Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast
1911 Houghton Mifflin Edition
Author(s)	Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Language	English
Genre(s)	Diary
Publisher	Harper and Brothers
Publication date	1840
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., published in 1840, having been written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834. A film adaptation under the same name was released in 1946.

Background

While an undergraduate at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles which affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor on a voyage around Cape Horn on the brig Pilgrim. He returned to Massachusetts two years later aboard the Alert (which left California sooner than the Pilgrim).

He kept a diary throughout the voyage, and, after returning, he wrote a recognized American classic, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, the same year of his admission to the bar.

A sailor's story

The term "before the mast" refers to the quarters of the common sailors — in the forecastle, in the front of the ship. His writing evidences his later sympathy with the lower classes; he later became a prominent anti-slavery activist and helped found the Free Soil Party.

Dana did not set out to write Two Years Before the Mast as a sea adventure, but to highlight how poorly common sailors were treated on ships. It quickly became a best seller.

The journey

Outbound

In the book, which takes place between 1834 and 1836, Dana gives a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is". He sails from Boston to South America and around Cape Horn to California ^[1]. Dana's ship was on a voyage to trade goods from the United States for the Mexican colonial Californian California missions' and ranchos' cow hides. They traded at the ports in San Diego Bay, San Pedro Bay, Santa Barbara Channel, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay.

California

California Hide Trade: Droughing (carrying) hides from an Alta California shore to boat, for exporting.

Dana arrived in Alta California when it was a remote province of independent Mexico, and no longer Spanish colonial Las Californias. He gives descriptions of landing at each of the ports up and down the California coast as they existed then. The ports served (south to north) the Mission San Diego de Alcalá, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Pueblo de Los Angeles (and Mission San Gabriel Arcángel), Mission Santa Barbara (and Presidio of Santa Barbara), Presidio of Monterey, and Presidio of San Francisco with their very small settlements and surrounding large Mexican land grant Ranchos. He also describes the coastal Indigenous peoples, the Mexican Californios' culture, and the immigrants and traders influences from other locales.

The headland bluffs near Mission San Juan Capistrano presented an obstacle to taking the cow hides to the beach for subsequent loading onto the ship. So Dana, along with others of the Pilgrim's crew, tossed the hides from the bluffs, while spinning them like a frisbee. Some hides got stuck part way down the cliff and Dana was lowered with ropes to retrieve them. The headlands, along with the adjacent present day city, took on Dana's name as Dana Point.

Being an intelligent and educated person, he learned Spanish from the Californian Mexicans and became an interpreter for his ship. He befriended Kanakan (native people of the Sandwich Islands—Hawaiian Islands) sailors in the ports, one of whose life Dana would save when his captain would as soon see him die. He spent a season on the San Diego shore preparing hides for shipment to Boston, and his journey home. Dana also makes a tellingly accurate prediction of San Francisco's future growth and significance.

Homebound

On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter he describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote, "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."^[2]

Publication history

Facsimile of an original manuscript page of the book in Richard Henry Dana's hand.

Dana's father first approached Harper and Brothers as they were his publishers, though the Danas rejected the original offer for 10 percent in royalties after the first 1,000 sold.^[3] The manuscript, originally titled Journal, was rejected by four publishing houses after that offer from Harpers in 1839. Two Years Before the Mast was finally published in September 1840 in two versions,^[4] without credit to Dana on the title page.^[5] Dana had asked for assistance from the poet William Cullen Bryant, whose poem "Thanatopsis" was praised by Dana's father. Bryant again brought the manuscript to Harper's, hoping they would pay $500 to its author, though they ultimately paid Dana only $250 along with 24 complimentary copies.^[6] Though the book sold 10,000 copies during its first year, Dana did not receive any royalties from sales of this edition of the book.^[3]

1869 and 1911 editions

In 1869, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. published a new edition which removed some content from the original and added an appendix entitled "Twenty-Four Years After". This appendix recounts his visit to California after the Gold Rush. During this trip, he revisited some of the sites mentioned in the book as well as seeing old friends, including some that had been mentioned in the book, and one unnamed person, the "Agent" (of the trading company), whom he intensely disliked (a man named Fitch, who had married into the wealthy Spanish Colonial Moraga family). He visited the Fremont mining operations in Mariposa County. Along with Jessie Fremont and her party, he went to Yosemite Valley. Stopping along the way at Clark's Station in Wawona, he described Galen Clark as a gracious host.

In 1911, Dana's son, Richard Henry Dana III, added an introduction detailing the "subsequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the reader is made acquainted."

Legacy

With the onset of the 1849 California Gold Rush, Dana's book was one of the few books in existence that described California, adding greatly to the book's readership as well as Dana's renown and legacy. When he returned to San Francisco in 1869 he was treated as a minor celebrity. To this day the book is regarded as a valuable historical resource describing 1830s California.

The geographic headland he wrote of, and the adjacent city, are named Dana Point for him.

There are schools named for him in Southern California, including:

• Richard Henry Dana Elementary School in Dana Point (R.H. Dana )
• Dana Middle School (San Diego)
• Richard Henry Dana Middle School (Arcadia)
• and Richard Henry Dana Middle Schools in San Pedro (formerly Richard Henry Dana Junior High) and in Hawthorne

See also

• Two Years Before the Mast (film)
• Ocean Institute - owns a replica of the brig Pilgrim and uses it as a classroom.
• History of California to 1899

References

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Two Years Before the Mast

External links

California portal

Nautical portal

• Two Years Before the Mast at Project Gutenberg
• WorldCat.org: 'Two Years Before the Mast' record, with link to free full text
• Annual public reading of 'Two Years Before the Mast' - during the annual Dana Point Tall Ships Festival