Two Years Before the Mast

The Pilgrim

It's interesting that I've randomly chosen this famous memoir of a life at sea after an in-depth exploration of realism in Russian short stories. But this book, although a work of non-fiction (as memoirs once were in bygone days), reads like realist prose to me. It is unembellished, plain spoken realism written without frills, without clutter, without unnecessary adornment. And the simple words and economical phrasing and sentences add up to something far greater than its constituent parts.

Two Years Before the Mast (orig: 1840; this edition: 1911) by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

There were hundreds of books written in the nineteenth century that document ship journeys, explorations, hunting expeditions and the like, many of them self important, long winded, monotonous, self-aggrandizing tomes of little value. Fortunately for us, Dana's book is way better than that.

Richard Dana was a sophomore at Harvard when he came down with the measles. The disease affected his sight and made it difficult for him to study, so he decided he would take two years off to work as a common sailor aboard a merchant ship, believing the air and hard work would do him some good after his illness. He set sail from Boston in the summer of 1834 aboard the Pilgrim, a merchant ship that transported goods to the California coast and to return packed with cowhides. But of course, back in the days before the Panama canal, if you wanted to sail from the east coast to the west coast of North America with a boat full of stuff, you had to go the long way, all the way around Cape Horn at the very tip of South America, which took several months and exposed sailors to some very harsh and dangerous conditions. The tale of the journey back is hairier and more riveting than the journey out, when nature's great power, beauty and fury are aptly described with a sense of respectful awe.

He wrote about the perils and pleasures of life at sea and gives us character sketches of his fellow sailors with a keen eye and ear for detail and dialect. He also describes the indignities and abuses that merchant sailors were subjected to by greedy and incompetent captains, unscrupulous agents and predatory recruiters who lured the ignorant to perilous journeys, often stripped of their rightful wages and kept in servitude. In fact, exposing these wrongs was his primary purpose in writing the book, which became an enormous success, bringing the issues facing merchant sailors to the attention of a wide audience and making its author world famous.

Dana and the crew spent most of their time going back and forth collecting hides between Mexican ports at San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, San Pedro and San Diego, and each port as he describes it is very different than the cities we know today. Back then, they were sleepy, somewhat desolate places at the very edge of civilization in the final years of Mexican rule. He engaged in backbreaking work carrying thousands of hides from shore to ship for the journey back east, spent a few months ashore in San Diego curing and preparing those hides for transit with a group of Sandwich Islanders he came to love and respect, and walked through the small towns near the ports, meeting people from other cultures and observing their habits and ways of living. Two Years Before the Mast is a document of what life was like on the California coast in the years before America's final westward expansion and is of great value to historians.

At one point, Harvard educated guy that he was with bright hopes for his future, Dana expresses concern about rumors that his engagement at sea might last as long as four years, After having spent so much time aboard the Pilgrim learning and adopting the the coarse ways of sailors, he feared that he might not be able to re-enter polite society and thus become a sailor for life.  As it happened, his engagement lasted only two years and he was able to retain his agile mind and gentlemanly demeanor, thus managing to write a cohesive narrative without using the word "argh!" in every other sentence. Dana managed to escape this fate by switching ships and returning home on the Alert, a ship that was much nicer and better run than the Pilgrim, whose captain was given to gruffness and the occasional unprovoked flogging.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr.  1815-1882

Dana's writing is literature of the highest order. His natural style reveals a recognizably American voice--factual and unsentimental, yet full of emotional intensity.  Read Moby Dick right after this and you'll see what an effect Dana's account had on Melville and subsequently on American literature.

Here's a good example of his considerable descriptive powers. At one point, Dana is given shore leave and writes about witnessing the funeral of a child in San Pedro. This passage wouldn't be out of place in a realist novel:

"From the beach we returned to the town, and, finding that the funeral procession had moved, rode on and overtook it, about half-way to the Mission. Here was as peculiar a sight as we had seen before in the house, the one looking as much like a funeral procession as the other did like a house of mourning. The little coffin was borne by eight girls, who were continually relieved by others running forward from the procession and taking their places. Behind it came a straggling company of girls, dressed, as before, in white and flowers, and including, I should suppose by their numbers, nearly all the girls between five and fifteen in the place. They played along on the way, frequently stopping and running all together to talk to some one, or to pick up a flower, and then running on again to overtake the coffin. There were a few elderly women in common colors; and a herd of young men and boys, some on foot and others mounted, followed them, or walked or rode by their side, frequently interrupting them by jokes and questions. But the most singular thing of all was, that two men walked, one on each side of the coffin, carrying muskets in their hands, which they continually loaded, and fired into the air. Whether this was to keep off the evil spirits or not, I do not know. It was the only interpretation that I could put upon it."

This is a straightforward account, yet so vivid and evocative, describing an emotionally charged scene with sparse language and an objective, even tone. This passage, and indeed the whole book, is written in a journalistic style yet positively breathes with compassion for the suffering of others. 

However, Dana does use a fair amount of antiquated nautical jargon here when describing his duties as a sailor and the finer points of how a crew of men work together to keep their ship afloat. But using your eReader's dictionary or making an occasional visit to Wikipedia to decode these terms is kind of fun. You get the hang of the shop talk after a couple of chapters.

This 1911 edition includes his son's forward and afterword, plus Dana's account of his return to his old haunts in 1859. Between his and his son's follow-up efforts, we're brought as up to date as we can be about the fate of the places, the people and the ships he sailed on and encountered. We also learn of Dana's lifelong commitment to protecting the human rights of oppressed people in his law practice and we learn of his commitment to the abolition of slavery. This is a book written for all the right reasons, giving us a rare view into history and of one man's conscience. Historical forces forged the destiny of the right man for the job, and the result is a fantastic book that combines the very best elements of a personal and historical account. Well done, sir.

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