The bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials
are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women
and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of
plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end
in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent
shipwreck “cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,” while others go
about their business.
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck,” writes an
eyewitness to the aftermath of the disaster, “there were men with carts
busily collecting seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it
beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to
separate fragments of clothing from it.”
This scene of devastation and indifference seems torn from
the latest headlines or photos from around the world, just one more
group of refugees appearing fleetingly on our screens and in our
consideration. In fact, the victims of this particular wreckage were 140
Irish immigrants who perished when the St. John, the ship upon which
they had sailed to “the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did,”
crashed off the coast of Cohasset, Massachusetts, during a huge storm in
October 1849. The eyewitness referred to above, without whom we might
not remember the incident at all, was none other than Henry David
Thoreau. ... [mehr] http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/29/walden-on-the-rocks/
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