A review by skitch41
Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea by Richard Henry Dana Jr.

4.0

A fine novel about life onboard a trading ship in the early 19th century. Dana puts you right in the middle of his sailing adventure and never lets go. In its best moments, "Two Years Before the Mast" describes things so well that you can almost feel the spray of the sea or the wind on your face. It also has an added bonus to it for the die hard historian: life in California prior to the U.S.-Mexican war and the settlement of California during the gold rush. Nearly all of Dana's work took place on the California coast, so he got a front row seat to early 19th century California and Mexican culture. If I have one criticism about the book is that it spends TOO much time on the coast. For a book that bills itself as being about life on a sea-going ship, Dana spent a lot of time on land. It only took a few weeks to get from Boston, around Cape Horn, to California and he spent the rest of that time trading up and down the coast of California. Not only that, but, since his original journal was lost and he had to write his narrative based on leftover notes, some of his chapters are very bare bones. But as a first person account of life at sea on a sailing vessel, and as a warm-up for "Moby-Dick," there is no better book out there.