Two Years Before the Mast
1840
Two Years Before the Mast
1840
In 1834, a Harvard student named Richard Henry Dana left Cambridge not for the Grand Tour of Europe like his peers, but for something far stranger: the forecastle of a merchant brig bound for California around Cape Horn. His vision had been damaged by measles, and perhaps he believed what many believed then, that sea air might heal what ailed him. What he found instead was another world entirely. Two Years Before the Mast is the account of a young man who deliberately chose to live among common sailors, working alongside them, sharing their quarters, learning their language. Dana chronicles the brutal labor, the brutalizing weather, the strange democracy of the ship's deck. This is a narrative about bodies at work, hands torn raw, backs bent over ropes in howling storms, the constant threat of disease and death. It captures the particular intimacy of men confined together in a floating world, their hierarchies and solidarities, their songs and cruelties. Dana writes with the precision of an educated observer who chose not to remain above, and the result remains one of the most vivid accounts of maritime life ever written, a book that still reads like a slap of salt wind to the face.
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“There is a witchery in the sea, its songs and stories, and in the mere sight of a ship, and the sailor's dress, especially to a young mind, which has done more to man navies, and fill merchantmen, than all the pressgangs of Europe.””
— Richard Henry Dana
“Yet a sailor's life is at best, but a mixture of a 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.””
— Richard Henry Dana
“A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night-watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.””
— Richard Henry Dana
“The Californians are an idle, thriftless people, and can make nothing for themselves.””
— Richard Henry Dana
“They seem to be a doomed people. The curse of a people calling themselves Christian, seems to follow them everywhere;””
— Richard Henry Dana
“Let him then have powers commensurate with his utmost possible need, only let him be held strictly responsible for the exercise of them. Any other course would be injustice as well as bad policy””
— Richard Henry Dana
“So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble they could not have been more motionless. Not a ripple upon the surface of the canvas; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail, so perfectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he said (for he, too, rough old man-of-war’s-man as he was, had been gazing at the show), half to himself, still looking at the marble sails,”
— Richard Henry Dana
“There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life.””
— Richard Henry Dana
“work hard, live hard, die hard, and go to hell after all, would be hard indeed!””
— Richard Henry Dana
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Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. Lex, lex-books.com/book/two-years-before-the-mast-6d912618-65fb-45a5-8a9a-5a4133487798.Dana, R. H. (1840). Two Years Before the Mast. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/two-years-before-the-mast-6d912618-65fb-45a5-8a9a-5a4133487798Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/two-years-before-the-mast-6d912618-65fb-45a5-8a9a-5a4133487798.
