Two Years Before the Mast

About the book

In 1834 Richard Henry Dana, a Harvard student with failing eyesight, signed on as an ordinary seaman aboard the brig Pilgrim, bound from Boston round Cape Horn to the hide-trading coast of California. He spent two years working the coast and came home in the Alert, then wrote up his journal as this book, published in 1840.

It is one of the first accounts of a sailing ship written from the forecastle rather than the quarterdeck, and its plain description of the work, the weather and the floggings did much to bring the conditions of merchant seamen to public notice. Dana went on to practise maritime law. The California he describes - Santa Barbara, San Pedro, San Diego as a handful of adobe houses - was gone within a generation.

Notes

To come.