Two Years Before the Mast

A two-year coast-to-coast voyage to California from Boston, Massachusetts was undertaken by American Richard Henry Dana, Jr. from 1834 to 1836. The journey took place aboard a merchant ship and was chronicled in a diary Dana kept. After the trek, in 1840, the diary was released as the memoir titled Two Years Before the Mast. Dana was an undergraduate student at Harvard College when he contracted the measles. The disease affected his vision and believing it would help the condition, he became a sailor on the brig Pilgrim traveling to South America, around Cape Horn, and to California. After that, he enlisted on the Alert on which his passage back from California took place. The nautical term used in the title “before the mast” refers to the lodging area of the sailors in the forecastle, or the front of the ship. As Dana’s time aboard the vessel continues he begins to sympathize with the lower social class of which he previously was not a part. Later in his life, he publically opposed slavery and was a founder of the Free Soil Party which opposed the expansion of slavery westward. This mindset was likely inspired by his not only by his time spent among the sailors, but from having become one of them.

A main goal of Dana’s was to show what the ordinary life of a sailor at sea entailed. The Pilgrim was on a trade voyage bringing United States goods to the Mexican colonies in California. Ports of call on the journey included San Diego Bay, Monterey Bay, and the San Francisco Bay. Alta California was a province of Mexico after having once been Las Californias, a Spanish colony. The text describes these and other ports along the westernmost coast of America. He encountered and wrote about indigenous people along with their native cultures and the widely varying impact of immigrant groups and other traders. In one adventure along the way, Dana’s party is to bring cow hides from an area near the mission of San Juan Capistrano, but a headland area presents a geographic obstacle for the crew. They need to throw the hides from the elevated area to the beach below. When some of the hides become stuck part way down the cliff Dana gets lowered on a rope to gather them. Ultimately, the headlands and surrounding area are given the name Dana Point.

Dana’s experience with higher education serves him well as he learns the Spanish language from Mexicans in California and takes on the role of translator for the crew of the ship. He makes friends of the natives of the Sandwich Islands (the name James Cook gave the Hawaiian Islands in 1778). This group of sailors is the Kanaka and at one point Dana saves the life of one of them from an uncaring captain. As the outward portion of the journey nears, there is tension among the crew members. There is doubt as to whether or not they will be able to meet their quota of amassing forty-thousand hides. Dana spends a period of time in San Diego getting hides ready to be shipped to Boston and preparing for his trip home. Dana grows bored at this point and is anxious for the Alert, the ship on which he will return home, to arrive. He grows a bit nervous as well for fear that a delay will impede his return to academia. As an aside, Dana’s writing foreshadows how San Francisco will grow and increase in importance in future years.

Writing about his return journey around Cape Horn, Dana describes part of the passage on his new ship, the Alert. The vessel is sailing amid icebergs in the Antarctic region. He tells of the great beauty of the area as well as giving graphic first hand descriptions of the massive storms and of the icebergs, which he says are like nothing else he has ever seen. He writes in detail of the challenge of working the ship’s riggings for weeks on end while fighting the elements. He suffers one setback when a tooth becomes infected preventing him from working for several days when the crew is in need of all the help it could possibly find. By the time they have almost completed their journey around the Horn some of the crew comes down with scurvy.

Two Years Before the Mast was reissued in 1869, three decades after its original publication. In this edition Dana deleted some of the material he had included in the original version and wrote an appendix which he titled “Twenty-Four Years After.” This section tells of a visit he made to California in 1859 when the state had changed greatly in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. Two Years Before the Mast had been one of the only books available before the Gold Rush that had vivid descriptions of California which brought it an expanded popularity. When Dana returned to the state in 1859 he was welcomed as something of a celebrity.