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sweatshop laborers today, stood to lose profits
if they were forced to pay their sailors a decent
wage and provide them with sanitary accommodations
and adequate food, Dana soldiered
on. He wrote The Seaman’s Friend, a legal
manual for sailors that did as much to help
inform them of their rights as men as it did to
educate sailors about the vagaries of
being a contract employee of a shipping
company.
Two Years Before the Mast is
often included in the ranks of
protest literature, and it deserves its
place there, but for most people in
1840 – well before the Gold Rush –
it gave readers their first glimpses
of California, which was then part
of Mexico. Adventure seekers and
entrepreneurs alike paid close attention
to Dana’s vivid and accurate
descriptions of the communities
along California’s coastline. Take
this passage from a visit to Santa
Barbara: “The country abounds in
grapes, yet they buy, at a great
price, bad wine made in Boston.”
Descriptions like these raised more
than a few eyebrows and caused
many of reader to pack his bags and
head round the Horn to seek his fortune in
California.
Perhaps Dana’s most famous reader was a
Boston sailor who, upon returning from an
uneventful crossing to Liverpool and back,
caught the buzz about Two Years Before the
Mast and picked up a copy. What he read electrified
him, and inspired him to pen stories of
his own. Thus began Herman Melville’s literary
career, a man whom is regarded today as the
father of American letters.
Today there is replica of the boat upon
which Dana sailed to California. It’s located at
a little harbor in Orange County in a city that
bears the name of its most famous crewman:
Dana Point. At the harbor entrance is a statue of
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. striking a romantic
pose as he stares out to sea. It’s a beautiful statue,
and I’m pretty sure Dana would hate it. It
aspires to be sublime and ignores the commonplace,
much less the revolting.
Sure, Dana had opportunities that were not
available to his shipmates. He was intelligent, a
writer with immense gifts, his father was
wealthy and well-connected; but when the
Pilgrim lost sight of land and he was alone
upon the ocean, Dana was nothing more and
nothing less than a common sailor. His experience
at sea was a short chapter of his life, of
which he dismissively referred to his Two Years
Before the Mast as a footnote. Some
remember him as a man of letters; others
see him as a man of the law, a man
of principles. I choose to remember
him as a man who changed the world
on the strength of his convictions.
I never went to Captain’s Mast
again, but I never went to Harvard
either. I got out of the Navy and
although I’ve done a half-assed job of
staying out of trouble, I haven’t kicked
anyone’s ass for a dollar (the opposite
cannot be said to be true with any
degree of certainty). Like Dana, I have
a story to tell, a story that is every bit as
solemn and ludicrous and commonplace
and revolting as Two Years
Before the Mast, perhaps even more so.
I haven’t changed the world yet, and
I’m pretty sure it’s not my place to
even try. Unlike Dana, I have few convictions,
and would be hard-pressed to
articulate them (The West Memphis 3 are innocent?
Never say “one more” to a bartender? Be
nice to your mom?) But in one sense old
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and I are exactly alike:
you cannot stop us from expressing what we
believe in. We will not be dismissed.
–Money
MONEY