Two Years Before the Mast

by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

  RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.

  Richard Henry Dana, Jr., was born on August 1, 1815, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a prominent Brahmin family whose roots dated back to the early days of the original Bay Colony. His grandfather Francis Dana was a delegate to the Continental Congress and served in the administration of George Washington. His father, Richard Henry Dana, Sr., made a name for himself as a poet and man of letters who helped found the North American Review. Dana received an elementary education at various grammar schools in the Boston area and was briefly a pupil of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He entered Harvard College in 1831 but was forced to drop out during his junior year when an attack of measles temporarily affected his eyesight. Unable to afford a gentleman’s grand tour of Europe and determined to break with convention, he signed on as a common seaman before the mast (the quarters of common sailors were in the forward part of the ship—that is, in front of [before] the mast) on the merchant brig Pilgrim and in 1834 sailed around Cape Horn to California. “When I recall the motives which governed me in this choice,” Dana later reflected, “I can hardly tell which predominated, a desire to cure my eyes, my love of adventure and the attraction of the novelty of a life before the mast, or anxiety to escape from the depressing situation of inactivity and dependence at home.” Upon returning to Boston aboard the Alert in 1836, Dana re-entered Harvard and graduated the following year. Afterward, while attending Harvard Law School, he began writing a realistic account of his seagoing adventure.

  Two Years Before the Mast was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1840. William Cullen Bryant praised it as “a new thing in our literature.” Herman Melville was deeply affected by the work and corresponded with Dana about sea fiction. As the writer Wright Morris later observed, “The extent to which young Dana spoke to Melville, a young man with his eyes and ears wide open, is superficially apparent everywhere [in the book].” Originally written to expose the brutal injustices of life at sea, Two Years Before the Mast remains a powerful portrayal of courage and endurance. “Dana’s small book is a very great book,” judged D. H. Lawrence. “It is the story of a man pitted in conflict against the sea, the vast, almost omnipotent element. In contest with this cosmic enemy, man finds his further ratification, his further ideal vindication. He comes out victorious, but not till the sea has tortured his living, integral body, and made him pay something for his triumph in consciousness.” Today critics generally regard Two Years Before the Mast as a defining influence of the literary period that has come to be called the American Renaissance.

  Dana was admitted to the bar in 1840 and immediately embarked on a legal career. He displayed an impressive command of maritime law in The Seaman’s Friend (1841), a handbook that confirmed his reputation as a champion of the common sailor. In 1841 he married Sarah Watson, of Hartford, Connecticut, with whom he had six children. Active in public affairs, Dana served as a spokesman for the controversial Free Soil movement, aimed at stopping the spread of slavery, and twice came to the defense of fugitive slaves. In 1855 he was asked to join the Saturday Club, a circle of literati that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A brief visit to Cuba in February 1859 inspired Dana to write To Cuba and Back (1859), which enjoyed moderate success as a travel guide, and in July of that year he set out on an around-the-world odyssey that lasted fourteen months. During the 1860s he was twice elected to the Massachusetts legislature, yet he was unsuccessful in his bid for a seat in the United States Congress. In 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant nominated him to become ambassador to England, but Dana’s political enemies defeated the appointment in the Senate. He subsequently retired to Paris to write a book on international law and spent the last years of his life abroad. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., died in Rome of pneumonia on January 6, 1882, and was buried there in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. Three volumes culled from his papers have been published posthumously: Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son (1910), An Autobiographical Sketch (1815–1842) (1953), and The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1968).

  CONTENTS

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by GARY KINDER

  TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST

  APPENDIX: “TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER”

  GLOSSARY

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  NOTES

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  INTRODUCTION

  Gary Kinder

  I can picture the scene. After dickering with Richard Henry Dana’s literary agent, a Hollywood producer acquires the rights to Two Years Before the Mast, and starts pitching it to studios. He’s got two minutes:

  “Guy goes to Harvard. He’s smart, but he’s having problems with his eyesight from getting measles or something, so he quits school to sail on a hide ship ‘before the mast,’ which means he’ll be just another Jack hanging off the yardarm, so he sails out of Boston, around the Horn, to a faraway land called California, we’re talking 1834, and before long he’s unreeving the studding-sail with the best of them, but then he watches two shipmates flogged bloody by an insane captain, takes mental note and vows revenge, sees another shipmate tumble off the main mast in a gale and ponders death at sea, then gets seduced by the island of Robinson Crusoe, witnesses a California back when the entire population wouldn’t fill the restaurants now in Long Beach, and of course, having gone to Harvard and being well-versed in Greek and Latin and fluent in French, he teaches himself how to speak Spanish and becomes the ship’s interpreter, which puts him in the middle of California society, where he observes trysts and intrigues, jots down political and sociological observations on the mixing of diverse cultures, dissects men and their personalities, and manhood itself, races horses on the California beach, encounters beautiful señoritas, frequents the tiny coastal villages of San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Monterey, sails into a pristine, pre–Gold Rush, empty San Francisco Bay, we may have to digitize that one, and makes prescient predictions, carries a lot of hundred-pound hides on his head through the surf, and becomes blood brothers with a Kanaka, before sailing back around the Horn in the dead of an Antarctic winter in the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure, facing hurricane winds, snow, and gigantic icebergs, are you with me, but when he returns to Harvard, he’s hailed as a hero by his classmates, writes a book, which becomes a bestseller and later a classic in American literature, and goes on to become a famous lawyer. I’m sorry? How old? We’ll make him about nineteen.”

  I’m sure the studios would pass, because it’s a period piece and would have to be shot on water. But this is a great book. That may seem presumptuous—of course it’s a great book—but I’m not commenting on its timelessness or its place in history; I mean that I really enjoyed spending time in Dana’s story, and I admire how he tells it. It is delightful and informative and stimulating. It doesn’t come close to accomplishing what Dana hoped to accomplish, but that’s not Dana’s fault. He tries to warn people of all the maltreatment, the danger, and the bad food at sea, but they just won’t listen.

  When the mad captain flogs two of his shipmates, Dana writes, “I thought of our situation, living under a tyranny; of the character of the country we were in; of the length of the voyage, and of the uncertainty attending our return to America; and then, if we should return, of the prospect of obtaining justice and satisfaction for these poor men; and vowed 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.”

  And so he does. He sits down and writes a five-hundred-page classic. In his preface, he states that his purpose is to portray the life of common sailors “as it really is, the light and the dark together,�
�� and if he happens to call attention to their frequent mistreatment and that helps to diminish “the hardships of their daily life,” then his purpose will be served. I imagine that after the book came out a lot of people did begin to look upon sailors with a little more respect, but according to historians their lives didn’t change much. I also imagine that, like a slingshot, Dana’s writings launched tens of thousands of young wanderlusters straight into the serpentine clutches of all those cartographers’ dragons depicting the Unknown.

  This is where Dana dashes his own hopes. As hard as he tries to discourage them from taking their lust to wander aboard merchant ships, every line beckons like a siren’s song, and he can’t eat enough cold salt beef in a cramped, damp, heaving hold to discourage the adventurous from hopping the next freighter to Shanghai. I had wanderlust bad enough to venture from home, in sunny south Florida, with temperatures in the 70s, to the snowy peaks of Idaho, where it was 30 below. God knows where I would have ended up if I had read this book first. There cannot be a more romantic tale.

  The day Dana leaves Boston Harbor, he is nineteen years, thirteen days old. He arrives on board at twelve, having changed from the tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves of a Harvard undergraduate into the loose duck trousers, checked shirt, and tarpaulin hat of a sailor. “While I supposed myself to be looking as salt as Neptune himself,” he admits, “I was, no doubt, known for a landsman by every one on board as soon as I hove in sight.”

  This sentence sets the honest, self-effacing, always perceptive, sometimes humorous tone for his narrative. Within moments he is reminded that his sailor costume does not come with instructions. “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.”

  Which makes his decision all the more admirable. Can you imagine walking onto that deck not knowing your aft from a hole in the ship, looking up at all that rigging seeing all those tough, sinewy, craggy, experienced salts, and having even the glimmer of a thought, “Oh yeah, I can handle this.” But a little over two years later, he returns to Boston Harbor, and “There came down from aloft a ‘rough alley’ looking fellow, with duck trowsers and red shirt, long hair, and face burnt as black as an Indian’s.”

  That’s heady stuff, to be able to climb into the rigging and dangle a hundred feet above the deck, so high that the billowing sails obscure the hull from which they sprout, and actually know why you’re up there and what you’re supposed to be doing and doing it right. Dana’s transformation is alluring, and it starts as soon as he has “pitch[ed] all [his] sweetmeats overboard,” i.e., barfed over the taffrail, and filled his gut with half a pound of that cold salt beef and a couple of sea biscuits.

  For those who would follow, Dana warns about all the tarring, greasing, oiling, varnishing, painting, scraping, and scrubbing required over a long voyage, and the watching, steering, reefing, furling, bracing, making and setting, pulling, hauling and climbing in every direction. He reveals that the mate’s duty is to keep everyone at work at all times, even if it’s no more than scraping rust from the anchor chains. “In no state prison,” he writes, “are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched.”

  Much of the time their clothes are wet, and the only change is from wet to more wet. Belowdecks, they can’t read or work, because “we were too tired, the hatchways were closed down, and everything was wet and uncomfortable, black and dirty, heaving and pitching.”

  Every time the ship jibes, Dana reminds the reader of the hardships, and in case the reader is still thinking a little too romantically, he summarizes, “A sailor’s life is at best, but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the common-place, and the solemn with the ludicrous.”

  But here’s where he slips. One night in the darkness near the Falkland Islands, with the ship becalmed on a glassy sea and enshrouded by fog, he hears shoals of “sluggish whales.” He leans over the bulwarks, “listening to the slow breathing of the mighty creatures—now one breaking the water just alongside, whose black body I almost fancied that I could see through the fog.” Put yourself up against that bulwark and listen to the snorting and blubbering in the dark only feet away, and try to imagine something more magical. Three weeks later, he rows ashore on the tiny island of Mas Atierra, three hundred miles off the coast of Chile, the same island where the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe (which Dana had read) was marooned for four years, “the most romantic spot of earth that my eyes had ever seen.”

  Even the terrifying storms seem only majestic and awe-inspiring, providing no more than a nice shot of adrenaline as the ship bucks in a maritime rodeo. “By the time we had got down upon deck again,” he describes one storm, “the little brig was plunging madly into a tremendous head sea, which at every dive rushed in through the bow-ports and over the bows, and buried all the forward part of the vessel…. For some time we could do nothing but hold on, and the vessel diving into two huge seas, one after the other, plunged us twice into the water up to our chins.” All of this is accompanied by the hardest driving hail and sleet he has ever seen, and nothing much changes for the next five days. And this is springtime down at the Horn. When they head back a year and a half later, it’s winter, and the weather’s not so nice.

  After 150 days at sea, they reach Santa Barbara. (Think about this the next time your flight from New York to LA. is delayed and you’re thirty minutes late for dinner.) Here we begin to see a California with no freeways, no office towers, no strip malls, no airports, no oil derricks, no Hollywood sign, no suburbs, no tract houses, no billboards, no cars.

  “I shall never forget the impression which our first landing on the beach of California made upon me. The sun had just gone down; it was getting dusky; the damp night wind was beginning to blow, and the heavy swell of the Pacific was setting in, and breaking in loud and high ‘combers’ upon the beach…. We pulled strongly in, and as soon as we felt that the sea had got hold of us and was carrying us in with the speed of a race-horse, we threw the oars as far from the boat as we could, and took hold of the gunwale, ready to spring out and seize her when she struck, the officer using his utmost strength to keep her stern on. We were shot up upon the beach like an arrow from a bow, and seizing the boat, ran her up high and dry, and soon picked up our oars.”

  As I read this, I wanted to go back to a time when Santa Barbara was a “large bay without a vessel in it; the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach; the white mission; the dark town and the high, treeless mountains.” When Monterey was “decidedly the pleasantest and most civilized-looking place in California,” but also “a great place for cock-fighting, gambling of all sorts, fandangos, and every kind of amusement and knavery.” I wanted to climb a cliff rising nearly five hundred feet straight up out of the sea that levels off in “high table land,” stretching beyond eye’s reach, where the only human habitat is the small white mission of San Juan Capistrano, “the only romantic spot in California.”

  I had to keep reminding myself that at this time there was nothing on the West Coast of the United States. The United States did not have a west coast. California belonged to Mexico. Scattered along thousands of square miles were a few presidios, a cattle ranch here and there, and some sparse settlements, by far the largest of which was an oasis called Pueblo de los Angeles. Sometimes in a harbor there were one, or two, or three other ships, but no more, and often, Dana’s ship was the only one. Nothing else. His writing made me want to experience that California, when I could ride a horse down Main Street in Pueblo de los Angeles, when I could sail into San Francisco Bay and see nothing but trees and water and little barren hills, when I could buy beach-front property for a dime and Santa Barbara for five hundred bucks.

  The most re
markable sentence in Two Years Before the Mast appears on page 249. “If California ever becomes a prosperous country this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.”

  The bay is San Francisco, and the date is two days after Christmas, 1835. Twelve years and a few days later, up above, in the Sierra Nevada, a man named James Marshall would roll up his sleeve, reach down into the cold water of John Sutter’s millrace, and pick up a curious yellow rock. Two years later, this remote outpost with one mud hut would become a metropolis approaching a hundred thousand, and the first of the ’49ers steamed right into that bay, which became the hub of the Gold Rush.

  When Dana arrives in California, he teaches himself how to read and speak Spanish, first by studying a dictionary and a grammar text, then by carefully listening to local speech. His resourcefulness opens him to new adventures, for now the captain relies on him to procure provisions and deliver messages ashore, which “gave me opportunities of seeing the customs, characters, and domestic arrangements of the people.”

  He notes that revolutions occur constantly. “Instead of caucusing, paragraphing, libelling, feasting, promising, and lying, as with us, they take muskets and bayonets … and declare a new dynasty.” He observes the Spanish men and finds them proud and extravagant; they throw away money and love to gamble. The women are beautiful, uneducated, and “their morality, of course, is none of the best.” But surprisingly little infidelity occurs, because though the women possess little virtue, the men are poised for revenge at the click of a castanet, and the punishment for an unwary man who smiles in the wrong direction is often “a few inches of cold steel.”

  What interests me as much as Dana’s social and political observations is his knack for putting himself in a good spot to encounter the texture of a place and time: like strolling outside a village away from the grog shops, where he sees a gaggle of little girls dressed all in white with wreaths of flowers on their heads and bouquets in their hands, laughing and skipping to keep up with the coffin bearing the body of one of their own; or finding a horse and saddle for a few pesos to race Italian sailors down hard, flat sandy beaches with the California rollers breaking on shore; or volunteering to row the captain to the beach and coming within ten feet of hitting a breaching humpback, which would have crushed their little gig and blown the pieces into the sky; and always being open to new cultures and friends, which lands him in a hovel on shore, trying to explain to the Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands the concept of steam locomotion.