"A Medium in Which I Seek Relief": Manuscripts of American Sailors 1919-1940

Richard Henry Dana: The Godfather

Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, published in 1840, was the first account of sea life written from the perspective of the common sailor. Dana broke through the illusion of romance surrounding the sea by describing the everyday hardships and challenges experienced by sailors. As Dana tells it, this included almost continuous manual labor, denial of holidays and time off, and occasional physical cruelty. Moreover, sailors had no redress for ill treatment or exploitation while at sea. These conditions were not visible in accounts written from the perspective of captains and officers. While bringing these harsh conditions into the light, Dana also conveyed the comradeship and natural beauty that help make the seagoing life endurable. 
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. 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. 

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