Two Years Before the Mast

Dana left Harvard in 1834 because of trouble with his eyesight, shipped out of Boston as an ordinary sailor on the brig Pilgrim, rounded Cape Horn and spent two years working the hide trade on the coast of a California that was still Mexican. The title is literal: “before the mast” means the forecastle, where the common crew lived, and the book’s force comes from a Brahmin’s son reporting that life from inside it rather than from the quarterdeck.

Published in 1840, it became both an adventure classic and a document — the first widely read American account of pre-Gold Rush California, and an indictment of shipboard flogging that fed Dana’s later career as a maritime lawyer.

Context: Listed under Adventure; one of the few first-person narratives in that genre grouping rather than a novel.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Richard Henry Dana Jr. — the author, later a maritime lawyer who defended fugitive slaves and helped found the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts.