Two Years Before the Mast -- a review by Hazel Duckworth

The hardcover version my grandparents had of Two Years Before the Mast had the map on the inner cover and you had to spin the book ninety degrees to see everything. I think that's why I wanted to read this one -- I'd really liked Lassie Come Home, which had that same kind of map. But I was too young to understand ship life or the eighteenth century so I gave up pretty quick on this memoir. 

But at a yard sale (before Covid, obviously!) I found the same edition of Two Years Before the Mast that Grandma and Grandpa had. The dust jacket is gone, so I put the paperback edition up at the top instead.

Here is a more modern map, tracing the trip from the East Coast to California during the Gold Rush. 

Richard Henry Dana was a New Englander who was once a student at a private school run by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He went on to attend Harvard, but then he got measles and had to suspend his classwork. After this, Dana was diagnosed with an eye condition and advised to take sea air for his health. Instead of taking an ocean voyage for pleasure, he signed up as a merchant season, first on a ship called the Pilgrim, later another vessel called the Alert.

In 1834, Dana sailed with the rest of the crew from Boston to San Diego. San Diego was in Mexico then and on the high ground overlooking the ocean were big sheds which held calf hides, which were dried and stacked to be shipped to Boston where the shoe-making factories were. When the merchant ships sailed from Boston to San Diego, they would bring the finished shoes and boots, and they'd pick up a new load of hides. Dana vividly describes his work in San Diego, which was to stack up calf hides and then haul these down a steep hillside to the dock, before climbing back up to get more hides.  The work on the ship was even harder, with sailors required to climb up high and then walking along a network of ropes which were sometimes both covered in ice to adjust the sails.

Those awful duties wasn't the hardest part of being a seaman on a merchant ship, though. Working conditions were hellish, with malnutrition, scurvy, and untreated sickness. Dana describes having such a bad toothache that he couldn't do his on-shop work duties. Even worse, was the absolute power of the sea captains in the early 19th century.

The captain was the king, the judge and jury, and the person who carried out punishments. Dana describes the captain of his first ship sadistically flogging a sailor for a pretty minor infraction while the rest of the crew had to watch. On other ships, captains sometimes  murdered crew members or had them murdered and served only weeks in jail.

And after all that, the crew had to get the ship back to Boston by "rounding the Horn." Here is  description  from YouTube.

 

Folk singer and ballad "Rounding the Horn"

Ther terrible working conditions for sailors and their mistreatment by cruel captains who answered to no one for their behavior inspired Richard Henry Dana to spend the rest of his life trying to right the wrongs. He recalled his own schoolboy days (before attendance at Emerson's school) where the cruel schoolmster both flogged students, and pulled their ears so hard that the lobe of the ear would tear way from the pupil's head. Seeing that sailors, like these schoolboys, had no one to protect them or to advise them, Dana wrote a handbook, The Seaman's Friend. Dana also worked within the legal system to fight for sailors' rights and to see that captains who abused the seamen stood trial for their crimes. 

Richard Henry Dana wrote well, and he must have kept a journal, to judge by all the details he gives. Even though the conditions on the ships were terrible, there's also a lot of adventure, spirit, and adventure in Two Years Before the Mast. It's a book I recommend even if you aren't interested in ships or sailing, because it's well-written history. 

 ****

                                                

This week's reviewer:  Hazel Duckworth is 51, has a day job in a warehouse full of products for a big box store, and reads whenever she has a chance. She shares a cozy small house with her partner Samuel and two cats, one of whom lives in the house and one of whom comes and goes.