HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR EVENTS OF 18TH STANZA The 19th Stanza in the Life of Henry Thoreau FALL 1835 JULY 1835 AUGUST SEPTEMBER WINTER 1835/1836 OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER 1835 SPRING 1836 JANUARY 1836 FEBRUARY MARCH SUMMER 1836 APRIL MAY JUNE 1836 Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period of readjustment that lasted for approximately one million years. –Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN 1835 Alonzo Lewis drew and George W. Boynton engraved a 31 inch by 22 inch map of Boston, known as the 3 “Bewick Company’s Map.” A map known as “Annin’s Small Map,” 4 inches by 2 /4 inches including only the peninsular portion of the city, appeared in the BOSTON ALMANAC. MAPS OF BOSTON THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANACK FOR 1835. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence, Rhode Island: Hugh H. Brown. The Reverend Robert Spence Hardy’s 2d voyage from England to Ceylon. Horace Hayman Wilson’s SELECT SPECIMENS OF THE THEATER OF THE HINDUS (2d edition; 2 volumes, London: Parbury, Allen & Co.). These volumes would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau. SELECT SPECIMENS, I SELECT SPECIMENS, II EVENTS OF 20TH STANZA HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR The Reverend Timothy Flint made good on his 1833 commitment to contribute “Sketches of the Literature of the United States” to the London Athenaeum (there would be a total of 11 articles from the issue of July 4th to the issue of November 9th). He traveled in Cuba, in New England, and on the Great Lakes. Sophia Amelia Peabody and her sister Mary Tyler Peabody (Mann) returned to Salem from Cuba. Her letters home would be collected and circulated among friends (but not published) by her mother Elizabeth Palmer Peabody under the title THE CUBA JOURNAL, 1833-1835. Breveted Major James Duncan Graham of the US Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers issued A REPORT UPON THE MILITARY AND HYDROGRAPHICAL CHART OF THE EXTREMITY OF CAPE COD: INCLUDING THE TOWNSHIPS OF PROVINCETOWN AND TRURO, WITH THEIR SEACOAST AND SHIP HARBOR: PROJECTED FROM SURVEYS EXECUTED DURING PORTIONS OF THE YEARS 1833, 1834, AND 1835 (United States. Topographical Bureau; this included a map of Provincetown and Truro). CAPE COD: This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or PEOPLE OF Highland Light, is one of our “primary sea-coast lights,” and is CAPE COD usually the first seen by those approaching the entrance of Massachusetts Bay from Europe. It is forty-three miles from Cape Ann Light, and forty-one from Boston Light. It stands about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is here formed of clay. I borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house, and with a couple of cod-lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle. It rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, or about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean low water. Graham, who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, GRAHAM makes it one hundred and thirty feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an angle of forty degrees with the horizon, where I measured it, but the clay is generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever gets down it. Half a mile farther south the bank is fifteen or twenty-five feet higher, and that appeared to be the highest land in North Truro. Even this vast clay bank is fast wearing away. Small streams of water trickling down it at intervals of two or three rods, have left the intermediate clay in the form of steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater. HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR It would appear that this was traced by Thoreau himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR James Rennie’s THE FACULTIES OF BIRDS (London: Charles Knight, 22, Ludgate Street). Henry Thoreau would copy from page 206 of this into his journal, and the extract would provide grist for A WEEK. THE FACULTIES OF BIRDS A WEEK: But, above all, there is wanting genius. Our books of science, as they improve in accuracy, are in danger of losing the freshness and vigor and readiness to appreciate the real laws of Nature, which is a marked merit in the ofttimes false theories of the ancients. I am attracted by the slight pride and satisfaction, the emphatic and even exaggerated style in which some of the older naturalists speak of the operations of Nature, though they are better qualified to appreciate than to discriminate the facts. Their assertions are not without value when disproved. If they are not facts, they are suggestions for Nature herself to act upon. “The Greeks,” says Gesner, “had a common proverb () a sleeping hare, for a dissembler or counterfeit; because the hare sees when she sleeps; for this is an admirable and rare work of Nature, that all the residue of her bodily parts take their rest, but the eye standeth continually sentinel.” CONRAD GESNER JAMES RENNIE A map of Maine was published, which self-described as “A Plan of the Public Lands in the State of Maine Surveyed under Instructions from the Commissioners & Agents of the States of Massachusetts and Maine a part of which have been set off in severalty to each State, ... viz. Those to Mass.ts are designated by the letter C for Common.th Those to Maine by the letter M. Those that have been sold by Mass.ts and not conveyed have the name of the grantee placed thereon. Copied from the original surveys on a reduced scale & corrected by Geo. W. Coffin, Land Agent of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1st August, 1835.” This map’s scale was 3.4 miles to the inch. 1835 MAP OF MAINE Henry Thoreau would have a copy of this map in his personal library and would refer to it on pages 15, 91, 94, 152, 165, 230, 242, and 279 of THE MAINE WOODS. A fire in New-York destroyed the equipment John James Audubon needed for his further travels, and so he began to push for the completion of his THE BIRDS OF AMERICA. Subscriptions weren’t coming in fast enough and Havell, as his firm proceeded, was always needing payment for work accomplished. To save money and time Audubon began to place multiple species on a page, in his effort to complete the project even on occasion pasting together separate images. HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR Edgar Allan Poe became Assistant Editor of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, Virginia, but was fired for sarcasm and drunkenness. Caleb Bellows sold the cotton mill founded by John Brown above Derby’s Bridge on the Assabet River in Concord to Calvin Carver Damon (hence “Damondale”). The new owner would raise the height of the milldam by 16 inches and install a larger water-wheel for more power, and by 1837 would quadruple the local production of cotton cloth.1 In Boston’s Quincy Market, tomatoes were for sale by the dozen. Boston’s population was 78,603, of which 15,883 or 20% had been born in some other country. The easternmost of the three original peaks of Boston, Pemberton Hill which had once been known as Cotton Hill, was being leveled for convenience and for fill dirt used in construction in the region of Leverett Circle and in various areas in the West End.2 The map of Boston created in 1722 by John Bonner was reissued: 1. This dam, although breached at the right side in the flood of Spring 1968 when 7 inches of rain fell on eastern Massachusetts within a 3-day period, is still to be seen. 2. I don’t know where the black people of Boston moved to, when they were forced out of their district on the slope of Cotton Hill (but for sure they weren’t welcomed into gentrified neighborhoods). HDT WHAT? INDEX THOREAU’S 19TH STANZA THOREAU’S 19TH YEAR “King Dick” or Richard Crafus remained active in downtown Boston as a teacher of pugilistics and manhood, under the name Richard Seaver, and despite his advancing age must have remained quite impressive.3 Crafus maintained his royal air long after repatriation. According to a chronicler of Boston’s underclass, Crafus, who still taught boxing, “was a well-known character ... about 1826-1835 [who] lived in one of the crowded tenements on Botolph Street and was the focus of all the colored population of that district.” Whites, at least, still knew him as “King Dick.” Dressed in a red vest and white shirt, crowned with “an old style police cap” and “swinging an Emmence cane,” long a symbol associated with black leadership, he assembled black Bostonians each Election Day as “Master of Ceremonies.” Crafus annually led the procession around Boston Common, and closed with a “patriotic speech.” Twenty years after organizing prison Number Four, King Dick retained authority among Bostonians of color, who acknowledged him more as a leader than as a tyrant. (It would, of course, be interesting to someday turn up a Henry Thoreau reference to this well-known personality.) For more information: 3.