Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

BOSTON WEEKLY MAGAZINE

The seaman’s life has many charms to the mind of an inexperienced youth, whose temper has become troubled by some real or fancied hardship, or who has acquired an inkling for roving and adventure. We have hardly ever seen a volume better fitted to dispel the illusions woven by the excited fancies of such persons than the one before us. There is no apparent intention to represent a sailor’s life as disagreeable, but a simple recital of facts, tallying well with the statements we have often heard personally from mates and masters, showing the irksomeness of the lot of a foremast hand. The work is interspersed with light and shade, though by far the most of the latter.

—September 26, 1840

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

This is a voice from the forecastle. Though a narrative of literal, prosaic truth, it possesses something of the romantic charm of Robinson Crusoe. Few more interesting chapters of the literature of the sea have ever fallen under our notice. The author left the halls of the University for the deck of a merchant vessel, exchanging “the tight dress coat, silk cap, and kid gloves of an undergraduate at Cambridge, for the loose duck trousers, checked shirt, and tarpaulin hat of a sailor,” and here presents us the fruits of his voyage. His book will have a wide circulation; it will be praised in the public prints; we shall be told that it does honor to his head and heart; but we trust that it will do much more than this; that it will open the eyes of many to the condition of the sailor, to the fearful waste of man, by which the luxuries of foreign climes are made to increase the amount of commercial wealth. This simple narrative, stamped with deep sincerity, and often displaying an unstudied, pathetic eloquence, may lead to reflections, which mere argument and sentimental appeals do not call forth. It will serve to hasten the day of reckoning between society and the sailor, which, though late, will not fail to come.

—unsigned review in The Dial (October 1840)

THE KNICKERBOCKER; OR, NEW YORK MONTHLY MAGAZINE

We find our author ever the same hard-working, all-enduring philosopher, with an eye to see and a heart to feel every body’s discomforts and sufferings but his own. We commend the forcible Saxon English, and the unpretending style, of this work to the notice of the elaborate, ornate class of writers among us, who find it so difficult to describe a plain matter in a plain way.

—October 1840

NEW YORK REVIEW

Truth—plain, honest, unvarnished truth, is the stamp upon every page of this most attractive volume, and gives to it such a charm, that the every-day incidents of sea life, and a common trading voyage up and down the coast of California, which it narrates, excite an interest in the reader, far beyond that of most tales of fiction. It is a picture drawn wholly from nature—from beginning to end, there is not a touch, or a trait, or a color, of the ideal, and this evidently, not because the author wanted imagination, but because he had imposed upon himself the severe law of restraining it, and adhering scrupulously to facts. We never read a book of more singleness of purpose—its professed design of presenting “the life of a common sailor as it really is,” is carried out with the most unvarying fidelity, and at the same time with masterly spirit. The author, had he aimed at effect, might have wrought upon the feelings of his reader at the outset, by an account of his previous position in society, the refinements to which he had been accustomed, and the superior education he had received; but he employs no such artifices; nothing could be more direct and unpretending than the manner in which the story begins—the past is introduced only as far as is requisite to exhibit the transformation he is now undergoing, and the new scene, and new characters, are at once brought on with the vividness of reality. We feel sure that no one can read the first page of this narrative, and lay it aside until it is finished....

One will hardly read a second page of the narrative without perceiving that the transformation is completely effected in the first twenty-four hours of the young sailor’s life. He has no sentimentality on taking leave of his friends, no palaver about “longing, lingering looks” cast back upon the receding shores; “for such things,” he says, and says truly, “no time is allowed on board ship;” he simply takes a last look at the city, bids “good night” to his native land, and goes about his duty. We scarcely know a more heart sinking moment than the coming on of the first night of darkness of a first voyage before the mast, to a youth accustomed to comforts and kindness at home. The surrounding waste of water, the wretched feeling of seasickness, the harsh tones of the captain and officers, the coarse jokes of the sailors, the disagreeable food, the dark and damp and dirty sleeping room, and above all the division of the crew into watches, which tells him that he can never have at best but four hours oblivion of such a sea of troubles; these are some of the many miseries, which make up the full measure of the suffering....

It may be difficult to make it appear, that a volume of five hundred pages, entirely filled with nautical details, and the common occurrences of traffic with a rude people, can be interesting and instructive, but such is the fact, and all who read it will be of our opinion. It gives us a juster estimate, than is elsewhere to be found, of the virtues and vices of a class of men, who are commonly represented on the one hand as all generosity and nobleness of feeling, and on the other as depraved and degraded in the extreme. We here see them as they are, a compound of good and evil, like mankind in general, with no other peculiarities than such as naturally result from their habits in life. Their cause and their claims are ably and justly stated, and the author has entitled himself to the warmest thanks of ship owners, ship masters, sailors, and all others concerned in navigation, for the dispassionate and impartial manner in which he has represented the existing grievances in our merchant service, and pointed out their remedies. Most clearly has he shown the absurdity of the common notion, that sailors cannot bear good treatment; and while he pleads most earnestly and feelingly for the exercise of greater humanity towards them, there is not a word in his book encouraging insubordination, or denying the necessity of severe discipline at sea.

This book deserves especial commendation on another account; it is calculated to exert a most salutary influence upon our youth. There are many among them who, under various circumstances, look to a long voyage as the summit of their wishes; either as a dernier resort, after a career of extravagance and dissipation, or an emancipation from paternal restraint, or an occasion of gratifying a spirit of adventure and a love of romance, or as a relief from the ennui of an idle life, or the disgust of an uncongenial occupation. The account here given of “two years before the mast,” will serve to dissipate all the illusions about the sea, which most young men are wont to cherish; they will learn from it, that the forecastle of a ship is the most undesirable of all asylums, to any one who has had even but a moderate share of comforts at home; and be convinced, that no reasonable man will choose it for his dwelling place, unless he has made up his mind to “follow the sea,” and get upon the weather-side of the quarter deck as soon as possible.

—October 1840

ARCTURUS, A JOURNAL OF BOOKS AND OPINION

There is, to us, something far more alluring in the plainness and simplicity of [Two Years Before the Mast], than in those exaggerated pictures of the sea which pass current with the novel-reading world. In truth, there is more imagination in the full consciousness of reality, in doing simple justice to the characters and events of actual life, than is required in writing a library of the second class works of fiction. To describe a scene of common life accurately there is needed not only a ready observation of what occurs, and the power of description, but a sympathy with the actors; in other words, a force of imagination to place ourselves in the very situation, with the very thoughts of those concerned. The man of imagination is the man who sees most in the world, as well as above it. This is the secret of genius, that it finds more in common things than common men find.

—December 1840

CHARLES DICKENS

Remember that it was an undergraduate of Harvard University who served as a common seaman two years before the mast, and who wrote about the best sea book in the English tongue.

—from his speech at the Oxford and Harvard Boat Race (August 30, 1869)

D. H. LAWRENCE

We must give Dana credit for a profound mystic vision. The best Americans are mystics by instinct. Simple and bare as his narrative is, it is deep with profound emotion and stark comprehension. He sees the last light-loving incarnation of life exposed upon the eternal waters: a speck, solitary upon the verge of the two naked principles, aerial and watery. And his own soul is as the soul of the albatross.

—from Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Questions

1. What are the attractions of what Dana did—boarding a ship and just taking off? If you had no obligations or responsibilities and had an opportunity to sail off on a merchant ship, would you be tempted? What is it about the possibility that tempts you?

2. Do you trust Dana’s observations? What is it in particular—style or tone—that makes him seem trustworthy or untrustworthy?

3. The life of sailors aboard ship, as Dana presents it, has few pleasures and many pains, few rewards and many deprivations. Considering the conditions of the time, the relative lack of amenities on the ships, and the length of the voyages, what could have been done to improve the lot of the sailors without taking away their essential work?

4. In works of this sort the sea often becomes symbolic. It seems to embody feelings and moods, spiritual and psychological agencies; it seems to signify the nature of existence or the human condition. Do you see evidence of symbolism in the sea as represented in Two Years Before the Mast?