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Lot 204
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Passage fr Thoreau's Cape Cod, with 145 words about Provincetown in his hand!
Passage fr Thoreau's Cape Cod, with 145 words about Provincetown in his hand!
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Thoreau Henry 1817 - 1862 A lengthy passage from an early draft of Thoreau's Cape Cod, with 145 words about Provincetown in his hand, fulfilling one of the great declarations he made in Walden: "Man can never have enough of nature."


Autograph Manuscript, 1 page, 7.5" x 9.75", [Concord, Massachusetts, c. October 1849], being a leaf bearing an early draft of a passage from his book, Cape Cod. The manuscript has been laid-in to a larger sheet, which in turn has been tipped in the first volume of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1906), 20 volumes, octavo, bound in green cloth with paper labels affixed to spines. Limited "Manuscript Edition," hand numbered as 544 of 600 editions printed. Boards toned at edges, spines cracked but intact, pages largely uncut and toned at ragged edges.

The manuscript which accompanies the book set bears 145 words in Thoreau's hand which he most likely wrote during the first of four trips he made to Cape Cod between 1849, and 1857. Only four articles from that work appeared in print during Thoreau's lifetime_„îpublished in the summer and early fall of 1855 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine. The balance appeared in print in 1865: two years following Thoreau's death, edited by his sister Sophia.

The manuscript passage reads, in most part: "So we went on to Race Point the extremity of the Cape - & finally to Provincetown at night - where the mackerel fleet had arrived before us and we counted 200 goodly looking schooners at anchor in the harbor _„î the same which we had now ... yes black ships under bare poles[.] This was that city of canvas which we had seen hull down in the horizon. After spending a day in the desert behind Provincetown_„îwhich I have no time to describe we returned to Boston in the steamer. So we took leave of Cape Cod and its inhabitants. For the most part we saw only the back sides of the towns, but our story is true as far as it goes, and let not the inhabitants take offence because the whole is not told. We cannot say how their towns look in the face to one ..."

In the manuscript, Thoreau continually uses the pronoun "we", referring to a friend and walking companion, William Ellery Channing, who accompanied the author on his first visit to the Cape in October 1849. The pair travelled by rail to Sandwich, where they disembarked to hike northward along the beaches to Provincetown. (Hence they were only able to observe the "back sides of the towns" as noted in the present manuscript). Thoreau and Channing then returned to Boston on the steamer from Provincetown, as noted in Thoreau's manuscript passage.

Only portions of this draft appear in the final work published in 1865. His initial impressions of the great mackerel fleet survive in the most intact state: "The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it being Saturday night, excepting that division which had stood down towards Chatham in the morning; and from a hill where we went to see the sun set in the Bay, we counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the harbor at various distances from the shore, and more were yet coming round the Cape. As each came to anchor, it took in sail and swung round in the wind, and lowered its boat. They belonged chiefly to Wellfleet, Truro, and Cape Ann." This passage appears on page 198 in volume four of the present set of books. Thoreau's likening of the great beaches on the Cape to a vast desert is a continual refrain throughout Cape Cod, especially the vast expanse of beach north of Provincetown_„îa characterization strikingly apt to anyone who has visited the dunes of the northern Cape.

Literary scholar Philip F. Gura observed that Cape Cod has, at its "center Thoreau's encounters with the wilderness he so movingly describes in the penultimate chapter of Walden, where he speaks of man to 'need to witness [his] own limits transgressed.' 'Man can never have enough of nature,' he observes, and 'must be refreshed buy the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.'" Gura concludes, "Thoreau's accounts ... thus can be read as elaboration - indeed, as further considerations - of the Walden experience." (Philip F. Gura, "'A wild, rank place': Thoreau's Cape Cod," Joel Myerson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, 1995, p. 148).

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