In 1834, a Harvard undergraduate has to drop out of college in his junior year after an attack of measles affects his eyesight. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., decides that a good spell of sea air, hard work, and no studying would improve his health, so he signs on as a common sailor aboard the merchant ship Pilgrim, bound from Boston around the Horn and onward to California.
It’s an unusual decision for a young man of his class and prospects. Living in the forecastle in damp, cramped, dark, and smelly conditions, "foremast jacks" labored hard six or more days a week, often exposed to the worst weather; ate salt beef and hardtack; received little or no medical care; and had no say aboard ship. There the captain—no matter how unstable, unfair, or vicious—reigned with absolute authority, "lord paramount" as Dana calls him.
With a good captain, the system works despite its hardships, but under a bad one, sailors suffer. After Dana witnesses the unjust flogging of two men, he vows to someday "do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one," and this book marks one attempt to do that.
Dana is an attractive figure. Not brought up to manual labor and just recovering from an illness, he's nevertheless always game, ready to jump into the hardest work. At first he's exhausted after two hours of swabbing the deck, but he soon becomes strong and active, springing up into the rigging with the best of them. He's enterprising in other ways too, as when he teaches himself Spanish by borrowing a grammar and dictionary and listening closely to conversations. He also has an endearing interest in other people, and his passages describing them are some of the best in the book.
Many readers will be entranced by the life-at-sea narrative, with its storms and floggings and men overboard, icebergs and whales, jib-booms and knight-heads and royal-yards. Surprisingly to me though, where Dana's account really takes off and becomes riveting is when he gets to the California coast. These chapters are packed with fascinating observations about the people, customs, trade, and geography.
This is California before the Gold Rush, before palm trees, when it was a foreign country: a backwater Mexican possession with little to trade beyond hides, horns, and tallow. Few towns boast more than a crumbling mission and presidio and a scattering of small one-story adobe houses. San Pedro and San Diego are even less developed, and San Francisco Bay is almost deserted.
As a Boston Yankee, Dana can hardly stand it. “In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!” He sees rich potential everywhere, often with great prescience, as when he says of San Francisco Bay:
If California ever becomes a prosperous country, this bay will be the centre of its prosperity. The abundance of wood and water, the extreme fertility of its shores, the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world, and its facilities for navigation, affording the best anchoring-grounds in the whole western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance.
An appendix to the book published 24 years after the 1840 original describes Dana’s return visit to San Francisco, now a bustling city, and everywhere he goes people quote this passage back to him. His was the only existing account of northern California, found in many a prospector's back pocket.
Although he calls Spanish Californians idle and thriftless, Dana doesn't automatically dislike foreigners. He gives the Spanish credit where he feels it's due. He has nothing but praise for the Hawaiians, called Sandwich Islanders or their own name for themselves, Kanaka, in the book. They crew ships all around the Pacific, and some also have temporary work at the hide-houses where Dana spends several months working on shore. Of these men, he writes:
They were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with. I felt a positive attachment for almost all of them; and many of them I have, to this time, a feeling for, which would lead me to go a great way for the mere pleasure of seeing them, and which will always make me feel a strong interest in the mere name of a Sandwich Islander.
He thinks very highly of their character as well, and becomes a sort of blood-brother to one of the Hawaiians.
The book is full of interesting observations on the manners, customs, clothes, food, appearance, houses, and entertainments of the various sets of people in California, and fascinating glimpses into a lost world:
Horses are the cheapest thing in California; the very best not being worth more than ten dollars apiece, and very good ones being often sold for three, and four. In taking a day's ride, you pay for the use of the saddle, and for the labor and trouble of catching the horses. If you bring the saddle back safe, they care but little what becomes of the horse.
Though the above passage is the sort of thing I love Dana for, the book does have plenty of exciting sea stuff, especially a harrowing return trip round the Horn. Patrick O'Brian drew upon Dana's account, and fans of the Aubrey-Maturin series may find some interesting parallels, especially the naturalist Professor Nuttall, who much like Stephen Maturin expresses great disappointment with the ship's captain refuses to stop at an uninhabited island, in the middle of difficult ship maneuvers, so he can do some botanizing.
All in all, Dana’s memoir is entertaining and fascinating as hell. Can’t recommend enough.
by arrec