The enigmatic-looking young man staring out from the silvered copper-plate was a curious mix of contradictory elements; his portrait was very much a mirror of his dualistic nature—the Ivy League scholar who had sailed as a common seaman. This sailor was from an established Massachusetts Bay Colony family. Dana was a Brahmin, a term Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. brought to the public’s attention in the 1860 Atlantic Monthly article “The Brahmin Caste of New England.” According to Holmes, this “harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy”1 had flourished over the centuries, growing “to be a caste, not in any odious sense; but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it [had] acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity.”2
The Dana family was a perfect example of this solid, old Massachusetts family stock. The first Dana who came to America arrived in Boston in 1640. The family tree took firm root and grew strong in Yankee ground, producing successive generations of Harvard College graduates, judges, and politicians. Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s great-grandfather had been a “Son of Liberty,” a group established in 1765 in Boston and later residing in every colony who agitated, sometimes violently, against the oppressive Stamp Act. His grandfather, Francis Dana, was a pillar of New England society who had a long and distinguished career of public service; he was chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts and first minister to the Russian Court at St. Petersburg under President George Washington. This Dana had married into another family of New England “aristocracy,” a daughter of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Dana’s father, Richard Henry Dana Sr., also attended Harvard and studied law, although he gave up his practice to live as a man of letters, as a poet, an essayist, and literary critic who helped found the prestigious North American Review. The Dana family’s academic and professional successes were evidence of its Brahmin caste, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s definition. Brahmins, he wrote, “are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or other.”3
Richard Henry Dana Jr. was born into the accomplished family on August 1, 1815, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother died when he was six. Dana was brought up by a literary father who suffered from regular bouts of melancholia, with much of his fretful moroseness focused on his namesake. In a letter to a friend, Dana Sr. shared some of his impressions of his young son. “If I understand Richard, he is a boy of excellent principles even now. I’m afraid he is too sensitive for his own happiness.... I never think of him without some touch of melancholy.” Despite his many worries, Dana’s father sent his son off for the first day of school with a formidable bit of Brahmin advice, “Put your bones to it, my boy!”4
The young Richard Henry began his elementary education at the grammar school in Cambridgeport. Dana later recalled the anguish of those early school years in the “Autobiographical Sketch” he wrote as an introduction to his private journal. Here, he held in vivid memory the “very austere look”5 of his first Cambridgeport schoolmaster, Reverend Samuel Barrett, and the punishments he administered with the “long pine ferrule”6 kept in a chest by the classroom door. It was a sight that, as Dana remembered, made “our hearts sicken.”7 He was punished by the schoolmaster only once. Caught laughing during a recitation, Dana was pulled by the ear and dragged across the classroom. When he left school that day, his ear was torn and bloody from the yanking.
This school incident, its aftermath, and its resolution would become a theme played out time and again during Dana’s academic life. It was also a motif that would resurface with a strong and disturbing resonance years later on his sea voyage. As for the ear-pulling incident, Dana’s father called for a meeting of school proprietors at which he registered his grievances, and “ear pulling” was banned as a classroom punishment. According to Dana, in his journal account, his early learning remained in the hands of masters who believed in daily floggings in schoolrooms “governed by force & fear.”8
The punishment that most affected Dana came several years later when a teacher accused him of feigning illness for the express purpose of being sent home. He gave the boy six blows on each hand with the ferrule, and Dana was “in such a frenzy of indignation at his injustice and his insulting insinuation, that I could not have uttered a word for my life.”9 He headed home to his father with swollen hands as evidence of his mistreatment. Again the senior Dana complained, and on the next day “the career of Mr. W. ended.”10 Dana’s first biographer, Charles Francis Adams, wrote of the effect these early run-ins with corporal punishment had on Dana. They developed in him a “premature and exaggerated punctiliousness on all points of so-called ‘honor.”11
Two more of Dana’s lifelong themes emerged and took shape in these formative years. As a young boy, he was subject to emotional upsets and spells of illness. In childhood, these episodes happened during the summer months. His father’s solution for both stressors was rustication. After one such sickly spell, the young Dana was sent to board at a school in the country, in a quiet place his worried father believed would serve as the best remedy for his son’s health and well-being. Young Dana returned the next year to attend several schools, one of them, a private academy under the tutelage of Ralph Waldo Emerson. There was no flogging in Emerson’s classroom, but the boy still found fault with his teacher’s manner. “A very pleasant instructor we had in Mr. E., although he had not system or discipline enough to insure regular and vigorous study. I have always considered it fortunate for us that we fell into the hands of more systematic and strict teachers, though not so popular with us, not perhaps so elevated in their habits of thought as Mr. E.”12 Years later “Mr. E.” would write a favorable review of his student’s sea book and confess in a letter, “He was my scholar once, but he never learned this of me: more’s the pity.”13
Dana began his Harvard education in 1831 and excelled throughout the first term. Near the end of his freshman year, Dana was drawn into a student difficulty, perceived by the college heads as a “rebellion.” 14 His growing sense of social justice was strengthened by his peers’ call for a show of student solidarity. As Dana noted, the “esprit du corps was strongly against tale bearing,”15 and his compliance with the matter resulted in a six-month suspension from Harvard, a fate that had also befallen his father during his Harvard days. The university overseers voted that Dana Jr. would begin his period of suspension with an instructor living at least 25 miles outside of the town limits. In accordance with the ruling, Dana took up his studies with Reverend Leonard Woods, a tutor at the Andover Theological Seminary. Here, Dana thrived on religious and philosophical discourse and felt much improved in spirit with this sudden freedom from the ordered stuffiness of Ivy League academia. To Dana, this was learning. “I can hardly describe the relief I felt at getting rid of the exciting emulation for college rank, & being able to study & recite for the good of my own mind, not for the sixes, sevens & eights, which, at Cambridge were put against every word that came out of a student’s mouth.”16
At the end of six months, he returned reluctantly to Harvard, as “a slave whipped to his dungeon.”17 But he also felt energized and inspired from Reverend Woods’ teaching. Dana performed well throughout his sophomore year and achieved a seventh-place ranking in his class. That summer, however, he once again succumbed to illness. He contracted measles, and the repercussions were serious. The disease so affected his eyesight he could not tolerate reading, even “for a moment, without extreme pain.”18 Dana waited for his sight to return to normal, but when his condition showed no signs of improvement over the next nine months, the Harvard undergraduate reluctantly abandoned his studies to stay at home. At eighteen years old, he felt he was “a useless, pitied & dissatisfied creature.”19
Dana considered that the solution to his ensuing ennui lay in ocean travel but realized it could not be the type of foreign travel young educated men us
ually embarked upon for leisure. For one thing, the Dana family fortunes had dwindled, and his poet father could not afford the luxury of a European voyage. Dana had been offered free passage to India and back in return for serving as a travel companion to a Boston ship-owner. He turned down this offer, rationalizing that, for him, “a passenger’s life would be insupportable without books.”20 After a winter spent searching for the voyage most appropriate for his condition, Dana made connections with the Boston firm of Bryant, Sturgis and Company to sail as a common merchant seaman aboard the brig Pilgrim.
I determined to go before the mast, where I knew that the constant occupation would make reading unnecessary, & the hard work, plain diet & life in the open air, away from coal fires, dust & lamp-light would do much to give rest to the nerves of the eye & would, above all, make a gradual change in my whole physical system.21
The Pilgrim’s destination, California, also fit Dana’s prescriptive requirements. He had heard California was “a very healthy coast, with a fine climate, and plenty of hard work for the sailors.”22
Sea Change
In mid-August of 1834, two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, Dana headed to the Boston wharves. He had made the obligatory costume change from his Cambridge “dress coat, silk cap and kid gloves” to the jack tar’s “loose duck trowsers, checked shirt and tarpaulin hat” (p. 7). He fancied himself to look “as salt as Neptune himself” (p. 7). But he lacked the salty essence to appear anything other than a green hand—a Brahmin in sailor’s clothing. After an overzealous first night on watch, the Harvard undergraduate recognized he did not begin to know the rules of his shipboard academy. He was awhirl in this new world.
Unintelligible orders were so rapidly given and so immediately executed; there was such a hurrying about, and such an intermingling of strange cries and stranger actions, that I was completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life (p. 9).
Dana’s previous modes of evaluation, through scholastic merit and the discerning evaluations of academia, held no status here. In this world afloat, he had everything to learn, and initiation into the intricate workings of shipshape sea order was swift. Sent aloft in a rocking vessel, with a bucket of grease that offended his “fastidious senses” (p. 14), Dana saw quickly the reality of the big picture-without a doubt, he would have to throw out the fineries of his old life. This he accomplished, quite literally and immediately, on the physical level with a dreadful bout of seasickness, one that, as the cook pointed out, left Dana without “a drop of your ‘long-shore swash aboard of you” (p. 14). His next survival requirement was to toughen up, to learn a seaman’s rules and live accordingly. Again the “doctor,” as the cook was addressed aboard ship, had an effective prescription to hasten the transformation: “Pitch all your sweetmeats overboard, and turn-to upon good hearty salt beef and sea bread.” That action, he promised, would do the trick: “You’ll have your ribs well sheathed, and be as hearty as any of ’em, afore you are up to the Horn” (p. 14).
Dana soon got his sea legs and with every mouthful of cold salt beef began to embody the physical changes necessary for maintaining equilibrium afloat. His mind too made the necessary shifts of perspective. The “witchery in the sea” (p. 357), with its mysterious lore and gallant sea songs, soon lost its romantic lure, and as Dana observed, once “all this fine drapery [fell] off” (p. 357), he was left with the true picture of the two-year voyage ahead of him. It was an unadorned image of daily drudgery and monotonous shipboard routine, a life he compared to living with the stiffest of prison sentences.
Throughout the voyage, Dana recorded the principal elements of daily affairs in a small notebook, which he transferred and elaborated upon in a sea journal. Dana kept records of his mundane shipboard routines: “all the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing ... in addition to watching at night, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting sail, and pulling, hauling and climbing in every direction” (p. 20). Now, sure-footed on a sailor’s precarious terrain, he worked in places where “you have to hang on with your eye-lids and tar with your hands” (p. 52). Dana spent any quiet time in the forecastle, which, he observed, “looked like the workshop of what a sailor is,—a Jack at all trades.” Here, he learned the fine points of tailoring a sailor suit from duck cloth, adding that “even the cobbler’s art was not out of place” (p. 280) in a sailor’s skill set. All of these demanding lessons shaped the priggish Brahmin teenager. According to Dana’s biographer Charles Francis Adams, these lessons of the forecastle “took the nonsense out of him.”23
True to Dana’s dualistic nature, his education had two distinct learning environments; each with its own stringent curriculum. Just under ten months of his duty was spent before the mast; this time was divided equally between two vessels, the Pilgrim and the Alert. Most of Dana’s working time was spent in California, where he was engaged in the company’s hide and tallow trade. Dana may have been on land again, but Mexican California in 1835—with its missions, presidios, rancheros, cockfights, and fandangos (lively, fast-paced dances)—was unfamiliar ground. The work lessons were equally demanding, physically exhausting, and as foreign to what Dana knew as any of his shipboard lessons had been. For the next fifteen months, Dana worked to fill the hide-house with the 40,000 hides required by the company for a worthwhile return trip to Boston. Working to fill that quota involved slavish work, with tedious tasks at every stage of operations. At San Pedro, the job entailed the “rolling of cargo up the steep hill, walking barefooted over stones, and getting drenched in salt water” (p. 201). In San Juan, the men carried the unruly, large, wide, and stiff-as-board hides on their heads in an endeavor to keep them dry as the sailors waded, “nearly up to our armpits” (p. 199), through the surf to their boats. The Pilgrim’s crewmen literally measured the length of their work sentence and the extent of their California misery hide by stacked hide. “There was not a man on board,” Dana observed, “who did not go a dozen times into the house, and look round, and make some calculation of the time it would require” (p. 122).
The litany of hard work was broken occasionally by finer moments that afforded reflection. At one point during the lifting and lugging routine of hide-droghing (collecting and transporting hides), Dana found the quiet time to just sit and contemplate the new Pacific world from a San Juan cliffside. And his soul responded.
It was almost the first time that I had been positively alone—free from the sense that human beings were at my elbow, if not talking with me—since I had left home. My better nature returned strong upon me. Everything was in accordance with my state of feeling, and I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and romance I ever had in me, had not been entirely deadened by the laborious and frittering life I had led. Nearly an hour did I sit, almost lost in the luxury of this entire new scene of the play in which I had been so long acting, when I was aroused by the distant shouts of my companions (pp. 138-139).
This “better nature,” rooted in the refined and cultured world he had left, was also roused at still points out in “blue water” ocean. Early on in the voyage, Dana was struck by the “perfect silence of the sea” (p. 10). At work, in the world of wind and water, Dana reveled in the mathematical precision of the vessel’s rigging, the synchronization of “the necessary ropes” (p. 71) with the size of the sails. Each call of “Hove short” or “Make sail, men” became a testimony to the ever-changing dance of physics. One night in the tropics, Dana lay over the end of the jib-boom and, looking up, was lost in the marvelous sight of the ship in full sail. Even his shipmate’s simple observation “How quietly they do their work!” (p. 329) resonated like poetry at that moment. For Dana, these glimpses of perfect order were comforting reminders of what made sense to him in his old life.
However much I was affected by the beauty of the sea, the bright stars, and the clouds driven swiftly over them, I could not but remember that I was
separating myself from all the social and intellectual enjoyments of life. Yet, strange as it may seem, I did then and afterwards take pleasure in these reflections, hoping by them to prevent my becoming insensible to the value of what I was leaving (p. 11).
This concern for maintaining the life he valued while living a harsh reality was a source of constant struggle, at times causing a great divide between Dana the sailor and Dana the Brahmin. Existing in the brutish worlds of the forecastle and hide-house, battling the elements, and keeping up with the slavish labor, affected an inevitable sea change in Dana. But he never surrendered to these influences with the total abandon required fully to effect the alteration. His Brahmin vision was certainly expanding just as his physical vision was improving, but Dana continued to see himself as separate from the “crew of swearers” (p. 23) with whom he kept company. Despite the conscious efforts he made to fit in, and to “set all suspicion at rest” (p. 115) as to whether he was indeed one of the forecastle crew, Dana’s old school Brahmin erudition and elitism inevitably flared up at times, and the crew reacted to any hint of snobbery. When Dana challenged the truth of the cook’s supernatural sea story, old Tom fired back in exasperation, “Oh ... go ‘way! You think, ’cause you been to college, you know better than anybody. You know better than them as has seen it with their own eyes. You wait till you’ve been to sea as long as I have, and you’ll know” (p. 43).
Two Years Before the Mast (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2