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Volume 23:

Two Years before the Mast (full text) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Throughout the past six months, I have struggled to discover some logic behind the order of the Classics. For the most part, I've come to the opinion that there is none. They aren't grouped chronologically, or thematically, or by genre. But occasionally there is some tantalizing pairing that suggests a hidden pattern that might eventually make itself clear. The appearance of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast alongside The Odyssey is that kind of pairing.

The Odyssey may be the oldest work in the Classics. Two Years before the Mast is among the most recent. Dana was a student at Harvard -- just a generation before Charles Eliot -- when weakened eyesight, brought on by a case of measles, forced him to leave school. In 1834, he signed up as a sailor on a merchant ship. (The term before the mast refers to common sailors, who bunk in the ship's forecastle, as opposed to the captain and his officers.) The odyssey that followed is the subject of Dana's book.

It's true that Dana's trip lasted only two years, as opposed to Odysseus's twenty. But it did suffer from unexpected delays. Throughout the journey, there were storms and lulls and icebergs. And then there were the hides. After sailing from Boston down and around Cape Horn, Dana's ship, the Pilgrim arrived at pre-Gold Rush California, then a sparsely populated Mexican territory. The ship came to California to trade for hides, which had to be tanned before making the passage back to Boston, so Dana finds himself six months on shore at this work. The descriptions of California are among the great pleasures of the book. To ensure a worthwhile profit, the ship continued up and down the west coast until it had collected 40,000 hides. Gradually, Dana comes to understand that this may take longer than expected -- that his eighteen months away from Boston may easily stretch to two years, to three, maybe more. By the time the Pilgrim returns to Boston, it will be too late for him to return to Harvard and make a professional life for himself; he will be a sailor. And this is when a brief trip threatens to turn into a lifetime on the sea.

In the event, Dana was able to get on to another ship that is returning in a more timely fashion. He returned to Harvard and eventually became a prominent maritime lawyer and advocate for sailors' rights. Twenty-four years later, he returned to California -- recently annexed to the U.S. He recounted this trip in a chapter appended to later editions of his book. Here is where Two Years before the Mast's juxtaposition with The Odyssey was most striking. For it seemed to me that the mechanics of sea travel had changed nearly as much in those twenty-four years as they had in the thousands of years prior. To be sure, by the time of the Pilgrim, the world had been more or less mapped; Dana's captain had navigational tools unknown to Homer. But in the end, Dana was among a crew of sailors in a wooden boat, dependent on the winds, working round-the-clock shifts to bring in and let out the sails. When he traveled again in 1859, he did so on the superb steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms.

The California to which Dana arrived on this lighted steamship was unrecognizable to him:

How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States.

Dana is stirred by a feeling that has become perhaps more common in the hundred and fifty years since he wrote, as the rate of change has accelerated dramatically. It is a feeling I have had myself as I these two seafaring books in the space of a few days. The past was real, Dana writes. The present, all about me, was unreal.


--CRB, July 18, 2007

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