I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day.
If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. “On the whole,” he wrote, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. The visitor from Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin. The living were trying to identify the dead-a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside.
When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished? Illustration by Eric Nyquist
