[Margaret Fuller's] death at [at sea at age] 40 was a blow to Transcendentalism: From 1840 to 1842 Fuller had edited the movement’s main publication, “The Dial,” alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fuller’s friends and colleagues rushed to the site, desperate to recover the family’s remains. They were also anxious to find an account of the rise and fall of the 1849 Roman republic — “what is most valuable to me if I live of any thing,” Fuller had written of her last manuscript. One of those travelers was Henry David Thoreau, sent by Emerson to “go, on all our parts, & obtain on the wrecking ground all the intelligence &, if possible, any fragments of manuscript or other property.”

Fuller’s body and manuscript were lost to the sea. But a recent Houghton Library acquisition is shedding new light on the tragedy and on what Thoreau found as he wandered the beach for clues and interviewed survivors.

In May, the library purchased nine leaves of a largely unknown manuscript: Thoreau’s notes taken during his shoreline search. The pencil-scrawled, double-sided pages contain vivid descriptions of Fuller’s last moments, related to Thoreau by witnesses; they also describe how scavengers eagerly snatched up belongings that had washed ashore.