Cape Cod chronicles Henry David Thoreau's journey of discovery along this evocative stretch of Massachusetts coastline during which time he came to understand the complex relationship between the sea and the shore. He spent his nights in lighthouses in fishing huts and on isolated farms. He passed his days wandering the beaches where he observed the wide variety of life and death offered up by the ocean. Through these observations Thoreau discovered that the only way to truly know the sea its depth its wildness and the natural life it contained was to study it from the shore.

It is also full of his own joy and wonder at having stumbled across a new frontier so close to home where a man may stand and "put all America behind him."