★★★★☆ A not-quite adventure tale of the seas

Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea

Richard Henry Dana Jr.

I read Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea as a high-school student, so perhaps 1972 or thereabouts. I vaguely remember that I was looking for a quite old book I had not yet read. I can't remember why -- perhaps it was the conviction that any book still being read 130 years after its first publication must have been pretty good to survive.

It was, but not quite in the way I was expecting. Two Years Before the Mast is a nonfiction account of two years Dana spent as a common sailor. That's what "Before the Mast" means: in the forecastle, not in the comparatively cushy officer quarters. Dana was a Harvard student recovering from the measles. This was his low-budget version of a convalescence trip. In its view from the forecastle, it is quite unusual. Most books of the sea, including historical fiction, tell of sea life from the point of view of officers. The extraordinary crowding of the sailors in the forecastle, the harsh discipline they were subject to, and the danger and difficulty of their work climbing the rigging and reefing sail, were a revelation to high-school me. And I still can't think of anything in literature quite like it.

I was also surprised at how little this felt like a book about adventure. Dana sailed from Boston to California -- then a part of of Mexico -- around the Horn, the southern extent of South America, there being, of course, no Panama Canal at the time. In California they took on hides to bring back to the East Coast to trade. In my memory, Dana's descriptions of carrying hides loom large and contribute much to my impression of an unadventurous story. The trip back through the horn through winter storms is more adventurous.

I encountered Dana once again when I later read The Education of Henry Adams. It is a reminder that Dana was a real person, not just a character in a book. Adams describes him as follows

Dana ... affected to be still before the mast, a direct, rather bluff, vigorous seaman, and only as one got to know him better one found the man of rather excessive refinement trying with success to work like a day-laborer, deliberately hardening his skin to the burden, as though he were still carrying hides at Monterey. Undoubtedly he succeeded, for his mind and will were robust, but he might have said what his lifelong friend William M. Evarts used to say: “I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do, but the things I don’t like to do.”

He was active in politics, with some success.

I love Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and Horatio Hornblower as well as anyone. But if you love those books, you should also read Two Years Before the Mast. It's less entertaining, but it will show you a side of those stories barely visible in the novels.

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