The horrific picture of a shipwreck in a beach community, which took the lives of over a hundred men, women, and children, is described in Henry David Thoreau's poem "The Shipwreck." He sees the local farmers and craftspeople pulling wagons full of shoddily made boxes to be used as coffins as he walks through the rubble. Only 28 bodies have so far been found out of the one hundred and forty-five dead. The locals are busily searching for the wreckage on the shore. 

The locals don't seem to care about what has happened. This coastal community has experienced its fair share of tragedy on those waters. They are no longer bothered by it because it has effectively merged into their daily lives. The water is an unpredictable and cruel master that is ungoverned. When it wants, it takes what it wants. The men went about nailing down lids or attempting to identify specific remains sought by the Irish who had come to find them, but Thoreau “witnessed no signs of grief, but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting” (Thoreau). The locals appear to be narrating the narrative with the same detached impartiality as Thoreau does. He can provide an objective narrative since he is unmoved by what occurred, emphasizing the power of nature rather than the needless waste of life while giving specifics.

Even though they frequently had to remove clothing fragments from it, the villagers dragged the seaweed that had washed ashore further up the shore so it wouldn't be carried away by the tide. The wreckage is then searched. They ran the chance of coming across a body that had not yet been found, but this didn't stop them. They were able to put their requirements ahead of their feelings in the circumstances. Despite these thoughts, they understood the importance of rescuing what they could. It would take years of deadly incidents against their shorelines for them to develop this behavior. 

This makes me think of the residents in states with a high frequency of natural disasters, like California or Oklahoma. A tornado destroys a house, yet the residents return and rebuild it as if nothing happened. This complacency is unsettling. Nature is unrelenting, cruel, and unyielding. Thoreau speculates that the local peasants were the ones who were most affected after the funeral procession had passed and the mass graves had been covered, despite their outward indifference and practicality.

Thoreau muses that the inhabitants should have a crest on their family shields of a wave and the datura plant, “which is said to produce mental alienation of long duration” (Thoreau) which is the only way they could deal with what the sea brings them. Thoreau seems to cope by reflecting on man's relationship to the sea and how it could fit into the afterlife, much like the Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," who wonders about the sea in response to the awful sight of so many dead bodies on the shores.

Thoreau, too, appears to take on the detachment shown by the locals at seeing so many dead at one time. He notes that “corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity” (Thoreau). He goes on to think about how, while these poor bodies are ravaged in the ocean, perhaps they have sailed into a safe port in Heaven (Thoreau) and it doesn’t matter that their corpses are “dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean” (Thoreau). Thoreau describes a subsequent visit to the same beach on a quiet day, many years after "The Shipwreck" concludes. The water was crystal clear and the breezes from the sea offered a pleasant freshness. He looked down and “could see the sea perch swimming about” (Thoreau). The harshness of the sea had been replaced by a calm and beautiful ocean. This same scenario occurred in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The sea turned against the sailors in the same way as it had against the Irish emigrants. Coleridge's seamen were stranded in a lull in the middle of the ocean, which is just as dangerous when food and water run out and there is no breeze to sail by. This is an alternative to tossing them and slamming the ship against the rocks.

Just as Thoreau did, Coleridge, through his mariner, ponders the afterlife and whether the dead sailors’ souls flew “to bliss or woe!” (Coleridge), and whether the pilot who comes to greet him will give him a blessing to wash away his sin of shooting the albatross. Another similarity in the two works is how, as terrible as the sea can be, both Thoreau and Coleridge saw the beauty the sea can also give in the same way as the mariner looks down into the calm water and glimpses the water-snakes “move in tracks of shining white” (Coleridge). Those who sail on it or make their life near the coast have learned to live in peace with the nature of the ocean in good times and bad. The sea can be both cruel and comforting.

Thoreau only got to see one tragic moment in the life of the Cohasset residents on one specific day. He saw a glimpse of their tenacity, their ability to adapt to living and working close to the ocean, and the pragmatism that has grown within them. Thoreau writes in "The Shipwreck" and Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" about the unyielding practicality of the locals and how they returned to work following a terrible shipwreck, as well as about how all of mankind can cope with the brutality of the sea. Take a deep breath and watch when the person next to you stands by the sea. 

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Bartleby.com www.bartleby.com/41/415.html 

Thoreau, Henry D. “The Shipwreck.” Cape Cod, 2010. The Project Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org/files/34392/34392-h/34392-h.htm