Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana Jr. left Harvard and shipped out as an ordinary seaman in 1834, sailing from Boston around Cape Horn to the hide-trading coast of Mexican California. Drawn from the journal he kept, his account records the daily grind of life before the mast: the cold night watches, the brutal flogging of shipmates, the endless labor of curing cattle hides on the beaches near San Diego and Santa Barbara. Beyond the adventure, Dana wrote with a reformer’s intent, exposing the harsh treatment of common sailors, and his pages also preserve a rare, vivid glimpse of California a decade before the Gold Rush changed it forever. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.