June 1, 1888

The writer and naturalist Henry Beston (June 1, 1888 to April 15, 1968) was the author of  the only book, according to Rachel Carson, that influenced her while ...[she wrote] The Sea Around Us.
That book was  The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928).  One thing Beston talks about is shipwrecks like that of the Castagna one winter. He addresses the reader this way:

'go about in the cottages, ...[and] you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner. When the coast guards returned to the Castagna on the quiet morning after the wreck, they found a grey cat calmly waiting for them in the captain's cabin, and a chilled canary up upon his perch.'

Another moving passage from The Outermost House:

'We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.'