A Voyage into Manhood: Two Years Before the Mast

After contracting measles before his junior year at Harvard College, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. suffered from ophthalmia, leaving his eyes too irritated to pursue his studies. Believing “plenty of hard work, plain food, and open air” could solve that problem, he decided to serve on the merchantman Pilgrim bound for California. The story he tells in Two Years Before the Mast, originally published in 1840, offers not only the first account of life on a sailing ship from the perspective of a common seaman but also a memoir of a man who chose a grueling adventure when he might have achieved the same end as a passenger. In it, he found his purpose in life.

As an inexperienced sailor, Dana lived in the rear of the ship, sleeping in steerage until he was ordered to move into the forecastle with the accomplished members of the crew. This move early in the voyage provides the title of his memoir (the forecastle is located toward the bow of the ship). In the forecastle as much as in the rigging of the two-masted brig, Dana learned about the hardships and privations of sailors as well as about their humanity.

Though he writes poetically of the beauties of the sea, he made a conscious decision to hold that appreciation in tension with the educational and social sacrifices he was making. While he gave himself fully to work, his desire to return home to finish his studies and pursue a professional career did not waver. This memoir is in part an account of delaying realization of goals in order both to heal his eyesight and to enhance his vision of the world.

PRUDENCE

In addition to its study of 1830s California, Dana’s book offers his insights into the officers and men on board the two merchant ships on which he serves. For example, he reveals his respect for the wisdom of experience in his praise of Tom Harris, a man with no formal education but possessed of the gift of total recall. Dana not only learns how to be a sailor from Harris but also finds in him a conversation partner. His comment on Harris reveals the character of both men: “taking together all that I learned from him of seamanship, of the history of sailors’ lives, of practical wisdom, and of human nature under new circumstances and strange forms of life . . . I would not part with the hours I spent in the watch with that man for the gift of many hours to be passed in study and intercourse with even the best of society.”

In a way not possible in Harvard lectures, Dana learned much about diverse cultures present both among the crews of the two vessels on which he served and among the various inhabitants of California. He learned Spanish to understand more about the people who sold cow hides to merchant ships from the U.S., Britain, Russia, and the Far East. He also learned Hawaiian from the Sandwich Islanders among the crews of ships trading in California, earning their respect while living with them on shore. He called them “the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.” The young sailor tacitly practiced his Christian faith when he nursed Hope, one of the Hawaiians, through a dire illness and secured the aid of a sympathetic captain to treat him when he no longer had access to medicines.

FORTITUDE

Two Years Before the Mast is also a study in courage. For example, early on Dana found himself so nauseous that he could not eat for three days. When ordered to grease the mainmast to facilitate sail hoisting, he was momentarily tempted to tell the first mate he would “rather wait till after breakfast.” But he instinctively realized he must follow orders, and thereby avoid the damage done by “want of spirit.” Later, in California, he risked bodily harm to retrieve cow hides by allowing himself himself to be lowered in a sling jerry-rigged by fellow sailors. The job had to be done.

Taking his future into his own hands, he defied an attempt by Capt. Thompson to reassign him to the Pilgrim when the Alert, the ship to which Dana had been transferred, leaves for Boston under Thompson’s command. Dana stands up to the captain and reminds him of papers assigning him permanently to the Alert. Thompson backs down, and Dana essentially wins his first case related to maritime law.

JUSTICE

As a student of the law even before he shipped out on the Pilgrim, Dana valued justice. Still, his experiences at sea focused his attention on seamen. In his account of the voyage to California, Dana captured the captain’s sadism in the man’s own explanation of why he flogs: “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! — because I like to do it!— It suits me! That’s what I do it for!” Thompson’s irreligion informs Dana’s characterization of him. When one of his victims appeals to Jesus, the captain retorts, “Don’t call on Jesus Christ . . . he can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson!”

As Dana describes the flogging, he also participates in the resignation to it. He explains that resistance is mutiny and that taking over the ship amounts to piracy. Resisting a cruel commander was the equivalent of resisting the law. “Bad as it was, they saw it must be borne.” Still, the floggings motivated him to publish his book. He writes, “if God should ever give me the means, I would do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that class of beings with whom my lot had so long been cast.‘’

TEMPERANCE

Throughout his memoir, Dana exhibits the cardinal virtue of temperance or self-restraint. Though his crewmates knew his background, he exhibited no pride but rather used his learning to teach Hope how to read and use numbers. His descriptions and assessments of captains and crewmen, as well as of the Californios (the Hispanic residents at the time) and Yankee expatriates on shore, are characterized by fairness and objectivity. Early in his narrative he writes, “However much I was affected by the beauty of the sea, the bright stars, and the clouds driven swiftly over them, I could not but remember that I was separating myself from all the social and intellectual enjoyments of life. Yet, strange as it may seem, I did then and afterwards take pleasure in these reflections, hoping by them to prevent my becoming insensible to the value of what I was losing.”

Having Learned to Be a Man

In his book No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, Anthony Esolen explores the idea that men are rightly socialized as members of teams – cooperating as athletes, hunters, or builders, in any way that brings them into a cooperative hierarchy. Two Years Before the Mast relates just such a socialization. The very nature of a crew required him to take risks with life in the balance. He learned from the wisdom of men who were often illiterate. He practiced patience and perseverance in the face of the cruelty of captains and of nature. He became more of a man on the ships than Harvard could have made him in the classroom.

In 1 Corinthians 16:13, St. Paul exhorts his readers to “stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” Dana’s memoir illustrates that its author did so, and Charles W. Eliot’s inclusion of it in the Harvard Classics series testifies to its significance in American literature. It is a book worth incorporating into any young man’s reading list.