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Richard Dana was a college student, not a sailor, when he signed onto a ship to California as a common hand. For two years he climbed icy ropes, stood night watches, hauled heavy hides, and saw men punished unfairly. He wrote it all down honestly, the good and the terrible. His book lets you feel exactly what ordinary sailors endured while officers lived in comfort at the back.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. was a Harvard student whose eyesight failed from measles, and doctors suggested an outdoor life. Rather than travel as a passenger, he shipped in 1834 as a common sailor on the brig Pilgrim, bound for California on a hide trading voyage. He kept a journal throughout, and friends urged the honest manuscript he brought home into print in 1840.
Inside, Dana describes the sailor's world from the forecastle, not the captain's cabin: night watches, reefing in storms, Sundays that brought no rest, and the grinding work of curing and loading cattle hides in California ports. A famous flogging scene shows arbitrary power at sea with a lawyer's precision. The return voyage around Cape Horn in winter, aboard the Alert, is a masterpiece of endurance writing.
Dana's book changed how readers imagined sailors, and it helped stir real reform of maritime law, a cause Dana pursued as a lawyer for seamen. Herman Melville admired it, and sea writers have followed its honest path ever since. Anyone who loves true adventure, working lives, or old California will find it gripping. It proves ordinary labor, seen clearly, makes extraordinary literature of the very best kind.
Richard Henry Dana Jr. left Harvard in 1834 and shipped to California as a common sailor, hoping the voyage would cure his weak eyes. Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, tells honestly what life before the mast was really like: storms, floggings, hard labor, and strange ports. It offers the finest firsthand account of ordinary seafaring in the age of sail.
Two Years Before the Mast appeared in 1840 and quietly reset the standard for sea writing. Its author was no professional sailor or literary man but a Harvard undergraduate who had shipped before the mast in 1834, worked the California hide trade for two years, and kept a journal with a future lawyer's eye for fact. Dana published partly to show landsmen what a common sailor's life actually was, a purpose almost no sea book had attempted before his.
The narrative's authority is its enduring claim: watches, weather, food, punishments, and port work are described from the forecastle, by a man who hauled the ropes he describes. The flogging chapters helped move American opinion and law on sailors' treatment, and Melville ranked Dana among his masters. The California sections are now also a primary source for the coast under Mexican rule, its missions, ranchos, and hide ports. First readers should settle into the nautical vocabulary, which Dana mostly teaches by context. Few adventure classics repay patience so completely.
Edition: School edition; Dana text of 1840. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 2055.
The first chapter
The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America. As she was to get under weigh early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o'clock, in full sea-rig, and with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three year voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.
The change from the tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves of an undergraduate at Cambridge, to the loose duck trowsers, checked shirt and tarpaulin hat of a sailor, though somewhat of a transformation, was soon made, and I supposed that I should pass very well for a jack tar. But it is impossible to deceive the practised eye in these matters; and while I supposed myself to be looking as salt as Neptune himself, I was, no doubt, known for a landsman by every one on board as soon as I hove in sight. A sailor has a peculiar cut to his clothes, and a way of wearing them which a green hand can never get. The trowsers, tight round the hips, and thence hanging long and loose round the feet, a superabundance of checked shirt, a low-crowned, well varnished black hat, worn on the back of the head, with half a fathom of black ribbon hanging over the left eye, and a peculiar tie to the black silk neckerchief, with sundry other minutiae, are signs, the want of which betray the beginner at once. Beside the points in my dress which were out of the way, doubtless my complexion and hands were enough to distinguish me from the regular salt, who, with a sun-burnt cheek, wide step, and rolling gait, swings his bronzed and toughened hands athwart-ships, half open, as though just ready to grasp a rope.
"With all my imperfections on my head," I joined the crew, and we hauled out into the stream, and came to anchor for the night. The next day we were employed in preparations for sea, reeving studding-sail gear, crossing royal yards, putting on chafing gear, and taking on board our powder. On the following night, I stood my first watch. I remained awake nearly all the first part of the night from fear that I might not hear when I was called; and when I went on deck, so great were my ideas of the importance of my trust, that I walked regularly fore and aft the whole length of the vessel, looking out over the bows and taffrail at each turn, and was not a little surprised at the coolness of the old salt whom I called to take my place, in stowing himself snugly away under the long boat, for a nap. That was sufficient lookout, he thought, for a fine night, at anchor in a safe harbor.
The next morning was Saturday, and a breeze having sprung up from the southward, we took a pilot on board, hove up our anchor, and began beating down the bay. I took leave of those of my friends who came to see me off, and had barely opportunity to take a last look at the city, and well-known objects, as no time is allowed on board ship for sentiment. As we drew down into the lower harbor, we found the wind ahead in the bay, and were obliged to come to anchor in the roads. We remained there through the day and a part of the night. My watch began at eleven o'clock at night, and I received orders to call the captain if the wind came out from the westward. About midnight the wind became fair, and having called the captain, I was ordered to call all hands. How I accomplished this I do not know, but I am quite sure I did not give the true hoarse, boatswain call of "A-a-ll ha-a-a-nds! up anchor, a-ho-oy!" In a short time every one was in motion, the sails loosed, the yards braced, and we began to heave up the anchor, which was our last hold upon Yankee land. I could take but little part in all these preparations. My little knowledge of a vessel was all at fault. 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. At length those peculiar, long-drawn sounds, which denote that the crew are heaving the windlass, began, and in a few moments we were under weigh. The noise of the water thrown from the bows began to be heard, the vessel leaned over from the damp night breeze, and rolled with the heavy ground swell, and we had actually begun our long, long journey. This was literally bidding "good night" to my native land.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1840. Author died 1882. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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