Richard Henry Dana: The Godfather
According to John Butler in Sailing on Friday (41), the conditions that Dana experienced were created by the intense demand for fast transport, as Eastern companies depended upon the cattle hides provided by west coast ranchers to make leather products. Likewise, the Californians relied on the goods carried by the eastern ships for survival. This geographic and economic landscape generated “a new breed of sea captain - fearless, hard-driving, and fierce in the use of power.” Frank Thompson, the captain of the Pilgrim, the ship on which Dana sailed, was a perfect specimen of this “new breed”; as Butler says, he “was moody and sadistic, a tyrannical commander, and an inept seamen” (42). In 1835, while the Pilgrim was in California, a new law passed Congress providing some protections for mariners, but the law was weak and difficult to enforce (43).
During Dana’s two years at sea he kept a journal, which eventually became the basis for Two Years Before the Mast, and read as many books as he could get his hands on. Because Dana was Harvard educated, it’s tempting to consider his literary interests exceptional; in fact, as Hester Blum points out in The View from the Masthead, sailors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were highly literate. Reading was a popular pastime on ships, and books were frequently exchanged (20-21). Sailors were not only avid consumers of literature, they were producers as well. The popularity of Dana’s book ushered in a wave of similar publications, including Nicholas Isaac’s Twenty Years Before the Mast (1845), William Nevins’s Forty Years at Sea (1845), and others (10). As we can see in Cecil Northrop's unpublished 1919 manuscript "Two Months Before the Mast", Dana still loomed large for sailor-authors some eighty years later.
These sailor-authors “stressed that the principal merit a narrative could offer was truth,” leading to a distinct “aesthetic of mechanical precision” (Blum 40-41). While poetic or metaphysical subject matter might be explored in the text, the narratives were always grounded in the specifics of labor, including nautical terminologies and practices. The authenticity of these accounts was part of the appeal for non-specialists, who were invited to glimpse a way of life that was quite alien to them. The narratives also allowed sailors, who lived at the margins of society, to define their own identities, explicating their dignity, skill, and worth as people and workers to the world.
While Dana and his brethren aimed to influence the broader American public about the lives of sailors, they also influenced the trajectory of American sea fiction as a whole. According to Bert Bender in Sea Brothers, “Despite the enormous changes in American life between the time of Melville’s first sea books and London’s Mutiny of Elsinore… there is an obvious continuity in their work that derives from their shared sympathy with the common seamen” (9). Even the romantic father of sea fiction James Fenimore Cooper responded to these developments in his later years with the publication of Ned Myers: A Life Before the Mast. Myers was Cooper's friend from the Sterling; Cooper collaborated with Myers to write his story. (As an aside, Myers retired to the Sailors' Snug Harbor retirement home in Staten Island; SUNY Maritime is the repository for the Sailors' Snug Harbor records, a selection of which have been digitized).
Dana had a measure of class privilege unavailable to most sailors, and as Bender noted, he never planned to remain at sea. However, he continued to champion the rights of mariners, becoming a lawyer and a social justice activist. He defended runaway slaves and seamen abused by captains and joined the Free Soil movement, advocating for the abolition of slavery on the western frontier (Butts). In 1841 he published The Seaman's Friend, a manual that explains nautical terms and traditions. He also travelled to Cuba in 1859 and published an account of his trip, To Cuba and Back (Davis). Despite his other accomplishments, Dana will always be remembered first and foremost as the author of Two Years Before the Mast, a classic of American sea fiction. As we can see from the diaries and writings published on this site, he was still influencing sailor-authors well into the 20th century.