Spin #43: Two Years Before the Mast
Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. Wow, this is a fascinating account. No wonder it was hugely popular in its day! It's not well-known now, and I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I sure enjoyed this memoir of life at sea in the 1830s. In 1834, Richard Dana was a law student at Harvard, and he contracted measles, which damaged his eyesight; he couldn't read at all. He decided that the way to recover his health would be to sign on as a regular sailor to a merchant ship and spend a couple of years at sea. He entered service on the Pilgrim , which was headed to California -- in the days when Alta California was a sparsely-populated area of Mexico and the back of beyond. No Panama Canal, no railroad, and no overland journeys from the United States yet. The financial interest in California was for cattle hides from the herds run by the Spanish missions, brought to the coast largely by the Native peoples being used as ...