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

by Richard Henry Dana

  Dana designed The Seaman’s Friend to empower all seamen and contribute to the welfare of the common sailor. As a lawyer starting out in his career, Dana also saw the book’s value to his future success. He wrote in his journal, “This is purely a business book.”42

  Dana had opened his first law office in September 1840 and was soon busy with three cases. According to his biographer Charles Francis Adams, who later would work for Dana, the office was a unique legal setup and often a bit of a spectacle. “In those days, and indeed long afterwards, his office was apt to be crowded with unkempt, roughly dressed seamen, and it smelled on such occasions much like a forcastle.”43

  Dana maintained contact with his old shipmates, scanning the shipping news for ship arrivals. He visited the Alert’s forecastle, and in 1843 his former mates came to his office to catch him up on their latest California trip. According to fellow Brahmin Henry Adams, Dana never lost the rough and ready look of his sailor days. In his autobiography, Adams reflected on Dana’s appearance, noting that he

  affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a daylaborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust.44

  This was the Dana captured for posterity in the 1840 daguerreotype. The “robust” young sailor/lawyer had the energy, stamina, and tenacity to tackle stodgy maritime law with a passion. His love for meticulous detail, his fine memory, elocution skills, diligent nature, and genuine concern for justice made him the sailors’ favorite representative. But Dana soon learned his defense of the common sailor wasn’t always an easy stand for him to make.

  I often have a good deal to contend with in the slurs or open opposition of masters and owners of vessels whose seamen I undertake to defend or look after. It is more unpleasant when this is retailed by the counsel.... I never have trouble with the upper class of merchants, but only with the small grinding machines and petty traders who save by small medicine chests and poor provisions.45

  Though these sailor cases often did not pay much, Dana was earning a solid reputation. He soon became known as the top American specialist in admiralty law, a pioneer of maritime legal territory. In one challenging case, Dana set the legal precedent for right of way in collisions between sailing ships and steamers.

  In the introduction to a 1911 edition of Two Years Before the Mast, Dana’s son, Richard Henry Dana III, asked the question about his father, “Finally, what did Mr. Dana accomplish for sailors?”46 The son looked to his father’s vow to “redress the grievances” made on the night of the San Pedro floggings by Captain Thompson. Upon his return, Dana had tried to prosecute Thompson, but the ill-tempered captain had suffered a worse fate; he had died of a fever off the coast of Sumatra. In 1842 Dana took action against another abusive captain. In a case involving a vicious assault on two seamen, Dana had the captain responsible legally detained until the issue was sorted out.

  But Dana’s view of flogging and corporal punishment was tempered by the practical concerns of maintaining efficient management with unruly crews. In weighing the captain’s authority against the sailors’ needs, Dana considered the captain’s huge responsibilities. In Two Years he reasoned, “In the first place, I have no fancies about equality on board ship. It is a thing out of the question, and certainly, in the present state of mankind, not to be desired” (p. 358). Dana felt that as a sailor he “would not wish to have the power of the captain diminished an iota.”

  As brutal as he believed flogging to be, Dana also believed the punishment had its place as an effective deterrent, one to be used as a last resort. But in cases such as Captain Thompson’s abuse of power, Dana vehemently defended a sailor’s right to challenge a captain’s authority. Dana’s son wrote of his father’s effective and intelligent “pay back” to Thompson. The writer had found redress not through mutiny but “by awakening a ‘strong sympathy’ for the sailor ‘by a voice from the forecastle,’ in his ‘Two Years before the Mast.’”47

  Many who read Dana’s book in 1840 interpreted it as a clear call for action against such injustices. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote enthusiastically of his former Cambridge pupil’s sea book in an 1840 article for The Dial. Emerson thought Dana’s truths would “serve to hasten the day of reckoning between society and the sailor.”48 While there is no concrete evidence to suggest Dana’s book had any impact on flogging’s demise a decade later; at the very least Two Years Before the Mast contributed to the debate by giving witness to a ghastly misuse of power.

  Dana believed that the real solution to harsh corporal punishment was a spiritual one. With religious instruction and general education, he reasoned that “as seamen improve, punishment will become less necessary; and as the character of officers is raised, they will be less ready to inflict it” (p. 364). In his way of thinking, such moral improvements would diminish the hardship and depravity of shipboard life.

  Dana’s Mark and Echo

  When William Clark Russell, the English author of many spectacular sea stories, reflected on the tradition of nautical tales, he pointed to the one dramatic turning point in the history of the literary genre. The plain truth began with Richard H. Dana’s book Two Years Before the Mast and was expanded upon by the works of Herman Melville.

  The ocean is the theatre of more interests than boys would care to follow. We laugh with Marryat; we read Cooper for his “plots;” we find much that is dashing and flattering to our patriotism in the “Tom Bowlings,” and “Will Watches,” and “Tough Yarns,” and “Topsail Sheet-blocks;” in the sprawling and fighting and drinking school of sea yarns; but when we turn to Dana and Melville, we find that the real life of the sea is not to be found between yellow covers adorned with catching cuts; that all the romance does not lie in cocked-hats and epaulets, but that by far the largest proportion of the sentiment, the pathos of the deep, the bitterness and suffering of the sailor’s life, must be sought in the gloomy forecastle of the humble coaster, in the deckhouses of the deep-laden cargo-steamer, in the crew’s dwelling-place on board the big ship trading to Australia and India and China.49

  Dana’s honest “voice from the forecastle” approach signaled the end of the high seas folly and romance novel with what Russell saw as the stereotype of Jack Tar—the “jolly, drinking, dancing, skylarking fellow.”50 With Dana, the common sailor finally had a real voice in literature. As a sailor, Russell appreciated both Dana’s and Melville’s “white gloves off” approach to sea novels.

  They were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle; how men live down in that gloomy cave, how and what they eat, and where they sleep; what pleasures they take, what their sorrows and wrongs are; how they are used when they quit their black sea-parlors in response to the boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day or by night.51

  The impact of Two Years Before the Mast was acknowledged immediately. Its exacting detail startled readers and excited critics.

  Reviewers were quick to praise the book’s clear, direct style, its convincing portraits, and what William Cullen Bryant proclaimed its “perfect verity.” Others predicted that Dana’s depiction of sailors would shatter any romantic illusions eager young boys might harbor about going to sea. E. T. Channing believed the common sailor would now be seen as “a slave of the worst kind, for his toil is a peril,—industry and exposure go hand in hand.” The forecastle, according to Channing, was a “den of horrors.” The New York Review went so far as to call it “the most undesirable of asylums.”

  Two Years Before the Mast was hailed by one British reviewer as a “new department of narrative literature.”52 Indeed Dana’s sea-log storytelling style inspired a decade of popular sailor narratives. James Fenimore Cooper, author of several sea romances, followed Dana’s example by editing and publishing Ned Myers: A Life Be
fore the Mast; this true account of one sailor’s life appeared in 1843. Other sailors wrote out their many decades of hardship and adventure on the water: Nicholas Isaacs in Twenty Years Before the Mast (1845), Samuel Leech in Thirty Years from Home; or, A Voice from the Main Deck (1843), and William Nevens in Forty Years at Sea (1831). Fellow New England author Nathaniel Hawthorne published his Journal of an African Cruiser in 1845, and Herman Melville would build on the tradition with his books Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850); he later transformed this tradition in Moby-Dick (1851). Looking at this inspired progression, W. Clark Russell reflected, “Melville wrote out of his heart and out of wide and perhaps bitter experience; he enlarged our knowledge of the life of the deep by adding many descriptions to those which Dana had already given.... Dana sighted her, but Melville lived in her.” 53

  In the 1892 introduction to Melville’s Pacific adventure Typee, Arthur Stedman speculated, “I fancy that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast’ which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville’s breast.”54 In fact, Herman Melville had read Two Years Before the Mast some time before January 3, 1841, the day he sailed from Massachusetts for the Pacific on the whaler Acushnet, and Melville refers to Dana’s book in White-jacket. In his own attempt to conjure up the drama of Cape Horn, Melville concedes defeat: “But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable “Two Years Before the Mast.’ But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.”55

  Melville and Dana related many of the same events, by virtue of the sailor-authors’ common elemental subject. Both chronicle young men’s first voyages and their initiation into maritime life—all suffered through bouts of seasickness, getting their sea legs, and learning wearisome daily routines. Along the way the green hands encountered the bewitching mysteries and harsh realities of shipboard existence, bearing witness to abusive captains and the solemnity of death at sea. Curiously, both Dana and Melville extolled the many attributes of their perfect Herculean sailor in great detail.

  Although Dana’s accounts tend to have a more reportorial quality in their telling, there is often a poetic flow buried in his simple, realistic descriptions of the quieter moments aboard. At these lovely points, Dana catches his breath to revel in the natural splendor of icebergs, sleeping albatrosses, and starry nights. W. Clark Russell remarked on one of Dana’s “passages of pathos and beauty.” For Russell the sailor, there was “nothing in Melville to equal in simple, unaffected beauty Dana’s description of an old sailor lying over a jibboom on a fine night and looking up at the stirless canvas white as sifted snow with moonlight. Full of rich poetry, too, is Dana’s description of the still night broken by the breathing of shadowy shapes of whales.”56

  Russell maintained that the biggest link between the two authors was their undisputed place in American maritime literature. He credited them both with “seizing the pen for a handspike,” to pry open “the sealed lid under which the merchant-seaman lay caverned.”57

  Dana exposed another great unknown to Americans and the world. Without realizing the historic significance of his accounts, Dana was documenting a primitive California as it existed just before a period of great change. The California Dana witnessed as a hidedrogher was a remote Mexican territory in transition. Its established Spanish mission structure was crumbling with the advent of secularization. Dana put into archival record his observations of the eroding and deserted-looking mission houses with their “impression of decayed grandeur.” He preserved for posterity many quaint images of ports—including Santa Barbara, with its one vessel in the bay, and Monterey, with its plain little presidio flying a Mexican flag. Dana had the curious and investigative eye of a sociologist. He created elaborate portraits of the Mexican province, on the way introducing readers to this faraway world of three-day-long fandangos, spirited cock-fights, leather bank notes, and free-roaming horses. He documented customs, language, and dress. Dana’s impressions at age nineteen often betrayed inexperience, naivete, and prejudice, and his portraits of Californians were far from flattering. As an ambitious young Yankee, he observed Californians to be “an idle, thriftless people, [who] can make nothing for themselves” (p. 78). Dana was equally ungenerous when describing California, a place “at the ends of the earth; on a coast almost solitary; in a country where there is neither law nor gospel” (p. 94).

  One aspect he couldn’t fault was the weather. Dana shared California’s golden secret. It was a land of sunshine, “blessed with a climate, than which there can be no better in the world” (p. 172). He also saw the undeveloped potential of each place he visited. Dana wrote that most of California “abounds in grapes” (p. 78). But he could not foresee the greatest potential—the Gold Rush, which would come only twelve years after he left the west coast for Boston.

  Dana’s book became the Bible for thousands of dreamers. Fortyniners scoured its pages for information about this promising new world. Although Dana did not see a cent of this gold fever profit in sales, his book had made him famous. When he returned to the prosperous and drastically changed California of 1859, he was a celebrated visitor. “I cannot pause for the civility of referring to the many kind attentions I received, and the society of educated men and women from all parts of the Union I met with; where New England, the Carolinas, Virginia, and the new West sat side by side with English, French, and German civilization” (p. 395).

  Dana the author was also known and feted in England. Anthony Trollope found the American to be “one of the most entertaining raconteurs I have ever met,”58 and he and Dana began a correspondence. Dickens requested Dana’s presence at dinner, and according to Dana’s son, his father also “received kindly words of appreciation” 59 from his esteemed contemporaries overseas Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Lord Henry Peter Brougham, and Dana’s biographer noted that Dana’s reputation was greater in England than at home in the states. A literary and social reception given in Dana’s honor during his London visit in 1856 was, according to Charles Francis Adams, “probably the most agreeable episode of its kind in his life.”60

  At home in Cambridge, Dana was embraced by the brightest figures and thinkers of his Brahmin society. He was one of the fourteen distinguished members of the Saturday Club, a cultural association of scholars, statesmen, poets, doctors, and lawyers. Fellow club members included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Emerson’s son, Edward Waldo, wrote about “how the Club would settle itself to listen when Dana had a story to tell. Not a word was missed, and those who were absent were told at the next Club what they had lost. Emerson [Ralph Waldo] smoked his cigar and was supremely happy, and laughed under protest when the point of the story was reached.”61

  By this time Dana was also receiving wide acclaim as a specialist in admiralty law, arguing important, groundbreaking cases. But Dana’s social conscience and passion for justice demanded greater expression. In the late 1840s his attention turned to the anti-slavery movement. He was one of the founders of the Free-Soil Party and became a defender of runaway slaves, providing free defense counsel for three fugitives named Shadrach, Sims, and Burns. Dana’s involvement angered many in Boston, and during the 1854 trial of Anthony Burns, Dana was assaulted late one night and struck on the side of the head; he recovered and continued representing Bums.

  His brave defense of justice is commemorated in an engraved silver plate at his home on Green Street in Cambridge. It reads, “TO RICHARD H. DANA, Jr. for his manly and gratuitous defense of the unalienable rights of Anthony Burns who was kidnapped at Boston, May 24th and doomed to eternal bondage, June 2nd, 1854. From a few of his fellow-citizens.”62

  Edward Waldo Emerson remembered Dana as “the counsel of the sailor and the slave,—persistent, courageous, hard-fighting, skilful, but still the advocate of the poor and the unpopular.63 Dana had voiced this strong passion for helping the le
ss fortunate at the very beginning of his career. As a young law student writing out his sea story, he made this plea for deeper human understanding and justice, which appears near the end of chapter XXVIII of Two Years Before the Mast.

  We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.

  Anne Spencer is the author of Alone at Sea: The Adventures of Joshua Slocum and three books of sea stories and folklore for young adults. She is a documentary maker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Radio, and lives in Toronto.

  Notes

  1 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Brahmin Caste of New England,” Atlantic Monthly 5:27 (January 1860); the article was chapter 1 in a series of articles entitled The Professor’s Story.

  2 Holmes, “Brahmin Caste.”

  3 Holmes, “Brahmin Caste.”

  4 Richard Henry Dana Jr., An Autobiographical Sketch (1815-1842), edited by Robert F. Metzdorf (Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1953): unsourced historical anecdote in Metzdorfs Notes section, page 99, note 6.

  5 Richard Henry Dana Jr., The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 3 vols., edited by Robert F. Lucid (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 7.

  6 Journal, p. 7.