Customer Reviews

Two Years Before the Mast (Signet Classics)

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This is a great read. If you missed it in high school, as I did 55 years ago, it's never too late to catch up. This is the story of Richard Henry Dana Jr., a young Harvard student, who leaves school to go on a sea voyage to improve his health. He ships out of Boston on the brig Pilgrim bound for California to bring back cow hides, presumably for the leather industry around Boston. There are parts of the book that some will complain about. At times he seems to go on for page after page rattling off technical stuff about managing sails on a sailing ship, albeit under horrific conditions. Give up early, he does not explain and you will not understand all this stuff about sails. But, he gives a graphic, sometimes chilling, picture of what life was like for seamen on a merchant ship in the 1800s. They were no better than slaves and life and death was subject to the whims of the captain. Their pay was small and sometimes they were forced to spend it in what amounted to a company store. It was possible to go on a two year voyage and wind up owing the shipping company money. Again, the conditons under which this labor was performed was sometimes beyond our imagination. Those of us who whine when the freeway slows down should try rounding Cape Horn in a sailing ship. Also, if you are interested in pre gold rush California history, this book gives a great view of Mexican Alta California, at least the history that happened close to the coast. Some of Dana's views will be seen as racist, and they are, but they seem to be a result of a judgment drawn from personal observations rather than a prejudice. He did have high regard for Sandwich Islanders (Hawaiians). All in all, an exciting adventure story and an insightful look into early 19th century merchant sailing. Highly recommended.

Two Years Before the Mast is a remarkable book. It is part travelogue of what was then undiscovered land, the California coast. It is part seafaring adventure, a great look at what life was really like on the merchant sailing ships of the first half of the 19th century. It is part suspense yarn, too, with the hero's return to his native land in serious doubt due to events beyond his control. There is nothing else like it.

Seen through the eyes of young man in his late teens who looks for both a cure for his measles and some real thrills, we are treated to his view of the west coast and the Californians as compared to his native, very urban and developed Yankee city of Boston. He finds them very different - but when he first visits San Francisco, the city is a single shack! This book was the guide for the many Americans who headed west for gold 15 years after its publication, too. As such it helped shape their settlement and exploration of the land.

Dana's time aboard ship differs hugely from his comfortable home life in Boston. That he was willing to accept this, even embrace it, moves the book from a dry history to a real-life human interest story.

The description of the sailing ships of the day involves many terms which few now will understand. A glossary or diagram of the ship and its parts and sails would be nice. Beyond that, the excitement of Two Years Before the Mast makes it a must-read for anyone in search of a young man's quest for real-life thrills at sea and in a new country.

I had expected this book to be mostly a tale of a young man's coming of age, and something of a tutorial about the operation of working ships during the age of sail. While these elements are present, the book is just as much a description of the early history of California and a study of managerial styles. Dana spent a year in California when there were few "Americans" there, trading on the coast and commenting on the geography and the people. Much of what he describes was radically changed even ten years later, after the gold rush and the joining of California to the United States.

However, enough remains the same that anybody who has spent time in California can picture Dana's route and compare his descriptions of the various cities he visits to their status today.

His discussion of the ship captains under whom he served, and whose work he witnessed, has value to anybody in a managerial position. His initial captain on the Pilgrim did a poor job, not recognizing where his subordinates knew more than he did, and imposing his authority at times in an arbitrary manner. Listening to his mates, and working more consistently would have better served the ship.

When originally published, the book was intended in part to illustrate the difficult lot of common sailors and the injustices they suffered. This material was summarized by Dana primarily in the final chapter of the book, which he removed in the second edition of the book. I think the book does well without it; the point is adequately made by the incidents on board that Dana describes.

In a way, the best thing for a writer is misfortune. In that regard, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. got lucky.

A young Harvard man, he signed on as a common seaman aboard the brig Pilgrim, bound for California from Boston, to help improve his health. Had it been smooth sailing over benign seas under a wise and beneficent captain, with good food and a leisurely stay on California beaches, we likely would never have heard of Dana.

But, thanks to the treacherous and icy waters of Cape Horn, a power hungry captain keen on flogging his men on slight pretence, a year of hard labor hauling hides in anarchic California (still part of Mexico in 1834, the year Dana sailed), and shipboard living conditions that today's Supreme Court would find cruel and unusual, Dana and his work have remained icons in American literature and history. (To wit, re living conditions: When he and his shipmates mistakenly believe war has broken out with France and they might be captured and spend time in a French prison, they view the prospect as a pleasant break from their hard routines and shipboard incarceration.)

Part of the lasting success of this book lies in its rich complexity: part memoir of a privileged youth's right of passage into full manhood; part sociological treatise on the people and politics of Mexico; part polemic and muckraking journalism exposing the indignities, injustices and virtual slavery suffered by merchant sailors; part technical manual on sailing; part travel narrative; and part detailed history of commerce on the high seas circa 1835.

For example:

-We learn much about mizenmasts, marlinespikes, and the how-to of sailing a brig (more, perhaps, than a landlubber cares to know).

-We see a California without streets or, for that matter, firm laws, but with a rigid Mexican social hierarchy of criollos, mestizos, and Indians--the last often literal slaves--as well as a smattering of Yankees, Hawaiian sailors, drunks, deadbeats, murderers, and rogues.

-We are given the particulars of a booming hide trade--the tanning, hauling, and loading in which Dana is forced to participate.

-We glimpse the endless work of the common seaman and the absolute power of ship captains, which, in the case of the Pilgrim's skipper, culminates in a mean-spirited tyranny.

-We share a perilous winter passage around Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan, through great, iceberg-littered fog banks, driving rain and snow, and mean seas, where the perpetually sodden and frigid seamen must negotiate pitching iced decks and rigging to perform their never-ending, life-threatening tasks.

-We view avarice, duplicity, ignorance, and cruelty, albeit leavened by loyalty, generosity, friendship, and perseverance. In that way, and more, Dana's tale is a microcosm of the human condition: a seemingly endless and at times pointless journey on a small ark afloat in perilous seas, filled with ceaseless toil yet anointed with sublime natural beauty.

Dana's descriptions of the seas, skies, and landscapes often turn poetic. In fact, most all the language of Two Years Before the Mast tends toward the formal and writerly. For despite it being a journal of a common seaman, Dana is an uncommon jack-tar, with a Harvard education, bourgeois manners, and Boston connections that keep him, just barely, from spending another two years in California hauling hides. (Some of his not-so-well-connected mates, from whom he always keeps a distance, at least in his mind and in his journal, were not so lucky.)

The reader never forgets Dana's Boston background, as he spouts Latin and quotes English poets. Although this book was the first to give us a seaman's, not the captain's, point of view, the language is not that of a seaman, and it will be another 45 years before Huck Finn comes to free us all from formal Boston English.

Though nominally an American, Dana exhibits a tone, demeanor and delicacy more English than Yank. (A possible influence: his lawyer father, who argued for an American monarchy and a House of Lords.) This delicacy also leads Dana to omit from his narrative most anything that might cast him in a common light--such as his consorting with Indian prostitutes in California.

But Dana's great fortune as a writer was, seemingly, his misfortune as a gentleman. Upon returning to Boston, he graduated first in his class at Harvard, became a celebrity with the publication of Two Years Before the Mast in 1840, married, and became a prosperous Boston lawyer. However, he never seemed to settle into a life of propriety, as if inoculated against it on his rough and formative two-year voyage. This unresolved inner conflict apparently resulted in a series of nervous breakdowns, which he cured with long sea voyages.

Yet we sense this conflict between his upper-crust snobbery and his genuine affection for the rigorous life and his vigorous shipmates seething beneath the surface throughout his journal. We see a young man made over by his experience--a patrician who, in his heart, becomes a common sailor, but one who never comes to relinquish his previous social status and persona.

For most memoirs to succeed, the reader must be convinced that the author has set off on a sincere sojourn of personal discovery, to find his or her true self. Here, in Two Years Before the Mast, we see that discovery take place before our eyes, even if the author never fully admits it.

I'll leave it to the other reviewers to tell you about the book (it's wonderful!) and will only comment on the Signet Classics edition in the hopes that you may save your eyes. It's unreadable! The print is tiny and is packed on the page with exceedingly small margins. Spare yourself and get another (larger print) edition... and enjoy this wonderful story.

Loved it!

I wish California still had more of that magic he describes - unfortunately we've developed too much of it already.

A fine novel about life onboard a trading ship in the early 19th century. Dana puts you right in the middle of his sailing adventure and never lets go. In its best moments, "Two Years Before the Mast" describes things so well that you can almost feel the spray of the sea or the wind on your face. It also has an added bonus to it for the die hard historian: life in California prior to the U.S.-Mexican war and the settlement of California during the gold rush. Nearly all of Dana's work took place on the California coast, so he got a front row seat to early 19th century California and Mexican culture. If I have one criticism about the book is that it spends TOO much time on the coast. For a book that bills itself as being about life on a sea-going ship, Dana spent a lot of time on land. It only took a few weeks to get from Boston, around Cape Horn, to California and he spent the rest of that time trading up and down the coast of California. Not only that, but, since his original journal was lost and he had to write his narrative based on leftover notes, some of his chapters are very bare bones. But as a first person account of life at sea on a sailing vessel, and as a warm-up for "Moby-Dick," there is no better book out there.