Richard Henry Dana. Two Years Before the Mast. 1869; Third Edition, Edited by Chris Thomerson, eNotated Classics, 2011.

A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is perfect. (1964)

Yet a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous. (741)

This seafaring memoir is a classic. After reading it, I can see why. It had an impact during its time, and its story endures.

Two Years Before the Mast originally came out in 1840. It describes the two-year adventure of the author sailing from Boston around South America to California and back on two different sailing ships from 1834 to 1836. At the time, this book was unique. There had been virtually no books about sailing on the oceans written by ordinary seamen. The perspective was very different. To use a term from land-based military, the seamen were the “grunts.” In those days they had virtually no rights. They worked hard, were fed poorly, and could be beaten (sometimes brutally) for many reasons, or for none at all.

Some “reforms” were hardly changes for the better. Dana tells us that, unlike the officers, the sailors were limited to what they could drink—even water was rationed. On one ship the sailors would observe the captain drinking coffee, cocoa, or grog, but the sailors were not allowed even water while they were working. As the temperance movement grew, some merchants began “virtue signaling” by dropping rum or other adult beverages from the supplies on board the ship. Dana saw this cynically: It was simply a way to economize and did nothing for morale or morals.

Dana’s background was different from most sailors, too. He came from a prominent Boston family. He had spent two years at Harvard as an undergraduate and decided to take some time off to explore the world. He was observant and literate. He writes of reading numerous books in his spare time while on the voyage. But most of the time he and his shipmates were working hard.

To illustrate the division of labor and status on board the ships, when his ship finally was full of cargo and returning to Boston, they took on a passenger. The passenger was the famous ornithologist, Thomas Nuttall. Nuttall was a professor at Harvard, and he and Dana casually knew each other, but while on the ship, they were separated and Dana and the other seamen were not permitted to speak to the passengers. Occasionally, the two men were able to have short conversations, but Dana tells us that they rarely saw each other on the long voyage home.

One secondary reason they did not see each other was the nature of the voyage, especially by Cape Horn. The weather there is notoriously rough, and they were traveling there in the austral winter. There were ice fields, icebergs, and almost constant gales. The sailors got very little rest during that part of the voyage. It really is quite exciting to read about the sailing around Tierra del Fuego.

The two ships Dana worked on both came to California for the same reason: to gather leather hides to bring back to Boston to sell. The descriptions of California in the 1830s is fascinating. Back then it was part of Mexico, so it was Spanish and Catholic. Dana picked up Spanish fairly well, having studied French and Latin. The ships sailed back and forth in Upper California between San Diego and San Francisco.

Dana describes the harbor at San Francisco as having the most commercial potential, but at the time there was just a Mexican fort, the Presidio, and one frame house. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego were not much more than villages. Ranches provided the hides of cattle that the men bought or traded for. In spite of the sparse population, there were some families with noble backgrounds, though Dana observes what Weber would call the Protestant work ethic. The most successful businessmen, he writes, were Yankees who came to California and settled there.

One interesting observation concerns the Mexican view of race. The Mexicans considered people with Spanish blood to be citizens and superior to the Native Americans. However, even someone who had just one Spanish great-grandparent was considered Spanish. That was and is notably different from the way Americans viewed people with any African ancestors.

While the book originally came out in 1840 and was a bestseller by the standards of the day, Dana published a revised edition in 1869. In 1859, twenty-years after he first visited California, he revisited it. Now it was a state of the United States, and it was a very different world. San Francisco was now a city of about a hundred thousand, and the other ports were all much more populated. Some of the Mexican families he knew still lived there, and he visited some of the folks he had met a quarter century before. California was on its way to becoming the state we know today. It was already another country in more ways than one. And there was very little leather trade any more. The railroads had opened up the cattle country of the Plains.

One caution: Years ago I read a diary of someone who read Two Years Before the Mast, and he had this observation:

Finished Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana – to my mind a very dull book, entirely too full of foreboom, royal spinnakers, and top gallant yardarm try sails.

The reaction might be a little surprising considering the author of the diary had lived in San Francisco. However, his critique cannot be entirely ignored. The book is full of nautical terms. Now, I was in the Coast Guard and was familiar with many of them, but not the specialized jargon of sailing ships. I did have to look up a number of terms.

I had a break, however. I started reading the book in a printed edition, but I was going on a trip, so to pack light I downloaded the Kindle version mentioned in the header. I recommend that version. It has a very thorough set of hyperlinked footnotes that define those terms that the above diarist complained about.

I think that note also tells us that Dana had in mind an audience of seafarers. Gradually, the plight of ordinary seamen and boatswains came to the greater attention of the public and the merchants who hired them. Gradually, reforms were made. My mother’s stepfather was a merchant mariner from the 1920s to the 1950s, and he would testify that the union took good care of him.

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not pages.