Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
From the two mini-posts of the last
week a faithful reader will know that I spent some of it traveling by car with my
granddaughter Sophia over a somewhat erratic course from Little Rock in
Arkansas to Murfreesboro in Tennessee.
It was a wonderful experience, worthy of an extended essay of its own,
did I not feel obliged to return to more professorial pastures. Thus I mention only its one down-side. I left Princeton with a mildly infected
tooth, which abandoned the mildness part on my way to the airport. I would not have believed that it is possible
crave root canal work “like as the hart panteth after the water brooks," but I did,
and achieved it within hours of my return.
This seamless segue brings me to today’s real subject, and that is
Richard Henry Dana’s wonderful book, Two
Years Before the Mast.
I always travel with some book or
another, even when I know that the opportunities for actual reading will be few
and brief. And I want a real book, not
an electronic device. I grabbed my
Library of America edition of Dana mainly on the basis of its comparative slimness. Dana (born in 1815) was a Harvard
undergraduate in 1834 when he fell dangerously ill with an attack of measles
that threatened his eyesight. The
recommended therapy of the day was fresh air and travel. What the medicos had in mind was probably
something like a cossetted visit to Baden-Baden, but Dana, thinking outside the
box, instead signed up as a common merchant sailor on a boat sailing to
California to gather a vast load of cowhides to bring back to Boston. His account of his experiences is not merely
one of the world’s greatest sea stories; it has deservedly achieved the status
of a literary classic. No less is it
precious as a witness of social history.
On the return journey, as the crew
faced the daunting prospect of rounding Cape Horn in terrible winter storms,
Dana was attacked by an infected tooth, facial swelling that seemed to double
the size of his head, and agonizing pain.
There was no root canal for him, nor palliative medicaments of any
kind. The few drops of laudanum in the
medicine chest had to be saved in case something “serious” arose. He just had to tough it out. Wooden ships and iron men, indeed! This narrative episode was naturally of
special interest to me under the circumstances, but it was not what struck me
most forcibly about Dana’s book.
Dana was among the first Americans
(meaning here, as it generally did in his time, citizens of the U.S.) to visit
and describe California, then a Mexican backwater, though destined to be the
great dynamo of western expansion and to this day a beckoning American mythscape. Dana never got far inland. He spent a year coasting back and forth
between San Francisco and San Diego, stopping at the few sleepy mission
settlements for periods of back-breaking labor required by the cowhide
trade. But he was a sharp observer and a
plain speaker, and his judgments of the californios
(Hispanic Californians) are arresting.
The heroic version of the “Turner
thesis” that was the stuff of my primary schooling—rugged, aspirational
Anglo-Saxons and other European pioneers manifesting national destiny with
yoked oxen, plowshares, and pickaxes—had already been supplanted, by the time
of my children’s schooling by a grimmer, racialized legend featuring distilled
greed, rapine, and genocide. Anyone who
has watched Ken Burns’s “The West” will be familiar with its drift. Dana’s description of Californian society
fifteen years before the Gold Rush is from this point of view fascinating. He sees a sparsely populated, backward and
culturally desolate colonial outpost abandoned to political corruption and
misgovernment by a distant and ineffective Mexican capital. It is riven with race-based social
inequities, with the mission Indians oppressed in de facto servitude. The
social dynamic, if one can call it that, is the privileged indolence of
Castilian blood. Here we have a country,
writes Dana, “embracing four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several
good harbors; with fine forests in the north; the waters filled with fish, and
the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate,
than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of
diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields
from seventy to eighty fold. In the
hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!” But, alas, according to Dana, the whole land
seems subject to “the ‘California fever’ (laziness).”
At the time of the Gold Rush there
were precious few real American authorities on California. Two
Years Before the Mast sold like hotcakes among the rushers eager for any
authentic information, even the incidental musings of a seafaring Harvard
undergraduate, about the new land of their dreams. And they doubtless thought of themselves as
“an enterprising people”. Dana himself
was very far from a jingoist or a money-grubber. Indeed he was a man of high principles and
admirably progressive opinions. Before
the Civil War he was an ardent abolitionist.
After the War he was a civil rights activist. His major cause was the amelioration of the
state of the working classes, especially the merchant mariners whose life he
had shared and permanently memorialized in a literary masterpiece.
