Two Years Before the Mast (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Richard Henry Dana

  Dana did the work required of him, playing by ship rules. He conscientiously contributed to the efficient working of the company’s business on sea and land, sometimes overextending himself to prove he was really just one of the crew. At one point he even scaled down a 400-foot cliff to dislodge a few dollars worth of hides. But Dana was never wholeheartedly one of the crew. He sailed with a sort of Brahmin safety net in place—his connections to influential circles back in Boston. He used this backup only once on the voyage—a time when he became frantic over rumors circulating of an extended and indefinite stay on the California coast. Dana viewed his plight as being of greater importance and urgency than that of the rest of the crew since “one year more or less might be of small consequence for others,” while for him, he believed, “it was everything” (p. 174). When push came to shove at one critical moment, Dana played his Brahmin class privilege as his trump card, arranging an exchange by buying his way onto the returning ship, Alert. His shipmates, incensed by the injustice, struck out. “Oh, yes!” they scolded him, “the captain has let you off, because you are a gentleman’s son, and have got friends, and know the owners” (p. 267).

  It was, in fact, the only time when this kind of class distinction became an issue. The greatest class disparity on board was between the forecastle crew and the quarterdeck ship’s officers under the command of the ill-tempered Captain Frank Thompson. The captain had given fair warning of his demands and his temperament at the outset of the voyage, when he stated for the crew’s record, “If we get along well together, we shall have a comfortable time; if we don’t, we shall have hell afloat” (p. 10). When the Pilgrim was anchored off San Pedro during the mid-winter of 1835, tensions rose, and that threatened hell surfaced. Captain Thompson’s pent-up wrath exploded on a slow-witted sailor. The unfortunate Sam Sparks was seized and flogged by the captain. Thompson whipped himself into a sadistic dance of fury fueled by the power of his own raging words. “Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” he yelled at Sam, “he can’t help you. Call on Captain Thompson, he’s the man!” (p. 104).

  This display of unrestrained rage and brutal corporal punishment hit Dana on a gut level. The horror of the scene, given Dana’s own history of mistreatment, made him physically ill. A second flogging of a protesting shipmate quieted any further displays of crew solidarity. Dana reflected on the dangers of addressing any injustice then and accepted that, even with his New England influence, he was impotent to speak out. But he wouldn’t be in the future. With his legal mind awakened by the cause and his sympathies firmly with his fellow sailors, Dana made a vow that, “if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one” (p. 106).

  The scholar in Dana embraced all of these new experiences as lessons, and he courted the best teacher for each assignment. As the Pilgrim sailed along the coast of California, he “cultivated” the acquaintance of a retainer of a passenger—an impoverished aristocrat, Don Juan Bandini—to learn more about Mexican politics, culture, and society, knowing he would gain “a greater knowledge” from Bandini’s servant “than I could have learned from almost any one else” (p. 235). This rugged education, with its courses in Californian geography, sociology, and the Spanish language, was satisfying to the exiled college student, but when a Boston paper arrived in California with an account of his Harvard class’s graduating exercises, Dana joked about the difference in his situation. While his classmates marched off the stage, he mused, “upon the very same day, their classmate was walking up and down a California beach with a hide upon his head” (p. 252).

  Dana took particular pride in his nautical achievements, especially when he mastered difficult tasks. He found the “systematic and strict”24 teacher he had craved in his youth in an old sailor who taught him how properly to send down a royal-yard. This was Dana’s “first act of what the sailors will allow to be seamanship,” and he thrilled to the mate’s “well done” after his feat, with “as much satisfaction as I ever felt at Cambridge on seeing a ‘bene’ at the foot of a Latin exercise” (p. 74). Dana’s most revered sailor-teacher was his watchmate, Tom Harris. Dana absorbed every lesson the seasoned sea dog had to teach.

  In fact, taking together all that I learned from him of seamanship, of the history of sailors’ lives, of practical wisdom, and of human nature under new circumstances—a great history from which many are shut out,—I would not part with the hours I spent in the watch with that man for any given hours of my life passed in study and social intercourse (p. 196).

  Dana met his sternest teacher on the return voyage. Nature would administer the final and supreme test—Cape Horn in all its wintry fury. Dana and the crew climbed ice-encased rigging and worked the “stiff as sheet iron” sails with bare hands. The agony of frozen flesh and unhealed cuts that turned to running sores in the cold was made even more intolerable by the misery of working with soaking-wet feet and sleeping in sopping clothes in a leaky forecastle. This passage at the “extremity of the globe” (p. 297)—through the trials of pelting horizontal hail and sleet storms and large, threatening masses of floating ice in the ship’s path—made for a grim final maritime exam requiring all-out endurance.

  This test of mythic proportions was the crowning achievement to all the other initiation challenges in Dana’s two-year voyage away from his safe New England home base. Rising to these demanding and tough occasions “brought out manhood,”25 according to Dana’s biographer Charles Francis Adams.

  Close contact with the coarse and the material in nature and man is a crucial test; but while it develops whatever is coarse and material in those subjected to it,—while the baser natures succumb, he who has in him the qualities of true manhood comes out from the ordeal purged and strengthened; and so the forecastle did Dana nothing but good. He came out of it better in every respect than he went into it. Whatever measure of success and fame he afterwards achieved in life was in all human probability due to it. That which would have ruined a coarser nature simply toned him up to the proper level. He ceased to be too fine for every-day use.26

  Dana’s two-year journey came to a close on September 20, 1836. When he walked down the gang plank to greet friends and family, the sea change was evident, his appearance proof of his weathering. The weak-eyed Harvard undergraduate returned with clear vision and was now a “‘rough alley’ looking fellow, with duck trowsers and red shirt, long hair, and face burnt as black as an Indian’s” (p. 354). To Dana’s restored eyes, the townspeople looked sickly; “pallid & emaciated” as if Boston had suffered a “famine or a fever.”27 Just as the “fine drapery” (p. 357) of romance had lifted early on in his outward voyage, the archetypal elements of his myth-like journey found grounding at anchorage in Boston harbor. At first, Dana felt apathy, knowing the brilliant tones of living life large and with vital immediacy would soon pale and settle into the familiar grays of Brahmin security and duty. But in hindsight, Dana reflected that the return to reliable refinement was mostly a welcome relief, if at first a jolt to his senses.

  To be transferred in a day from a forecastle, the contact of none but rough & vulgar men, servile duty, blasphemy, obscenity & tyranny, to perfect freedom & leisure, literary conversation, refined language & manners, with all the arts & ornaments of polished life, added to a personal affection not to be doubted, was a change wh. has not befallen many.28

  The Dark and the Light Together

  Dana had missed the pleasures of elite aesthetics and stringent academics. He was keen to embrace his old life and tackled his studies with a vengeance. That December, after passing the required entrance examination, Dana returned to Harvard and thrived in his senior year. He graduated at the top of the class, taking prizes in both English and elocution. Charles Francis Adams attributed Dana’s splendid academic return to the “state of intellectual famine”29 he had endured “during the most germinating period of life.”30 Indeed, in those voyage years when “his mind had been ly
ing fallow,”31 Dana admitted he had devoured any newspaper, jest book, or novel that crossed his path, relishing whatever he read as “a spring in a desert land” (p. 163). Adams believed this deep hunger, heightened by Dana’s renewed physical energy, receptivity, and “buoyancy of temperament”32 set in motion his startling early literary and legal career successes.

  The Harvard graduate entered the Dane School of Law at Cambridge in the autumn of 1837. Aware of his family’s long legal lineage, he considered his fate sealed. He noted in his “Autobiographical Sketch” that he had held a “dread of the profession”33 since he was a child. While he acknowledged the law to be an honorable profession, he fully expected it to be “hard, dry, uninteresting, uncertain & slavish” 34 for him. The one hope in this bleak life choice lay in his passionate response to the injustice suffered by sailors.

  In his second year of law school, Dana began writing out the experiences of his sea voyage. Most of his story would need to come from memory. Dana had kept a detailed journal during those two years at sea and in California, but upon landing in Boston, his sea chest, entrusted to his cousin Frank Dana, was lost at the wharf. With the chest’s disappearance, Dana lost all souvenirs, his clothing, and his record of the trip, complete with detailed impressions and details of his daily routine. Dana still had the small notebook in which he had recorded some vital moments of his time away. He drew on these short, matter-of-fact entries, along with several letters he had sent to relatives, to flesh out the book. Dana’s recollections proved reliable and vivid. He was able to complete the close to 300-page first draft of his book in six months.

  Revisiting the gruesome details of the flogging, the misery of the forecastle, and the grueling conditions he and the sailors endured stirred Dana’s strong sense of justice. The idealistic young writer felt compelled to add a preface in which he clearly stated the objectives of his book.

  If it shall interest the general reader, and call more attention to the welfare of seamen, or give any information as to their real condition, which may serve to raise them in the rank of beings, and to promote in any measure their religious and moral improvement, and diminish the hardships of their daily life, the end of its publication will be answered (p. 4).

  Dana then wrote a lengthy concluding chapter in which he offered his suggestions for such religious, moral, and quality of life improvements. Two Years Before the Mast was finished in January 1839. Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Ralph Waldo, would later reflect on the importance of Dana’s experiences before the mast: “Not only did it cure his eyes, but it opened them to the lot, which he shared, and to the point of view, of men humble, toiling, exposed, and often abused; it softened him to human beings, and hardened to danger.”35

  With his manuscript completed, Dana, the law student, pursued another venue for his growing passion for maritime justice. He wrote an article, “Cruelty to Seamen—Case of Nichols and Couch,” which was published in the American Jurist and Law magazine in the autumn of 1839.

  Meanwhile, Dana had passed his voyage manuscript to his literary father and poet uncle, Washington Allston, for evaluation. They immediately encouraged its publication and arranged for it to be shown to publishers. Harper Brothers was interested and offered the young author a 10 percent share of the royalties after the first 1,000 copies had been sold. The senior Dana encouraged his son to decline the offer and instead accept the alternative offer, a lump sum payment of $250 and several copies. This proved to be an incredibly bad piece of business advice. In the eighteen years Harper Brothers held the copyright, Dana’s sea chronicle would earn the publisher $50,000.

  Two Years Before the Mast appeared in September 1840 as part of the Harper’s Family Library series. The company’s imprint focused on nonfiction and travel writings, but Dana’s diary and log-like account was distinct from other sea literature of the time. This voyage was not being told by one “who goes to sea as a gentleman, ‘with his gloves on.”’ Dana wanted another class of seaman to have a say, “A voice from the forecastle has hardly yet been heard. In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor, before the mast, in the American merchant service” (pp. 3-4).

  This “voice from the forecastle” was arresting. Dana’s detailed descriptions captivated readers with their realism. His clarity of sensory impressions had the effect of taking readers headfirst into the action, whether it was the rocking and lurching of a vessel in heavy seas, freezing and shivering in a damp, dark forecastle, smelling the tar in the ropes, or tasting the salt beef. The book’s focus on the unadorned sailor of the forecastle became a bold and daring expose of maritime life.

  I have adhered closely to fact in every particular, and endeavored to give each thing its true character. In so doing, I have been obliged occasionally to use strong and coarse expressions, and in some instances to give scenes which may be painful to nice feelings; but I have very carefully avoided doing so, whenever I have not felt them essential to giving the true character of a scene. My design is, and it is this which has induced me to publish the book, to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is,—the light and the dark together.

  There were, in fact, a lot of light-gray areas in Dana’s mix of light and dark. In his “Autobiographical Sketch,” Dana wrote that he had “studiously kept out most of my reflections, & much of the wickedness I was placed in the midst of.”36 These darker aspects were expunged, he explained, “from necessity,”37 as Harper’s Family Library promoted its books for use in schools and public libraries. In readying Two Years for publication in 1840, Dana removed much of the unsavory language, the sexual references, the tipsy priests in California, and the crew’s elaborate ruse to fool Mexican revenue agents assessing the ship for duties owed. While Dana gave the graphic details of his friend Hope’s illness, he did not divulge that the sickness afflicting the young Hawaiian was a venereal disease.

  Dana’s fellow sailor on the voyage, Ben Stimson, pointed out some of the missing facts. He wrote a letter to Dana in 1841, to refresh the author’s memory of their encounters with the “beautiful Indian Lasses, who often frequented your humble abode in the hide-house.”38 In his private journal, Dana also remembered a woman who had lived with him for several months during his California stay. Of his own sins from his sailor days, he admitted, “I fell into their ways. When I did, I was as bad as any of them.”39

  Dana hid his own darkness in part to protect his new marriage to Sarah “Sally” Watson in 1841. He also wished to preserve his good reputation and maintain good career prospects. Dana used his journal as his sole confessor in his new life: “The dangers to a young man’s moral purity, & to his nicer sentiments, as well as to his manners, are more to be dreaded in such a life, than gales, mast-heads & yard-arms.”40

  Despite the necessary sanitizing, Dana did shed light on much of the dark and grisly side of life in the forecastle. He wrote a brutally honest account of his shipmates’ floggings, shared the horrendous details of what it meant to have scurvy on board, and described the daily unpleasantness of living and sleeping in wet, mildewed clothing in the “wet, leaky hole” (p. 318) that was the forecastle.

  Many of the dark accounts read like cautionary tales offering up cruel lessons of wasted lives. In “Twenty-four Years After,” an account Dana wrote of his trip to California in 1859, he remembered a dying teenage boy “ruined by every vice a sailor’s life absorbs” (p. 405). He told the story of a young boy put on board against his will, and added many tales of carousing sailors who, having spent their advances, had no alternative but to ship out on long and dangerous voyages. Dana spared little in his pathetic portrait of his crew mate Tom Harris.

  One night, when giving me an account of his life, and lamenting the years of manhood he had thrown away, he said that there, in the forecastle, at the foot of the steps—a chest of old clothes—was the result of twenty-two years of hard labor and exposure—worked like a horse, and treated like a dog
. As he grew older, he began to feel the necessity of some provision for his later years, and came gradually to the conviction that rum had been his worst enemy (p. 195).

  Harris informed Dana of the worst workings in a sailors’ world: the horrendous treatment of the sick and dying, the corrupt ship owners with their secretive means of control, and the “tyranny and hardship which had driven men to piracy” (p. 196).

  Understanding the extent of this corrupt and cruel world led to Dana’s growing empathy with the sailors’ lot. Each miserable story fueled his passion to bring legal redress to these everyday horrors. With the unique vantage point of having lived the hard life and of also knowing the law, Dana was fast becoming an authority on the legal issues that mattered most to sailors. In 1841 he published The Seaman’s Friend, a reference book designed to bring clarity to matters of practical seamanship and existing maritime laws. He dedicated his comprehensive handbook “To all sea-faring persons, and especially to those commencing the sea life;—to owners and insurers of vessels;—to judges and practitioners in maritime law;—and to all persons interested in acquainting themselves with the laws, customs, and duties of Seamen,41

  Dana covered all the nautical particulars; he categorized and cataloged each rope, sail, and gale of wind. The fastidious young lawyer even compiled a thirty-five-page dictionary of sea terms. Dana felt such exacting definition was a necessity. He had learned early in his law school days how ignorant many in his profession were of maritime matters. One “lawyer of repute” horrified Dana when he asked a sailor on the witness stand “whether the crew had ‘got up from the table’ when a certain thing happened” (see endnote 44). Dana, the common sailor, knew the miserable truth—that “Jack” was lucky to dine on a sea chest.