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Two Years Before the Mast: A Sailor's Life at Sea
by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
"To work hard, live hard, die hard, and go to hell after all, would be hard indeed!"
This has always been "the dad book" to me. My dad extolled its virtues to me from a young age, and with wooden boats, history, and manual labour, what could be more dadly? But it turns out it was great. You win this one dad.
The autobiography of a Harvard student who spent two years as a common sailor in the 1830s, Two Years Before the Mast is so much more than a journal of a particularly bizarre gap year(s). Dana shows what the lives of sailors were really like, with all the danger, back breaking labour, and camaraderie, rather than the romantic and dramaticized depictions of novels. That's not to say nothing interesting happens, of course. Dana finds plenty of interesting people, places and incidents to show to us, including two sailors unjustly flogged. He balances the book well, with a single night of a deadly gale getting as much space as months of tedious sailing or work on shore. However, he always makes sure to keep things in perspective, that the majority of a sailor's life was rote difficult labour, with zero freedom or autonomy.
One of the first things Dana wants to correct is the idea that sailors have any free time. Sailing ships require regularly adjusting sails and ropes to deal with changing weather, things constantly need to be repaired and replaced. Beyond that, the officers have a policy of never letting a sailor be idle as long as he's on deck. If there's no real work to do, they can make yarn, pick oakum, or pure make-work like scraping rust from anchor chains. Even Sundays might require doing necessary rigging work. Dana claims that a free sunday, when sailors liked to read and mend their clothes, was a rarity at sea. That's not even getting into the sleep-depriving watches, kept up 24 hours a day.
There is a great deal of very technical sailing terminology, but you can mostly disregard it as "technobabble" if you wish. I understood maybe half of it, and didn't feel I had gained much by what I had, or lost much by what I hadn't. This Project Gutenburg release has some helpful diagrams to understand where the major parts of the ship are, which could be helpful.
Of course, the book is more than a technical description of sailing. Dana worked and lived with the same men for years, and we get explorations of his relationship with them and their quotidian customs. In particular, Dana meets one Tom Harris, a common sailor with a prodigious memory and intellect, kept back from rising in the ranks by his alcoholism on shore. Dana claims that this Harris could perform large calculations mentally and with shocking accuracy, quote things he had read years after the fact, and was a more formidable debater than any student he had met at Harvard, even when Dana knew for a fact that Harris was wrong. "He was a far better sailor, and probably a better navigator, than the captain, and had more brains than all the after part of the ship put together." Dana also comes into contact with a group of Hawaiian sailors on the shore of California, who were apparently widely employed on Pacific ocean ships. He becomes friends with several, and says that parting with them was the only thing he regretted about leaving California.
The anthropological angle is very interesting. Dana observes sailors as the most rarefied cases of masculinity. Danger is almost never acknowledged, and if one narrowly escapes death, it must be laughed off and moved on from. The death of another sailor is about the only thing that can bring them to solemnity, though he does record the case of a man who fails to receive a letter from his recently married wife, while all the other sailors were written to by friends on shore. Obvious conclusion: she's gone. He falls into a funk, and another sailor "comforts" him by relating his own experience of having a wife run off with every bit of furniture he owned, and advises him to disregard "women's daughters". There are the in-jokes, amusing incidents, superstitions, songs, a flogging, everything is in there.
The camaraderie of the sailors is very deep. Much of their work is done collectively, and they despise a "soger" (from soldier, meaning shirker) who doesn't do his utmost to keep up. At the same time, when they feel they are being unfairly used, they have ways of collectively slowing work to a crawl, such as by climbing to a high post, then "realizing" they left a necessary tool on deck. There is surprising kindness among them, as well. Dana records a minor incident when a sailor's quart of molasses tea was washed away by seawater, and the other sailors made up his portion out of a bit from each of their own, so the loss was borne equally. Even more stirringly, when Dana secures his return to Boston on schedule, the captain makes an English boy stay in his place, and the other sailors nearly turn on Dana for imposing on a poor lad who has none to defend him (Dana was able to find a willing man in exchange for payment).
Beyond the exploration of the lives and customs of sailors, the book is a valuable record of California as it was before its annexation by America, and was apparently extremely widely read during the gold rush, as it was the only commonly available description of what the region was like. Dana travels to a rural, undeveloped land, whose sole export is cattle hides, ruled by the already decaying Catholic missions and Mexican presidios (amusingly, the "Pueblo de los Angeles" was already the largest settlement at the time Dana arrived). To Dana it may as well be the ends of the Earth, and he records the customs and lives of the people with interest, including their racial caste system with its many gradations, their attention to dress and speech even when in poverty, and the ubiquity of horse riding. He claims there were so many horses, people in the towns didn't even bother to truly own them, since there were always more to have. The men who rented horses to the sailors cared more about getting the saddles back than the horses. People would exit buildings, mount any nearby horse, ride to their destination, let it free, and then take another horse back. He visits a mission complex, witnesses a Mexican wedding celebration, and even intrudes on what he believes to be an Easter celebration, but proves to be the funeral of a man's young daughter.
In what must be one of the earliest "where are they now" segments, Dana returns 24 years later, finding the once barren San Francisco bay now a thriving metropolis, with Americans, Europeans and Chinese living in the same place, while other ports and parts of the country seem almost the same as when he left them. He meets several people he had known on his voyage and described in his book, such as the consummate seaman Captain Wilson, who retired to become a rancher, and Dana finds himself a minor celebrity, with his book having had a very wide readership. He further records what he can find of the fates of his crewmates. Some come off fine, with Harris maintaining a pledge to not drink, and planning to return to England with some money for his mother, while a boy who grew up into a young man dies at the age of 19 from "every vice a sailor's life absorbs". Unfortunately, he failed to find out what happened to the Pilgrim's African cook, who was my favourite of the minor figures of the book.
My only real complaint about the book, is that it's overly cleanly. "Swearing like a sailor" isn't just an expression, and though Dana occasionally describes a sailor speaking "interspersed with oaths", the most that makes it into print is a few censored damns. He also refrains from discussing prostitution, though he alludes to it. I can't imagine it didn't loom large in the thoughts of rough and tumble men who spent months at a time in an exclusively male environment. Of course, it's clear Dana was a religious man, and intended the book to be educational for a general audience, and part of a gradual course of raising the station and morality of sailors. Still, it's disappointing, both from a prurient and anthropologic perspective.
This has always been "the dad book" to me. My dad extolled its virtues to me from a young age, and with wooden boats, history, and manual labour, what could be more dadly? But it turns out it was great. You win this one dad.
The autobiography of a Harvard student who spent two years as a common sailor in the 1830s, Two Years Before the Mast is so much more than a journal of a particularly bizarre gap year(s). Dana shows what the lives of sailors were really like, with all the danger, back breaking labour, and camaraderie, rather than the romantic and dramaticized depictions of novels. That's not to say nothing interesting happens, of course. Dana finds plenty of interesting people, places and incidents to show to us, including two sailors unjustly flogged. He balances the book well, with a single night of a deadly gale getting as much space as months of tedious sailing or work on shore. However, he always makes sure to keep things in perspective, that the majority of a sailor's life was rote difficult labour, with zero freedom or autonomy.
One of the first things Dana wants to correct is the idea that sailors have any free time. Sailing ships require regularly adjusting sails and ropes to deal with changing weather, things constantly need to be repaired and replaced. Beyond that, the officers have a policy of never letting a sailor be idle as long as he's on deck. If there's no real work to do, they can make yarn, pick oakum, or pure make-work like scraping rust from anchor chains. Even Sundays might require doing necessary rigging work. Dana claims that a free sunday, when sailors liked to read and mend their clothes, was a rarity at sea. That's not even getting into the sleep-depriving watches, kept up 24 hours a day.
There is a great deal of very technical sailing terminology, but you can mostly disregard it as "technobabble" if you wish. I understood maybe half of it, and didn't feel I had gained much by what I had, or lost much by what I hadn't. This Project Gutenburg release has some helpful diagrams to understand where the major parts of the ship are, which could be helpful.
Of course, the book is more than a technical description of sailing. Dana worked and lived with the same men for years, and we get explorations of his relationship with them and their quotidian customs. In particular, Dana meets one Tom Harris, a common sailor with a prodigious memory and intellect, kept back from rising in the ranks by his alcoholism on shore. Dana claims that this Harris could perform large calculations mentally and with shocking accuracy, quote things he had read years after the fact, and was a more formidable debater than any student he had met at Harvard, even when Dana knew for a fact that Harris was wrong. "He was a far better sailor, and probably a better navigator, than the captain, and had more brains than all the after part of the ship put together." Dana also comes into contact with a group of Hawaiian sailors on the shore of California, who were apparently widely employed on Pacific ocean ships. He becomes friends with several, and says that parting with them was the only thing he regretted about leaving California.
The anthropological angle is very interesting. Dana observes sailors as the most rarefied cases of masculinity. Danger is almost never acknowledged, and if one narrowly escapes death, it must be laughed off and moved on from. The death of another sailor is about the only thing that can bring them to solemnity, though he does record the case of a man who fails to receive a letter from his recently married wife, while all the other sailors were written to by friends on shore. Obvious conclusion: she's gone. He falls into a funk, and another sailor "comforts" him by relating his own experience of having a wife run off with every bit of furniture he owned, and advises him to disregard "women's daughters". There are the in-jokes, amusing incidents, superstitions, songs, a flogging, everything is in there.
The camaraderie of the sailors is very deep. Much of their work is done collectively, and they despise a "soger" (from soldier, meaning shirker) who doesn't do his utmost to keep up. At the same time, when they feel they are being unfairly used, they have ways of collectively slowing work to a crawl, such as by climbing to a high post, then "realizing" they left a necessary tool on deck. There is surprising kindness among them, as well. Dana records a minor incident when a sailor's quart of molasses tea was washed away by seawater, and the other sailors made up his portion out of a bit from each of their own, so the loss was borne equally. Even more stirringly, when Dana secures his return to Boston on schedule, the captain makes an English boy stay in his place, and the other sailors nearly turn on Dana for imposing on a poor lad who has none to defend him (Dana was able to find a willing man in exchange for payment).
Beyond the exploration of the lives and customs of sailors, the book is a valuable record of California as it was before its annexation by America, and was apparently extremely widely read during the gold rush, as it was the only commonly available description of what the region was like. Dana travels to a rural, undeveloped land, whose sole export is cattle hides, ruled by the already decaying Catholic missions and Mexican presidios (amusingly, the "Pueblo de los Angeles" was already the largest settlement at the time Dana arrived). To Dana it may as well be the ends of the Earth, and he records the customs and lives of the people with interest, including their racial caste system with its many gradations, their attention to dress and speech even when in poverty, and the ubiquity of horse riding. He claims there were so many horses, people in the towns didn't even bother to truly own them, since there were always more to have. The men who rented horses to the sailors cared more about getting the saddles back than the horses. People would exit buildings, mount any nearby horse, ride to their destination, let it free, and then take another horse back. He visits a mission complex, witnesses a Mexican wedding celebration, and even intrudes on what he believes to be an Easter celebration, but proves to be the funeral of a man's young daughter.
In what must be one of the earliest "where are they now" segments, Dana returns 24 years later, finding the once barren San Francisco bay now a thriving metropolis, with Americans, Europeans and Chinese living in the same place, while other ports and parts of the country seem almost the same as when he left them. He meets several people he had known on his voyage and described in his book, such as the consummate seaman Captain Wilson, who retired to become a rancher, and Dana finds himself a minor celebrity, with his book having had a very wide readership. He further records what he can find of the fates of his crewmates. Some come off fine, with Harris maintaining a pledge to not drink, and planning to return to England with some money for his mother, while a boy who grew up into a young man dies at the age of 19 from "every vice a sailor's life absorbs". Unfortunately, he failed to find out what happened to the Pilgrim's African cook, who was my favourite of the minor figures of the book.
My only real complaint about the book, is that it's overly cleanly. "Swearing like a sailor" isn't just an expression, and though Dana occasionally describes a sailor speaking "interspersed with oaths", the most that makes it into print is a few censored damns. He also refrains from discussing prostitution, though he alludes to it. I can't imagine it didn't loom large in the thoughts of rough and tumble men who spent months at a time in an exclusively male environment. Of course, it's clear Dana was a religious man, and intended the book to be educational for a general audience, and part of a gradual course of raising the station and morality of sailors. Still, it's disappointing, both from a prurient and anthropologic perspective.