Early Years
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1815 to an established colonial family that had lived in America since the 17th century. His father, Richard Henry Dana, Sr., was a renowned critic and poet who taught his son to appreciate literature at a young age.In 1831, Dana decided to enroll in Harvard to study law. But during his freshman year, a student protest erupted and his rowdy classmates caused damage to the campus. Since Dana refused to tell on his peers and get them in trouble, the school suspended several students, including Dana, for six months.
Dana returned to Harvard after the suspension, but his studies were interrupted once again in his junior year when he contracted the measles. The disease affected his eyesight and made it impossible for him to continue his studies.
Sailor and Author
Dana’s ship Pilgrim left Boston on Aug. 14, 1834 and sailed around Cape Horn (the tip of South America in southern Chile) to the California coast. He traveled along the Pacific coast from San Diego to San Francisco. At times, he worked at Port Loma in San Diego, where he cured and prepared hides to be shipped back to Boston.
While studying law, Dana used his journals from his two-year voyage to start writing his first novel depicting his time at sea. That same year, Dana published “Two Years Before the Mast.” It was one of the first accounts of the California coast, written from the perspective of a sailor on a merchant ship.
“Besides the interest which everyone must feel in exhibitions of life in those forms in which he himself has never experienced it; there has been, of late years, a great deal of attention directed toward common seamen, and a strong sympathy awakened in their behalf,” Dana wrote in the preface to “Two Years Before the Mast.”
“Yet I believe that, with the single exception which I have mentioned, there has not been a book written, professing to give their life and experiences, by one who has been of them, and can know what their life really is. A voice from the forecastle has hardly yet been heard,” he wrote in the preface.
Classic Literature
Avid sailor and author Rick Kennedy, professor of History and Environmental Studies at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, uses the book as a part of his curriculum. He says it’s a classic piece of American literature, written while Dana was the same age as his college students. Kennedy said that Dana’s book is a good example of the Jacksonian era when the dignity of labor and the lower working class were greatly appreciated.“To me, Dana really represents California during a very high point in its history when Mexico was trying to do a lot of really cool things in California,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “Dana was one of the first romantics who really believed that you communicate with nature. He has a distinctive type of American romanticism that he got from his father and a group in Cambridge, but he brings it to California.”
Though Dana didn’t profit from his book due to a shady deal on the part of his publisher, the book made its way overseas to Britain where it became even more popular. In 1841, Dana published “The Seaman’s Friend.” It served as a descriptive manual for sailing, contained a dictionary of sea terms, and discussed maritime law, a field Dana would later pioneer.
Dana continued working as a lawyer, and he gained a reputation for defending mistreated sailors and freed slaves. He helped found the Free Soil Party in 1848, which focused on opposing the expansion of slavery to western territories recently purchased from Mexico. Dana’s anti-slavery stance was so unpopular at that time that he was once attacked on the streets by a violent mob.
Throughout his life, Dana traveled the world and used sailing as a way to escape society and get over bouts of depression. He and his wife, Sarah, lived in Paris until his father death, when they returned to the States. After he settled his father’s estate, they moved to Rome in 1879. Dana died in Rome in 1882 preparing a treatise on international law.
