Cape Cod (1865)

AUTHOR: Thoreau, Henry David

KEYWORDS: food, animals, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Cape Cod presents an account of three trips Thoreau undertook in 1849, 1850, and 1855, with detailed descriptions of the eponymous peninsula's flora, fauna, climate, geology, and topography interspersed with often sustained excursions into the inhabitant's habits and means of earning their livelihood and the region's history. In this vein, early on, Thoreau critically remarks on the Native inheritance of the land in question:

When the committee from Plymouth had purchased the territory of Eastham of the Indians, "it was demanded, who laid claim to Billingsgate?" which was understood to be all that part of the Cape north of what they had purchased. The answer was, there was not any who owned it. 'Then,' said the committee, 'that land is ours.' The Indians answered, that it was." This was a remarkable assertion and admission. The Pilgrims appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any's representatives. Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees. But history says, that when the Pilgrims had held the lands of Billingsgate many years, at length, "appeared an Indian, who styled himself Lieutenant Anthony," who laid claim to them, and of him they bought them. Who knows but a Lieutenant Anthony may be knocking at the door of the White House some day? At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last (38).

It becomes clear early in the text that Thoreau did not adhere to a vegetarian diet during these trips, as he recounts that next to “buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea” he also had “eels” for breakfast at one point (90); and an earlier passage provides a detailed description of him preparing and eating clams: “I kindled a fire with a match and some paper, and cooked my clam on the embers for my dinner; for breakfast was commonly the only meal which I took in a house on this excursion. When the clam was done, one valve held the meat and the other the liquor. Though it was very tough, I found it sweet and savory, and ate the whole with a relish. Indeed, with the addition of a cracker or two, it would have been a bountiful dinner” (66).

As a naturalist, he is also interested in all kinds of animal remains as when he reports that he “saw the exuviae of a third [fox] fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull to my collection” (136). Thoreau is convinced that “marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants” (116), and as the following passages convey, his account is also full of detached descriptions of cruelty towards (marine) animals as part of the local fishing business:

They were waiting for the tide to leave these fishes high and dry, that they might strip off the blubber and carry it to their try-works in their boats, where they try it on the beach. They get commonly a barrel of oil, worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish (132).

[W]e saw several boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four or five rods ahead was drawing it like a race-horse straight toward the beach, leaping half out of water blowing blood and water from its hole, and leaving a streak of foam behind. But they went ashore too far north for us, though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance them on the sand. It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen, and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous (133).

About a week afterward, when I came to this shore, it was strewn as far as I could see with a glass, with the carcasses of blackfish stripped of their blubber and their heads cut off; the latter lying higher up. Walking on the beach was out of the question on account of the stench. Between Provincetown and Truro they lay in the very path of the stage. Yet no steps were taken to abate the nuisance, and men were catching lobsters as usual just off the shore. I was told that they did sometimes tow them out and sink them; yet I wondered where they got the stones to sink them with. Of course they might be made into guano, and Cape Cod is not so fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do without this manure,—to say nothing of the diseases they may produce (134).

But Thoreau also remarks that most of the fish is actually sold in the markets of the country, noting that he himself did not eat any fresh fish on Cape Cod. Conversely, most of the meat is imported from the mainland:

I walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast, and mine host inquired if I would take "hashed fish or beans." I took beans, though they never were a favorite dish of mine. I found next summer that this was still the only alternative proposed here, and the landlord was still ringing the changes on these two words. In the former dish there was a remarkable proportion of fish. As you travel inland the potato predominates. It chanced that I did not taste fresh fish of any kind on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so much used there as in the country. That is where they are cured, and where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating them. No fresh meat was slaughtered in Provincetown, but the little that was used at the public houses was brought from Boston by the steamer (196-197).

As the reference to being cured of eating fish suggests, Thoreau counteracts his unflinching descriptions of cruelty towards animals as an everyday aspect of the Cape Cod economy with repeated and forceful appeals to animal welfare as in the following instance: “It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous” (168-169). More emphatically, he reports that “in one of the villages I saw the next summer a cow tethered by a rope six rods long, the rope long in proportion as the feed was short and thin. Sixty rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been no more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she would get into Arabia Felix!” (127). And in an ironic remark, he lets his readers know that “one little boy who had been a-birdsnesting had got eighty swallows' eggs for his share! Tell it not to the Humane Society” (151). In what is certainly the most remarkable episode, Thoreau rhetorically inverts the food chain, imagining human brains as food for a kind of alien cow:

It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed on cod's heads! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it,—coming to such an end! to be craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal! (198).

A more subtle instance concerns the treatment of a dog on a steamer, in which the dog emerges as the more ethical being:

All sailors pause to watch a steamer, and shout in welcome or derision. In one a large Newfoundland dog put his paws on the rail and stood up as high as any of them, and looked as wise. But the skipper, who did not wish to be seen no better employed than a dog, rapped him on the nose and sent him below. Such is human justice! I thought I could hear him making an effective appeal down there from human to divine justice. He must have had much the cleanest breast of the two (241).

No doubt Thoreau's concerns about animal welfare are due to his convictions concerning the interconnectedness of nature. In Cape Cod, a passage that highlights the easy interplay between a shorebird and the ocean's waves may serve to illustrate this interconnectedness:

One little bird not larger than a sparrow,— it may have been a Phalarope,—would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs (103-104).

What is a mere local interaction in the above example, takes on a global dimension in the passage below on the dispersion of seeds (a topic at the heart of Thoreau's late writings collected in Faith in a Seed ):

This suggests how various plants may have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents. Vessels, with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports, where perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate islands, and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate adapted to them,—become naturalized and perhaps drive out the native plants at last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. (153)

What is particularly notable about Cape Cod is how Thoreau casts nature in the guise of the ocean as the grand equalizer, the global network holding everything together:

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. The Indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the civilized man and the savage. The aspect of the shore only has changed. The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves. It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, in this respect (174-175).

Last updated on April 19th, 2024

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