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Two Years Before the Mast was written by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr. after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834.
While at Harvard College Dana had an attack of the measles which affected his sight. Thinking it might help his sight, rather than going on a grand tour of Europe (and unable to afford it anyway), and something of a non-conformist, in 1834 he left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor on a voyage around Cape Horn, on the brig Pilgrim. He returned to Massachusetts two years later.
He kept a diary throughout the voyage, and after returning he write a recognized American classic, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840.
The term "before the mast" refers to the quarters of the common sailors -- in the forecastle, in the front of the ship. His writing evidences his later social feeling for the oppressed; he later became a prominent anti-slavery activist and helped found the Free Soil Party.
It is of note that he did not set out to write Two Years Before the Mast as a sea adventure, but to highlight how poorly common sailors were treated on ships. It quickly became a best seller.
In the book, he gives a vivid account of the life of a common sailor as of 1834. He sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, arriving in California when it was a remote Mexican land, and San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco weren't much more than a few sheds, though he makes a tellingly accurate prediction of San Francisco's future. He learns Spanish and becomes an interpreter, and befriends a Kanaka (a native of modern-day Hawaii), later saving his life when his racist captain would as soon see him die.
On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter hedescribes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, and the scurvy that infects members of the crew.
After the California Gold Rush of 1849, he re-visited California, commenting on the drastic changes and seeing several old friends.
- Yet a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of a little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous.
- — from Two Years Before the Mast, Chapter VI
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