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 slave labor, and then taken back to the East for manufacture into leather goods.   The job, therefore, is to sail 'round Cape Horn to California, sell the finished goods they bring, go up and down collecting hides for at least a year, and then sail back to Boston.

Dana gives a detailed account of life at sea, and 'difficult' does not begin to describe it.  A sailor's life is made up largely of very hard work and danger, fueled by salt meat, hardtack, and enough onions and potatoes to ward off scurvy for a while.  These fellows have to constantly adjust the sails to the conditions, and there are 34 sails (they're almost never all out at once).  Everything has to be repaired all the time, and the men are usually wet.  They work in four-hour shifts, on and off, around the clock -- unless of course there is bad weather requiring all of them -- and if everything is going really well (a rare occurrence), they get Sunday as a rest day.   

The reader has to get used to an avalanche of sailing terms and descriptions, but luckily there are diagrams and a glossary in back, or you can just let them go by.

Most of the memoir is really about California, which is just fascinating, especially since I live there.  They arrive at Point Concepción* and sail up and down, visiting Santa Barbara, San Juan Capistrano, Monterey, and San Francisco, which is described as practically deserted, but potentially a great place for shipping and trade.  The collected hides are stored and processed at San Diego, where Dana spends several months as a hide processor.  The little ports are populated by a mix of Spaniard families, various Europeans and Americans that have metaphorically washed up on shore, and Hawaiian sailors.

After a year of this, Dana is desperate to get homeward bound, figuring that if he stays another year, he'll be unable to get back to his old life.  He trades jobs for a place on the Alert, which has a much better captain as well, and eventually they collect all 40,000 of the required hides, pack up, and set sail for Cape Horn... just as winter is coming on.  The voyage around the Cape is brutal, but they make it, and he's thrilled to be home again.

A later addition describes a trip Dana made in 1859, 24 years after leaving California, and describing incredible changes in Northern California, for now San Francisco is a large city and trade goes up all the rivers to Sacramento, Stockton, and Marysville.  There are American military outposts -- Alcatraz and Fort Point.  And it seems that practically everyone has read his book, because until pretty recently it was the only one that talked about California at all.  So he meets lots of people and gives a talk to the Society of California Pioneers and so on.

This really is a neat glimpse into history.  It's long and not fast, but well worth a read!   There were no penguins, though.

 

*next door to my hometown, and where Vandenberg AFB is today