Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  But surveying also gave Thoreau a respected professional identity, and he took pride in his high standards, his resourcefulness, his ability to hack through swamps and briars in all weather, and his precise and exacting drawings, always finished with a flourish. Townspeople who mocked him before now called on him for a valuable service, and his Journal began to fill with the homespun observations of landowners, farmers, and laborers. Thanks to his voracious curiosity, what might have narrowed his field of view and blinded his vision had the opposite effect: a surveyor’s eyes were open eyes, and as his surveying journal filled with professional notes, his private journal filled with scientific and poetic observations of all he could see with what he called “the side of his eye.” If his profession forced him to step aside from his chosen path, it also helped him to see the world around him anew: “I wanted to know the name of every shrub,” he declared, even as he hacked through the underbrush.31

  Back in 1847, when Thoreau had dreamed of going on a scientific exploring expedition, he had written gleefully to Emerson that Harvard at last was “really beginning to wake up” and “overtake the age”: its new telescope was the most powerful in the United States, and its new Lawrence Scientific School had just hired Professor Horsford in chemistry and Professor Agassiz in zoology. Just down the road, Concord’s amateur astronomer, Perez Blood, had invested in a telescope powerful enough for serious astronomy, strong enough to show Thoreau the rings of Saturn and the mountains in the moon.32 Astronomy was not his calling—he was gratified when Harvard’s new professor of astronomy, William Cranch Bond, told him the naked eye was still of service to science—but he was making good on his vow to learn the name of every shrub. Even on the way to look through Bond’s telescope, Thoreau studied plants out the window, amazed to see that Concord and Cambridge, so close together, were clearly different botanical regions—which reading Asa Gray, Harvard’s new (and world-class) botanist, helped him see. In January 1848, after collecting so many specimens for Louis Agassiz, he had finally met the great scientist in person during Agassiz’s second course of Lowell Lectures. Thoreau tried to lure him to Bangor for a lecture series, and though the perennially overworked Agassiz turned him down, they remained on cordial terms through the 1850s, thanks in part to their mutual friendships with Emerson and James Elliot Cabot.33

  This was what science and engineering meant for Thoreau: local, hands-on, immediate. And urgent, too: “It should be a part of every man’s education today to understand the Steam Engine,” he wrote his cousin George Thatcher, whose teenage son was interested in engineering. “What right does a man have to ride in the cars who does not know by what means he is moved?” Young George should visit every machine shop, mill, and factory within reach. Thoreau himself—who could never pass a manufactory without stopping for a tour—had just spent a day at Hinckley and Drury’s, the largest manufacturer of locomotives, and he now “saw and understood the use of every wheel & screw, so that I can build an engine myself when I am ready.” When lecturing had taken him to Clinton, Massachusetts, where he toured the huge gingham mills to see exactly how cloth was made, he not only detailed the process carefully in his Journal, he applied it to his own craft as a writer: “The arts teach us a thousand lessons. Not a yard of cloth can be woven without the most thorough fidelity in the weaver. The ship must be made absolutely tight before it is launched.” Part of the lesson was the deliberate pun on his own name: “thorough fidelity” to process, to craft, was becoming his watchword.34

  Later generations would lose touch with Thoreau’s immediate, visceral feeling for science and technology, as “science” receded to a specialized profession practiced by an elite corps of intellectuals and “technology” was black-boxed into machines powered as if by magic. By contrast, in Thoreau’s world, the coupling of man and nature through machine could still be a thing of wonder. One Sunday afternoon during the spring rains of 1850, Thoreau heard from over the meadow “a faint tink-tink, tink-tink, as of a cow bell amidst the birches and huckleberry bushes.” As he approached, the mystery grew, sounding up from the ground as if the open meadow spoke. Perhaps this was some unknown frog or muskrat, some discovery in natural history? Then he found it: a boy’s toy waterwheel engineered to tap a small hammer on a tongueless cowbell nailed to a board. “The little rill itself seemed delighted with the din & rushed over the miniature dam & fell on the water wheel eagerly as if delighted at & proud of this loud tinkling”—which Thoreau could hear, he realized that night, all the way from home. He called the family to the window, and they all marveled to hear the sweet sound from so far away. This became another figure for Thoreau’s own artistry: if he arranged his materials just so, nature would speak through him in a voice that carried to town, where even people in the streets would stop to listen, to hear something higher, beyond themselves.35

  Thoreau needed this breakthrough insight for his own kind of Transcendentalism. Science showed him how to see the Cosmos in a grain of sand or the ocean in a woodland pond, a mountain range in Fairhaven Cliff, a glacier in the cobblestones of Walden Pond. Poetry gave him a voice to show the world why this mattered. Late in 1849, Thoreau plunged into a new course of reading: he worked his way through Alexander von Humboldt’s volumes of exploration science and the scores of books by scientists and explorers whom Humboldt had inspired to see the world—up the Orinoco, down the Andes to Tierra del Fuego, out to the Rocky Mountains and the far Northwest, south to Antarctica, north to the Arctic, beyond to the steppes of Asia or the African savannah. As he read his way around the globe, Thoreau imagined his own travels as one-person exploring expeditions. What the world explorers of his day were doing writ large, he could do in microcosm, traveling and writing about the earth as a planet whose smallest and most local features illuminated, and were illuminated by, the Cosmos itself. To the leading edge of science, Thoreau could add his own “home-cosmography.” By November 1850 he had caught hold of the method, and by September 1851 he captured it in a phrase: “A writer a man writing is the scribe of all nature—he is the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing.”36

  But first, there was a chasm to cross. Nearly ten years before, Margaret Fuller advised Thoreau that nature “is not yours till you have been more hers.” He in turn appreciated Fuller deeply, calling “The Great Lawsuit,” her pioneering essay in women’s rights, “a noble piece, rich extempore writing—talking with pen in hand” that showed how “in writing conversation should be folded many times thick.”37 A Week, his own attempt to fold conversation many times thick, owed much to Fuller’s example. In the years since, Fuller’s path had taken her from Boston to New York, where she reported on a wide range of social issues as a correspondent for Greeley’s Tribune, then to Europe, where she became Greeley’s foreign correspondent.

  Fuller settled in Rome, and as the Revolution of 1848 broke over Italy she became a revolutionary herself, a fierce partisan for the Roman Republic who enthralled and alarmed American readers with harrowing eyewitness reports from the front lines. And though she told no one about it, she married—so it was implied—her lover Giovanni the Marquis d’Ossoli, an Italian revolutionary, and gave birth to their son Angelo, or “Nino.” As the Republic collapsed, Fuller fled to England, where she drafted a first-person history of the Italian Revolution.38 Determined to see it through the American press herself, she booked passage for her family, their nursemaid Celesta Pardena, and their friend Horace Sumner on the Elizabeth, a British sailing ship. They left Italy on May 17, 1850, bound for New York with a reliable crew, pleasant friends, and a hold filled with luxury goods: silk, almonds, olive oil, castile soap, hats and straw bonnets, a gallery’s worth of fine paintings, a statue of John Calhoun for South Carolina, and 150 tons of Carrera marble.39

  Ill fortune began when the ship’s captain died of smallpox just as they reached Gibraltar, where they laid over in quarantine before proceeding under the command of the inexperienced first mate, Henry P. Bangs. As they neared New York in mid-July, they did not kn
ow that a historic hurricane was sweeping up the Atlantic coast. Nor did they know quite where they were: Captain Bangs thought they were safely off New Jersey in deep water, but actually they were sixty miles east, dangerously close to Fire Island. Just before four in the morning on Friday, July 19, a thunderous crash awoke the passengers: the Elizabeth had struck a sandbar head-on. A great wave struck the brig broadside, driving her onto the bar with a force that smashed the marble through the hold. The seas broke over the ship and poured through the cabin, tearing away sails, masts, and lifeboats, sending the terrified passengers, still in their nightclothes, to the deck, where they could see the shore was only three hundred yards away. The tide was falling, and already in the dawn there were scores, hundreds, of people on the beach. Rescue seemed sure. But as they watched in mounting horror and disbelief, the crowds ignored them, swarming over the trunks and boxes washing ashore, smashing them open and bearing away in cartloads clothing, possessions, and merchandise.

  The abandoned passengers tried to save themselves. Some dived into the water and made it ashore, battered by the wave-tossed timbers but alive. Others, including Horace Sumner, sank out of sight and drowned. The Ossolis huddled together, refusing to be separated, protecting their terrified child and waiting for the lifeboat—which never came. The furious first mate later told Thoreau, “The men on shore had not courage enough to launch the lifeboat.” All they did was sit and watch, now and then snatching up “a hat that came ashore.”40 Finally, at flood tide, well into the afternoon, with the last of the ship breaking up around them, the ship’s steward took Nino in his arms and jumped overboard. Both were borne under by the waves and drowned. Then Celesta and Giovanni were washed away, while Margaret, as Thoreau would later write, “sat with her back to the foremast with her hands over her knees—her husband & child already drowned—a great wave came & washed her off.”41 Nino’s small naked body was carried ashore and buried in the sand in a sailor’s chest. The bodies of his parents were never recovered.

  Not until three days later, on the evening of July 22, did the calamitous news reach Concord. All through the night, Emerson agonized whether he should go himself, but in the morning he delegated Thoreau—“the most competent person that could be selected”—to go at once to Fire Island “on all our parts, and obtain on the wrecking ground all the intelligence &, if possible, any fragments of manuscript or other property.”42 Thoreau left immediately, with a seventy-dollar advance from Emerson, and on Wednesday morning, July 24, he stopped in New York long enough to leave a note for the absent Greeley before joining William Henry Channing on the 9:00 a.m. cars to Fire Island. They reached Fire Island at noon; Margaret’s brother Arthur Fuller and Horace Sumner’s brother Charles reached the beach later that night. Back in Concord, Margaret’s sister Ellen was so devastated her friends feared for her sanity. Her husband Ellery Channing traveled to Fire Island to add his own efforts to the futile search for something, anything, of Margaret’s.

  If Thoreau had expected horror, what he found was worse: nothing. Or nearly nothing. Wreckers had scavenged the beach for days—three days earlier, one eyewitness counted nearly a thousand persons walking the miles of sand, over half of them “secreting and carrying off everything that seemed to be of value.” Thoreau coursed up and down the beach, hunting for any scrap, interviewing with the intensity of a police investigator every witness he could find, trying to make sense of chaotic and conflicting reports. What became terribly clear was that everything of any possible worth had been plundered. No one denied it. “There are some proper pirates among them but most do not deserve this name—they are rather low thieves & pilferers,” who divvied up the spoils among themselves, even as friends of the dead sought any remains: “This will do for your child & that for your wife—these were the expressions which they themselves quoted. I found the young men playing at dominoes with their hats decked out with the spoils of the drowned”—Fuller’s own tassels and ribbons.43

  On Thursday morning Thoreau wrote his sad report to Emerson from Smith Oakes’s nearby house—“a perfect pirate’s house” filled with wreckage and stolen goods, where the survivors had gathered and the bodies had been collected. Of Giovanni Ossoli there was an empty carpetbag and one shoe, possibly his. Of Margaret Fuller Ossoli there was a black leather trunk with a wrenched-off lock, and inside nothing left but twenty or thirty books and a few papers—only enough to cover a small table. Margaret’s writing desk, in a blue calico bag, was broken, and inside were a few letters. Of her manuscript, there was nothing. The second mate told Thoreau he had seen a man open a bundle of handwritten papers, which he threw down on the beach as of no value.

  There were a few more leads, so Thoreau lingered until Saturday morning, walking the sands, kicking apart heaps of almonds and juniper berries from the hold. Something more might yet wash ashore. He posted advertisements and searched houses all the way to Patchogue and Sayville on Long Island. The results could not have helped his view of humanity. “Some had heard that there were 3,000 doll[ar]s in rings on the fingers of the Marchioness,” he noted grimly. “They stole from one another—what some had hid in the bushes others stole again.” After poling to Patchogue in an oyster boat full of drunken, snoring fishermen wallowing in their own vomit, he found the dresses of the drowned—Fuller’s dresses—worn by the wives of men who had stolen them; the women refused to give them up.44 No trace of Margaret’s or Giovanni’s bodies was ever found. Rumors persisted that they had washed ashore, been plundered of clothes, jewels, and money, and were secretly buried to hide the robbery.45

  Thoreau himself took one keepsake: out on the beach he found the skirt of a gentleman’s coat, from which he ripped a single button. At the Oakes’ he compared it with those on a coat known to be Ossoli’s; it was a match. On Friday, the lighthouse keeper reported a body four or five miles west of the wreck. Next morning Thoreau walked out to it: “a portion of a human skeleton,” he wrote to the grieving Charles Sumner, perhaps the remains of his brother Horace, though Thoreau could not be sure whether it was male or female. Thoreau ordered the lighthouse keeper to bury it and mark the gravesite, pending a “trustworthy examination.” Sumner sadly agreed that the remains must be impossible to identify—another futile search.46 But his thanks to Thoreau were profound. Less than a year later, Sumner was elected to the US Senate, replacing the disgraced Daniel Webster, and ever after he repaid the favor by sending Thoreau all the government scientific reports he thought Thoreau might find useful.

  One button and some bones on the beach: for all the lives lost and all the hopes, this was what remained. Back home in Concord, Thoreau fingered the button and brooded. “Held up it intercepts the light & casts a shadow, an actual button so called—And yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams.” True, our bodies float on the stream of the “actual” and “we have sympathy with it through them”—but then he added, overcome with nausea, “I do not think much of the actual. . . . It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” A few days later, a calmer Thoreau wrote to H. G. O. Blake: “Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives; all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.”47

  The bones disturbed Thoreau in a very different way. They were unremarkable, “simply some bones lying on the beach.” But months later they haunted him still, not because they were nauseating but because they weren’t—they seemed “singularly inoffensive,” even possessing a “certain majesty”: “They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my sniveling sympathies.”48 The beach of Fire Island brought Thoreau back to the mystery of Katahdin, where he’d first divined the uncanny nature of the body: “for it is at home there, though you are not.” The bones and the ocean understood something his mind struggled to grasp—not merely the blunt fact that all things pass, but the further insight, which
he’d come to after John’s death, that only the passing of the body gave passage to spirit. Once again harrowed by tragedy, Thoreau turned not away from the things of nature, but toward them, voicing again his awe before the fundamental strangeness of materiality. Nature is not yours until you are more hers: that sympathy had been part of Fuller’s legacy to him.

  Ellery Channing, in his own grief, wrote that Fuller drew forth from her friends, by some “secret magnetism . . . the cherished secret, which now runs like a vein of fire through all the meshes of each one’s correspondence. To each she answered in some one part, was an answer to some one question, & accomplished some one desire.” Turning to his own most cherished correspondent, Thoreau tried to pass forward Fuller’s gift: after fingering the button one more time, he put it down, picked up his pen, and wrote to Blake, “I say to myself, Do a little more of that work which you have confessed to be good. . . . If there is an experiment which you would like to try, try it. . . . Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.” To himself he was even more expansive: “If you can drive a nail & have any nails to drive, drive them. If you have any experiments you would like to try—try them—now’s your chance. . . . Be native to the universe.”49

  · · ·

  Two months after returning from Fire Island, Thoreau and Ellery Channing had a chance to drive one of those nails. All summer long, Boston had been talking about William Burr’s “Moving Mirror,” a “Seven-Mile Panorama” that unscrolled a painted moving-picture show scripted to narrative and music, which took viewers on the waterway from the Great Lakes to Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence River. Thoreau was one of perhaps a million people to see it.50 As a publicity stunt, Burr arranged three railroad excursions from Boston to Montreal, for five dollars round trip; an optional boat ride down the St. Lawrence River to Quebec cost only two dollars more. European travel was out of the question for Thoreau, but this opportunity for foreign travel was irresistible. Purchasers had to return within ten days; nonetheless, 1,346 subscribers bought tickets for the first excursion, Thoreau and Channing among them. It would be a lightning-quick trip, and Thoreau set himself to making the most of it. All year he’d been walking daily—often nightly, too, exploring the woods and fields by moonlight despite many raised eyebrows.51 The thought of taking such a walk in the heart of French Canada, along the greatest river in North America, was tantalizing, and after helping the family move into the Yellow House that August, he was ready for a break. So a month later, Thoreau bundled up his few travel necessities, put on his “bad weather clothes,” seized his ever-present umbrella, and set off for Canada with Channing.