, the number at masthead ten or twelve miles, name on hull six or seven miles.]

Thought there would be a fog as long as the wind was southwest. "How is it in Boston ?" I asked. "I will ask," said he. Tick tick tick — "Wind northeast and cloudy." (Here it was southwest and thick fog.) 

He thought that there [were] more vessels to be seen passing this point than any other in the United States. One day when telegraphing the passing vessels he put in "a fox passing," for there was one running between the station and the edge of the bank. 

I observed the name of the brig Leader displayed on  a flag for me. The report was, "Brig Leader in." It may be a month before the vessel reaches Boston. 

The operator said that last winter the wind between his station and the bank blew him three rods through the air, and he was considerably hurt when he fell. A boy was blown head over heels. The fences were blown up, post and rail. There was no wind just this side the edge of the bank, but if you lay down there and extended your hand over the edge of the bank it would be blown suddenly upward, or if you cast off a large piece of wood it would be blown up thirty or forty feet high. Both boys and men often amuse them selves by running and trying to jump off the bank with their jackets spread, and being blown back. (Small confirmed this.) 

Hall said that he could not possibly jump off. Sometimes and in some places, pebbles as big as chestnuts are blown far over the bank. 

Hall said that he saw very large flocks of geese; had counted as many as six hundred go by at once, reaching three miles; and sometimes alight on the water. 

Talked with Uncle Sam, who was picking goose berries on the bank, — for the sun shone a short time. He showed me some fossil shells imbedded in stone which he had picked up on the high bank, just south of the light, and laid on his pile of driftwood. He wanted to know something about them. Said that a lecturer down at Pamet River had said, as he was told, that the Norwegians who formerly came to this country cemented them together. He had come down to watch a piece of driftwood, perhaps a stump, which had been lodged on a bar for a day or two. He was trying to make out what it was. There is something picked up on the shore of the Cape and advertised in every paper. 

This was the third foggy day. It cleared up the next day noon, but the night after and the next day was foggy again. It is a serious objection to visiting or living on the Cape that you lose so many days by fog.

Small said that a week of fog at this season would be nothing remarkable. You can see that the fog is local and of no great thickness. From time to time the sun almost or quite shines, and you can see half a mile, or to Provincetown even, and then, against all your rules, it thickens up again. An inlander would think [it] was going to clear up twenty times when it may last a week. Small said that they were very common with southerly winds, being blown up from Nantucket Shoals; that they were good for almost everything but corn, yet there was probably less rain there at this season than on the mainland. 

I have now visited the Cape four times in as many different years, once in October, twice in June, and once in July, having spent in all about one month there, and about one third the days were foggy, with or without rain. According to Alden (in Massachusetts Historical Collections, vol. v, First Series, page 57), Nantucket was discovered by a famous old Indian giant named Maushop, who waded the sea to it, and there filling his pipe with "poke," his smoke made fog. Whence that island is so much in the fog, and the aborigines on the opposite portion of the Cape, seeing a fog over the water at a distance, would say, "There comes old Maushop's smoke." The Gloucester carpenter thought August the worst month for fog on the coast. 

The fog lasted this time, with the exception of one afternoon and one or two slight breakings away, five days, or from Thursday morning till I reached Minot's Ledge, Monday noon. How much longer it continued on the Cape I do not know. The Cape people with whom I talked very generally denied that it [was] a phenomenon in any degree peculiar to the Cape. They said that it was just such weather at Boston. Indeed, some denied that it was fog at all. They said with some asperity that it was rain. Yet more rain would have fallen in a smart shower in the country in twenty minutes than in these five days on the Cape. When I got home I found that there had been an abundance [of] cloudy weather and rain within a week, but not one foggy day in Concord. 

Small thought that Lieutenant Davis might have misunderstood him. He meant to say that the offshore current (three miles off) set down the Cape, and wrecks in it went down the coast, the inshore one sets up. 

I noticed several lengths of fence hereabouts made chiefly of oars, very long ones.

A Cape Cod house is low, unpainted, shingled on the sides. They have many windows, even under the roofs to light the closets there, and as the chambers can only be lighted at one end, there are commonly two windows there. Once I saw a triangular blind under the peak, though there was no window beneath it. The windows commonly afford a view of the bay or ocean, though the house may be sheltered by some hill, or they are very snugly placed in a hollow, apparently as secluded as among the New Hampshire hills.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 20, 1857

When I asked him about Salvages, he said it was a large bare rock....:  The Dry Salvages are located about two miles north-east of Rockport, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. They are “dry” even at high tide, in contrast to an adjacent, lower reef, the Little Salvages, which are submerged at high tide. ~ The Dry Salvages by Vladimir Brezina

June 20. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 20

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021

To Small’s in Truro

June 18. 

 June 18.

Thursday. From Traveller's Home to Small's in Truro. 

A mizzling and rainy day with thick driving fog; a drizzling rain, or "drisk," as one called it. 

I struck across into the stage-road, a quarter of a mile east, and followed that a mile or more into an extensive bare plain tract called Silver Springs, in the southwest part of Wellfleet, — according to Pratt, one third of Wellfleet was covered mostly with pines in 1844, — then turned off northeast through the bushes, to the Back Side, three quarters of a mile distant. 

The desert was about one hundred and fifteen rods wide on the bank where I struck it. You might safely say it was from thirty to one hundred rods or more in width. But the bank was apparently not so high as in Truro. This was on that long Table-Land in Wellfleet. Where the bank was covered with coarse pebbles, however high, I judged that it could not have been formed by the wind, but rather the small sand-hills on the west edge of the desert were formed of its finer particles and remains, leaving the coarser parts here. However, I afterwards saw where, in the hollows more or less deep, the sand blown up from the beach had covered the dark stratum of the original surface ten feet deep with fine sand, which was now densely covered with bushes. 

As I walked on the top of the bank for a mile or two before I came to a hollow by which to descend, though it rained but little, the strong wind there drove that and the mist against my unprotected legs so as to wet me through and plaster over the legs of my pants with sand. The wind was southeasterly.

I observed, in a few stiller places behind a bar, a yellowish scum on the water close to the shore, which I suspect was the pollen of the pine, lately in full bloom, which had been wafted on to the ocean. Small thought at first that I referred to a scum like that which collects on salt-vats. 

Stopped to dry me about 11 a. m. at a house near John Newcomb's, who they told me died last winter, ninety-five years old (or would have been now had he lived?). I had shortly before picked up a Mother- Carey's-chicken, which was just washed up dead on the beach. This I carried tied to the tip of my umbrella, dangling outside. When the inhabitants saw me come up from the beach this stormy day, with this emblem dangling from my umbrella, and saw me set it up in a corner carefully to be out of the way of cats, they may have taken me for a crazy man. It is remarkable how wet the grass will be there in a misty day alone; more so than after a rain with us.

The Mother-Carey's-chicken was apparently about thirteen inches in alar extent, black-brown, with seven primaries, the second a little longer than the third; rump and vent white, making a sort of ring of white, breast ashy-brown, legs black with yellowish webs, bill black with a protuberance above. 

I think there were more boat-houses in the hollows along the Back Side than when I first walked there. These are the simplest and cheapest little low, narrow, and long sheds, just enough to cover a boat, within the line of the bank at some hollow. But in my three walks there I never chanced to see a man about one of them, or any boating there. 

Soon after leaving Newcomb's Hollow, I passed a hulk of a vessel about a hundred feet long, which the sea had cast up in the sand. She lay at high-water mark high up the beach, the ribs at her bows rising higher than my head above the sand; then for sixty or seventy feet there was nothing to be seen of her, and at last only the outline of her stern ribs projecting slightly above the sand for a short distance. Small suggested that this might be the hulk of the Franklin, lost there seven or eight years ago. They sometimes buy and break them up and carry them piecemeal up the bank, all which is a great job; or they bum them down to the sand and get out the iron alone. It was an impressive sight to see, lying thus insignificant, the hulk of a large (? I walked five rods beside it) vessel which had been lost for years, now cast up and half buried in the sand, like a piece of driftwood. Apparently no longer regarded. It looked very small and insignificant under that impending bank. 

In Newcomb's Hollow I had already entered a Humane house. A sign over the door said "For Cases of Distress only," and directed where the key of the life boat was to be obtained. Mine was a case of distress. Within was a simple apartment containing the boat, a bench, a fireplace and chimney, an india-rubber bucket, a few armfuls of wood, a keg of rags, a tin case with matches and two candles and a candlestick over the fireplace, etc. Also an extract from the laws of the State to protect the property of the Humane Society. I did not look closely for oil or food. I actually sought the Humane house for shelter. It was with peculiar reflections that I contemplated these two candles and those matches prepared to keep the spark of life in some suffering fellow-creature. This was before I went to the house by Newcomb's. 

The waves ran pretty well on account of the easterly wind. I observed how merely undulatory was the motion of the waves. A floating chip or the like on the back of the largest wave often was not advanced in the least toward the shore, however great the undulasion. 

I noticed dor-bugs washed up many miles south of the Highland Light.

I think it was north of Newcomb's Hollow that I passed a perpendicular promontory of clay in the bank, which was conspicuous a good way through the fog.

Reached the Highland Light about 2 p. m. 

The Smilacina racemosa was just out of bloom on the bank. They call it the " wood lily " there. Uncle Sam called it "snake-corn," and said it looked like corn when it first came up. 

Small says that the lighthouse was built about sixty years ago. He knows by his own age. A new light house was built some twenty-five years ago. They are now building another still on the same spot. 

He once drove some cattle up the beach on the Back Side from Newcomb's Hollow to Pamet River Hollow, — a singular road by which to drive cows, yet well fenced! They were rather wild and gave him some trouble by trying to get up the bank at first, though in vain. He could easily head them off when they turned. And also they wanted to drink the salt water. They did not mind the waves, and if the sea had been the other side, where they had belonged and wanted to go, would have taken to it. 

The sea was not frozen there exactly as I had inferred from the papers last winter. Small never knew it to be frozen smooth there so as to bear, but there was last winter a mere brash of pieces several inches thick reaching out half a mile or more, but you cannot go out on it. It is worth the while to see the ice piled up on the shore. 

Small says that the Truro fishermen who were lost in the great shipwreck were on the Nantucket Shoals. Four or five vessels were lost with all aboard. They may have been endeavoring to reach Provincetown Harbor. He spoke of one of his neighbors who was drowned in Truro, and very soon after his bones were found picked clean by the beach-fleas. Thinks you could get off in a boat from the Back Side one day out of three at the right tide. He thinks that what we thought a shark may have been a big bass, since one was taken just alive soon after in that cove.

A youngish man came into Small's with a thick out side coat, when a girl asked where he got that coat. He answered that it was taken off a man that came ashore dead, and he had worn it a year or more. The girls or young ladies expressed surprise that he should be willing to wear [it] and said, "You 'd not dare to go to sea with that coat on." But he answered that he might just as well embark in that coat as any other. 

They brought me an Attacus Cecropia which a boy had found in a swamp near by on the 17th. Its body was large like the one I have preserved, while the two I found to have come out in my chamber meanwhile, and to have laid their eggs, had comparatively small bodies. 

One said there was a little bit of a rill of fresh water near Small's, though it could not be called a brook.

H. D.  Thoreau, Journal, June 18, 1857

A mizzling and rainy day with thick driving fog; a drizzling rain, or "drisk," as one called it. See July 29, 1851 (“In the afternoon I sail to Plymouth, three miles, notwithstanding the drizzling rain, or “drisk” as Uncle Ned calls it.”)

They call it the "wood lily" there. Uncle Sam called it "snake-corn," and said it looked like corn when it first came up. See July 7, 1855 ("What that smilacina-like plant very common in the shrubbery, a foot high, with now green fruit big as peas at end of spike, with reddish streaks? Uncle Sam calls it snake-corn. It is Smilacina racemosa.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, False Solomon's Seal

Attacus Cecropia . . . large like the one I have preserved, while the two I found to have come out in my chamber meanwhile, and to have laid their eggs, had comparatively small bodies. See June 2, 1855 ("From that cocoon of the Attacus cecropia which I found  . . . .came out this forenoon a splendid moth . . .. I gave it ether and so saved it iin a perfect state. As it lies, not spread to the utmost, it is five and nine tenths inches by two and a quarter."); June 22, 1857 ("It seems that Sophia found an Attacus Cecropia out in my chamber last Monday, or the 15th. It soon went to laying eggs on the window-sill . . . Another was seen at the window outside the house on the south side (mother's chamber) on the 21st, which S. took in, supposing it the first which had got out, but she found the first still in the chamber. This, too, she says, went right to laying eggs."); See also May 6, 1858 ("A boy brings me to-day an Attacus Cecropia moth . . ., the male, a dark brown above, and considerably larger than mine. It must be about seven inches in alar extent.")

June18. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 18

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2020

Navigating Cape Cod on foot

June 17. 

This morning had for breakfast fresh eels from Herring River, caught in an eel-pot baited with horseshoe clams cut up. Crossed Herring River, and went down to the shore and walked a mile or more eastward along the beach. 

This beach seems to be laid down too long on the map. The sea never runs very much here, since this shore is protected from the swell by Monomoy. The Harbor (?) of West Harwich is merely some wharves protected by a shoal offshore. Passed a place where they had been taking bluefish with a seine and, as usual, had left their backbones on the beach. There was a scup also, a good fish. 

A fish hawk (?) or eagle sailed low directly over my head as I sat on the bank. The bank is quite low there. I could see Monomoy, very low and indistinct, stretching much further south than I expected. The wooded portions of this, and perhaps of Nauset Beach further north, looked like islets on the water. You could not distinguish much without a glass, but the lighthouse and fishermen's houses at the south end loomed very large to the naked eye. 

I soon turned inland through the woods and struck north to the centre of Harwich. At a retired house where I inquired the road to Brewster, a woman told me that if I wanted to go to Brewster I had come a good deal out of my way, and yet she did not know where I had come from, and I was certainly taking the right course to keep in the way. But they presume that a traveller inquiring the way wishes to be anywhere but where he is. They take me for a roadster, and do not know where my way is. They take it for granted that my way is a direct one from village to village. 

I go along the settled road, where the houses are interspersed with woods, in an unaccountably desponding mood, but when I come out upon a bare and solitary heath am at once exhilarated. This is a common experience in my travelling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious. 

After passing the centre of Harwich, with its seminary, I struck north to the ponds between Harwich and Brewster. Saw some white pond-lilies open that had been dropped by the roadside. Disturbed a very large water snake sunning on the bank of a pond-hole. 

At what is called on the map Hinckley's Pond, in Harwich, met with the first cranberry-patch. A man told me there were twelve acres here in all, in one body, owned by Albert Clark of Boston, and by others, and this was the largest patch on that part the Cape. They formed a handsome, perfectly level bed, a field, a redeemed meadow, adjoining the pond, the plants in perfectly straight rows eighteen inches apart, in coarse white sand which had been carted in. What with the runners and the moss, etc., between, they made a uniform green bed, very striking and handsome. 

Baker had complained that the cranberry vines were seriously injured by worms, would be, perhaps, destroyed. He and some others had turned theirs into English grass. They also are apt to become too thick and cease to bear well. They then sell them to others to set out for $5.00 a square rod, as another informed me by the pond. This was a large and interesting pond. 

A little further, I came to Long Pond, and passed between it and Bangs Pond by a low beach, and took my lunch on a pine hill with a flat summit, on the Brewster side of Long Pond, near the house of one Cohoon. This is a noble lake some two miles long, as a man there told me (the Historical Collections say the chain of ponds is three and two thirds miles long), with high, steep, sliding sand-banks, more or less wooded, and is the source of Herring River, which empties into the sound on the south. Connected with Bangs and Hinckley's Ponds. 

This high hill with a flat summit, on which was an open pitch pine wood, very suitable for picnics, appeared to be the best point to view it from. You could see at least three ponds at once. Situated about half way between the two seas, on the shore of this noble lake, it appeared to be the best place for an inland hotel on the Cape. What was that slender, succulent, somewhat samphire-like plant in the sand-bank by this pond? After bathing, I abandoned the road and struck across the country northeast by chart and compass, for Orleans, passing between this and another large pond called Sheep Pond, on the north, the country being at first woody, then open. 

After passing Sheep Pond I knocked at a house near the road from Brewster to Chatham to inquire the way to Orleans. This house was about a quarter of a mile from the road, in the fields, and the usual Sabbath like serenity reigned around it. There was no beaten perhaps, because the husband was gone to sea with his dirty boots. I inquired the way of another woman who lived on the road near by, who was just setting her dinner-table when I thought it must be mid-afternoon. 

She directed me by a road or cart-path through the woods that ran due southeast, but I knew better than to follow this long. Concluded she meant the south part of Orleans, and so I struck off northeast by fainter cart-paths through the woods. I kept on through uninterrupted wood by various paths some what east of north for about an hour, avoiding those that ran southeast, because I knew by the map that there were large ponds east of me which I must go round on the north. 

At length, seeing no end to the woods, laying down my pack, I climbed an oak and looked off; but the woods bounded the horizon as far as I could see on every side, and eastward it was several miles, for on that side I observed a great depression where a large pond lay concealed in the forest. All the life I could see was a red-tailed or hen hawk circling not far above my head. This gave me a new idea of the extent of Cape Cod woodland. 

After a while, travelling by compass alone, without path, I fell into a more beaten path than I had left, and came very unexpectedly upon a house on the shore of the pond, in the midst of the woods, in the most secluded place imaginable. There was a small orchard even. It was mid-afternoon, and, to judge from appearances and from the sounds, you would have supposed that only the hens and chickens were at home; but after my first knock I heard a slight stir within, and though all was still immediately, they being afraid, I knew better than [to] give it up, but knocked all round the house at five doors in succession, there being two to a stoop, and by the time I got round to the first again there was a woman with a child in her arms there ready to answer my questions. 

I found that I had not come out of my way. 

Of the woods of the Cape which I walked through in Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich, and Brewster, it is to be said that they are dry pine and oak woods, extensive but quite low, commonly, with an abundance of bear-berry and checkerberry in the more open parts, the latter forming an almost uninterrupted bed for great distances. 

I soon came out on the open hills in the northeast part of Brewster, from which I overlooked the Bay, some two miles distant. This was a grand place to walk. There were two or three more of those peculiar ponds with high, shiny sand-banks, by which you detected them before you saw the water, as if freshly scooped out of the high plains or a table-land. The banks were like those of the sea on the Back Side, though on a smaller scale, and they had clear sandy shores. One pond would often be separated from another by low curving beaches or necks of land. The features of the surrounding landscape simple and obvious. The sod, so short and barren, affords the best ground for walking. 

Brewster is much more hilly than Eastham. The latter is, indeed, quite flat. In short, Brewster, with its noble ponds, its bare hills, gray with poverty-grass and lichens, and its secluded cottages, is a very interesting town to an inlander. Saw a woman mending a fence nearly a mile from a house, using an axe. 

Barber appears to be mistaken about seeing both seas from the county road in this town, — to have misunderstood the Massachusetts Historical Collections. I passed over some hills there where pine seed had recently been planted with a hoe only, about four feet apart. At first I thought the turtles had been laying their eggs there, but I observed them in straight lines and detected some little pines an inch high just up. Some of the Cape roads are repaired with the coarsest bushes and roots, with such earth as adheres to them. 

Jeremiah's Gutter is what is called Boat Meadow River on the map. I saw the town bounds there. There, too, was somebody's Folly, who dug a canal, which the sand filled up again. 

About a mile north of this, I left the road and struck across west of the road to near the Eastham Meeting-house, crossing a part of that "beach" where once wheat grew, and by Great Pond, where a canal has been talked of. Passed some large tupelo trees. The greater part of Eastham an open plain, and also the southwest part of Wellfleet. 

Put up at the Traveller's Home (Cobb's), so called, at the Camp Ground, just within the woods. Cobb says he has known formerly one man in Eastham export twelve hundred bushels of grain from his own farm. Twenty of corn to an acre is an average crop in a fair year in his neighborhood, which is better soil than usual. Thought likely there was not more raised in the town now than used. 

Cobb thought the Nauset lights not of much use, because so often you could not see them, and if you could they would not prevent your coming ashore. Sailors preferred to depend on the "blue pigeon" (lead). He said that the inhabitants lived on the West or Bay Side, though no more fertile or fishy, because their harbors were there. On the Back Side they could not get off to fish more than once a fortnight, but on the West almost every day. He thought the Cape wasting on both sides there. That the Truro Insurance Company had a hard time to meet their payments. They import cedar posts from Maine, which, with rails, make a fence costing about seventy-five cents a rod, but they are not so durable as formerly, being made of younger trees. 

According to Pratt's History, first camp-meeting in 1828.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 17, 1857

I have found the compass and chart safer guides than the inhabitants

June 16 (continued from June 15)

June 16, 2017
Keeseville lights float over Lake Champlain

 --- he gave thanks that we "of all the pale faces were preserved alive." He was probably a Methodist. 

But the worst of it is that these evidences of "religion" are no evidence to the traveller of hospitality or generosity. Though he hears the sound of family prayer and sees sanctified faces and a greasy Bible or prayer-book, he feels not the less that he is in the hands of the Philistines, and perceives not the less the greasy and musty scent of a household whose single purpose is to scrape more pennies together, when it has already more than enough for its uses, and it is to be preserved and abetted in this enterprise that they pray. 

What's the use of ushering the day with prayer, if it is thus consecrated to turning a few more pennies merely? 

All genuine goodness is original and as free from cant and tradition as the air. It is heathen in its liberality and independence on tradition. The accepted or established church is in alliance with the graveyards. 

7 a. m. — I go along the sandy road through a region of small hills about half a mile from the sea, between slight gray fences, either post and rail, or slanting rails, a foot apart, resting on two crossed stakes, the rails of unequal length, looking agreeably loose and irregular. 

Within half a mile I come to the house of an Indian, a gray one-storied cottage, and there were two or three more beyond. They were just beginning to build a meeting-house to-day! Mrs. Ellis had told me that they were worthy people, especially such a family, that were members of the church, and the others were decent people, though they were not "professors of religion," — as if they were consequently less trustworthy. Ellis thought that if they should get angry with you they wouldn't make anything of taking your life. He had seen it in their eyes. 

The usual suspicion. 

I asked the way of an Indian whom I met in the road, a respectable-looking young man not darker than a sunburnt white man, with black eyes and the usual straight black hair of his race. He was apparently of mixed race, however. When I observed to him that he was one of the aboriginal stock, he answered, "I suppose so." We could see even to Sandwich Meeting house as we stood in the road, and he showed me where to turn up from the shore to go to Scusset. 

I turned off to the seashore at his house, going down through shrubbery enlivened by the strain of the yellow-throat (or black-throat bunting ?). The seringo and bay-wing were also very common near the sea to-day and yesterday. The shore between Manomet and Sandwich has in it two or three rocky capes, which interrupt the view along it, but are not very obvious on the map, between which are successive curving sandy beaches, Bays of Naples of the approved pattern. 

Swallows have their nests in the high bank from time to time, as at Cape Cod. Crows are seen lazily flapping away from the shore on your approach. Even a robin was seeking its food there. 

The piping plover, as it runs half invisible on the sand before you, utters a shrill peep on an elevated key (different birds on different keys), as if to indicate its locality from time to time to its kind, or it utters a succession of short notes as it flies low over the sand or water. Ever and anon stands still tremblingly, or teeter-ingly, wagtail-like, turning this way and that. 

Now and then a rock or two occurs on the sandy shore left by the undermining of the bank, even as on our Assabet, and I used one to-day (as yesterday) in my bathing. 

From time to time, summer and winter and far inland, I call to mind that peculiar prolonged cry of the upland plover on the bare heaths of Truro in July, heard from sea to sea, though you cannot guess how far the bird may be, as if it were a characteristic sound of the Cape. In a genuine Cape Cod road you see simple dents in the sand, but cannot tell by what kind of foot they were made, the sand is so light and flowing. The whole length of the Cape the beach-flea is skipping and the plover piping. 

Where I turned up to go to Scusset village I saw some handsome patches of Hudsonia tomentosa (not yet had seen the ericoides), its fine bright-yellow flowers open chiefly about the edges of the hemispherical mounds. 

About 11 a. m. take the cars from Scusset to Sandwich. 

See in the marshes by the railroad the Potentilla anserina, now apparently in prime, like a buttercup. 

Stopped on the northwest edge of Yarmouth and in quired of the ticket-master the way to Friends Village in the southeast part of the town. He never heard of it. A stage-driver said it was five miles, and both directed me first northerly a quarter of a mile to the main street and then down that easterly some two miles before I turned off; and when I declared it must be nearer to go across lots, the driver said he would rather go round than get over the fences. 

Thus it is commonly; the landlords and stage-drivers are bent on making you walk the whole length of their main street first, wherever you are going. They know no road but such as is fit for a coach and four. I looked despairingly at this straggling village whose street I must run the gantlet of, — so much time and distance lost. 

Nevertheless, I turned off earlier than they directed, and found that, as usual, I might have taken a shorter route across the fields and avoided the town altogether. 

With my chart and compass I can generally find a shorter way than the inhabitants can tell me. I stop at a depot a little one side of a village and ask the way to some place I am bound to. The landlords and stage-drivers would fain persuade me to go first down on to the main street and follow that a piece; and when I show them a shorter way on the map, which leaves their village on one side, they shrug their shoulders, and say they would rather go round than get over the fences. 

I have found the compass and chart safer guides than the inhabitants, though the latter universally abuse the maps. 

I do not love to go through a village street any more than a cottage yard. I feel that I am there only by sufferance; but I love to go by the villages by my own road, seeing them from one side, as I do theoretically. When I go through a village, my legs ache at the prospect of the hard gravelled walk. I go by the tavern with its porch full of gazers, and meet a miss taking a walk or the doctor in his sulky, and for half an hour I feel as strange as if I were in a town in China; but soon I am at home in the wide world again, and my feet rebound from the yielding turf. 

I followed a retired road across the Cape diagonally some five miles to Friends Village, the southeast part of the town, on Bass River, over at first bare upland with pine plantations, gradually at last rising a low but very broad and flat-backed hill (German's?) in the woods. The pine and oak woods were quite extensive, but the trees small. See the Hudsonia ericoides, with a peduncle. 

The road ran directly through woods the last half the way. Passed Long Pond just before reaching Friends Village. Passed through the latter and crossed Bass River by a toll-bridge, and so on through Crowell Village, Grand Cove, to Isaiah Baker's in West Harwich, some eight miles from Yarmouth Depot. 

Just after crossing Bass River, plucked a plant in the marsh by the roadside like (if not) mullein pink. 

At Swan Pond River in Dennis, where they were just completing a new bridge, plucked the Potentilla anserina, now apparently in prime, with a handsome leaf, silvery beneath, in the marsh. 

From near Long Pond, Friends Village, thus far, and also the two miles further that I walked due east the next day, or for five miles at least, it was a continuous street, without a distinct village, the houses but a few rods apart all the way on each side. A sandy road, small houses, with small pine and oak wood close bordering the road, making the soil appear more fertile than in reality it is. 

As in Canada along the St. Lawrence, you never got out of the village, only came to a meeting-house now and then. And they told me there was another similar street parallel with this further north. 

But all this street had a peculiarly Sabbath-day appearance, for there was scarcely an inhabitant to be seen, and they were commonly women or young children, for the greater part of the able-bodied men were gone to sea, as usual. This makes them very quiet towns. Baker said that half or three quarters of the men were gone. 

This afternoon it mizzled a little. 

At the supper-table there was a youngish man who, looking very serious, at length observed to me, "Your countenance is very familiar to me, sir." "Where do you think you have seen me?" I asked. "It seems to me that I have been consigned to you," said he. This was said with such a serious tone and look that the suspicion crossed my mind that he meant spiritually, but I soon remembered where I was and the employment of the inhabitants. 

Herring River was near by, and Baker sent a little boy to set an eel-pot for eels for breakfast. We had some of the herring for supper. He said that the eels went down the river in the spring, and up in the fall! That last winter many were found in holes under the ice (where passers broke through), left dry by the tide. He said it was a consideration with poor men who talked of migrating West that here shellfish and eels were abundant and easily obtained. 

Spoke of the large tract of wood running down the centre of the Cape from Sandwich, three miles wide and thirty long, and he declared repeatedly, since I looked surprised, that there was more wood in Barnstable County than in Ohio County. His father-in-law owned $75,000 worth thereabouts. Wood was worth six dollars per cord.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 16, 1857

June 16. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 16

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2021

Journey along the shore at Manomet

June 15. 

Monday. A. M. — Walked to James Spooner's farm in a valley amid the woods; also to a swamp where white cedars once grew, not far behind the town, and now full of their buried trunks, though I hear of no tradition of trees there.

In digging mud there recently, hog's bristles were found three or four feet deep. Watson told me of such places in Plymouth as "Small Gains " and "Shall I go naked?" 

2 p. m. — Ride to Manomet with Watson and wife, through Manomet Ponds village, about eight miles. 

At the mouth of Eel River, the marsh vetchling (Lathyrus palustris), apparently in prime, some done. 

The curve of the shore on the east of Plymouth Beach is said to resemble the Bay of Naples. 

Manomet was quite a hill, over which the road ran in the woods. We struck the shore near Holmes's Hotel about half a mile north of Manomet Point. There I shouldered my pack and took leave of my friends, — who thought it a dreary place to leave me, — and my journey along the shore was begun. 

Following the rocky shore round the point, I went considerably round without knowing it. Found there many of the small shells that R. W. E. brought from Pigeon Cove. Having got round the point, I found a smooth sandy shore with pretty high sand-banks, like the back side of the Cape (though less). The vegetation on the top of the bank, too, was similar. 

I could see scattered small houses on the road a little inland. The Hudsonia tomentosa was apparently in prime there. 

Passed a few fishers' boats on the sand, with a long rope and anchor carried high up, and one or two places where they land wood. 

Some three miles below Manomet, there appeared another blunt cape in front, which I avoided by going inland, falling into a small road near the coast, on which were two or three houses. Within a mile I crossed the stream or brook laid down on the map, by a rail, in low woods, leaving a wooded hill between me and the shore, then went along the edge of a swamp. 

It was pleasant walking thus at 5 p. m. by solitary sandy paths, through commonly low dry woods of oak or pine, through glistening oak woods (their fresh leaves in the June air), where the yellow-throat (or black-throat?[That is, black-throated bunting. See June 16.]) was heard and the wood thrush sang, and, as I passed a swamp, a bittern boomed. 

As I stood quite near, I heard distinctly two or three dry, hard sucks, as if the bird were drawing up water from the swamp, and then the sounds usually heard, as if ejecting it. 

From time to time passed a yellow-spot or a painted turtle in the path, for now is their laying- season. One of the former was laying. We had before been obliged to stop our horse for fear of running over one in the rut. Now is the time that they are killed in the ruts all the country over. They are caught in them, the clumsy fellows, as in a trap. Now the tortoises are met with in sandy woods and, delaying, are run over in the ruts. 

One old man directed me on my way through the "plewed" land. Was amused at the simple and obliging but evidently despairing way in which a man at the last house endeavored to direct me further on my way by cart-paths through the woods, he evidently not having any faith that I could keep the route, but, getting the general course by compass, I did. 

Having left Ship's Pond and Centre Hill Pond and a cedar swamp on my left, I at length reached one Harlow's, to whom I was recommended, but his neighbors said that "he lived alone like a beast" there ten years. 

I put up at Samuel Ellis's, just beyond the Salt Pond near by, having walked six or seven miles from Manomet through a singularly out-of-the-way region, of which you wonder if it is ever represented in the legislature. Mrs. Ellis agreed to take me in, though they had already supped and she was unusually tired, it being washing-day. They were accustomed to put up peddlers from time to time, and had some pies just baked for such an emergency. At first took me for a peddler and asked what I carried in my bag. 

I was interested in a young peddler who soon after arrived and put up with his horse and cart, a simple and well-behaved boy of sixteen or seventeen only, peddling cutlery, who said that he started from Conway in this State. In answer to my question how he liked peddling, he said that he liked it on some accounts, it enabled him to see the world. I thought him an unusually good specimen of Young America. He found cutlery not good wares for that region; could do better where he came from, and was on his way to Boston for dry goods. Arranged to pay for his keeping partly in kind. 

I saw menhaden skipping in the pond as I came along, it being connected with the sea. Ellis, an oldish man, said that lobsters were plentier than they used to be, that one sometimes got three hundred and upward in a day, and he thought the reason was that they spawned in the cars and so the young were protected from fishes that prey on them. 

He told me of a man whom he had known, who once leaped upon a blackfish that had run or been driven ashore at the head of Buzzard's Bay, where they are very rare, in order to dispatch him, and as he was making a hole in the side of his head, he looked up and found him self a quarter of a mile from land, not having noticed any motion. The fish blowed blood with such force that it cut like a knife, and he saw his shirt-sleeve which appeared as if riddled with shot. He managed with his knife to head him toward shore again, and there landed. 

Told of finding a mud turtle so large that he walked with him standing on his back, though the turtle did not fairly stand up. He had killed a deer close by his house within two or three years. Hunters were then after it. Hearing the noise, he rushed into his house, seized his gun and fired hastily and carelessly, so as to mortally wound his dog (as well as the deer), which he "would not have taken five dollars for!!" and had to dispatch at last. His wife and child also were nearly within range. 

Speaking of the cold of last winter, he said he had no glass, but he knew it was extremely cold by seeing so great a fog on the sea in the morning as never before, which lasted unusually long. Said they fished on a shoal lying northeast, where there were seventeen fathoms of water, but when there was a fog on it, the fishes were gone, and he reckoned that the cold struck through. 

Ellis told of a Boston man who thought he could catch some large trout in his brook with his fine tackling, but, as E. foretold, it broke, and the man offered five dollars apiece for the trout delivered in Boston, whether fresh or not. E. caught them soon after and sent them to Boston by water, but they, being spoiled by delay, were never delivered. 

I heard him praying after I went to bed, and at breakfast the next morning —

H. D. Thoreau, Journal  June 15,1857