Two Years Before the Mast

by Richard Henry Dana

The dela Guerra family of California, I am told, is dying out in the male line and will soon leave no representative.

As to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,[1] the author of the book, the reader may wish to know something. He came back from his two years' trip in 1836 ``in a state of intellectual famine, to books and study and intercourse with educated men.'' He had left his class at Harvard at the end of the sophomore year (1833), on account of the trouble with his eyes and sailed about a year later. When he returned, September, 1836, his class had graduated in the summer of 1835, but with a little study he passed the examinations for the then senior class, which he entered late in the autumn of 1836. On graduation in 1837 he not only stood first, but ``had the highest marks that were given out in every branch of study.'' He took the Bowdoin prize for English prose composition and the first Boylston prize in elocution. He then entered the Law School and became instructor in elocution under Professor Edward T. Channing, and during this period wrote the ``Two Years Before the Mast.'' In February, 1840, he went into the office of Charles G. Loring and in the following September opened his own office and began the active practice of law. He was born August 1, 1815, at Cambridge, Mass., with a line of ancestors reaching back to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with several colonial governors in the maternal lines. His great grandfather, Richard Dana, was one of the early patriots, a ``Son of Liberty,'' who frequently presided at the meetings at Faneuil Hall at which Otis, Adams and others spoke. This man's son, my father's grandfather, Francis Dana, was several times member of the State Colonial Legislature and of the Continental Congress. He was one of the signers of the Articles of Confederation and married Elizabeth Ellery, the daughter of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Francis Dana had been sent abroad on a special mission to England in 1774 before the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, to sound English public opinion, for which he had unusual advantages. He returned in the late spring of 1776 advising independence, and soon after this the Declaration of Independence was signed. Francis Dana was also appointed on a special mission to Paris and Holland with John Adams, later was made Minister to Russia, and after the peace with Great Britain was made Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Mr. Dana's own father, Richard Henry Dana, Senior, was a poet and literary critic and a founder of the ``North American Review.'' Young Richard was brought up in very moderate circumstances. His grandfather, who had accumulated a good deal of property, lost the larger part of it through unfortunate investments in canals by a relation, in which he had himself become more deeply involved than he supposed. I remember my father's saying that his spending money for one whole term consisted of twenty-five cents, which he carried in his pocket in cases of emergencies. He walked to and from Boston to save omnibus fares, had no carpet on his college room and had no chore-man to black his boots and fetch his water and fuel. This, however, was the usual custom in his day with all but the rich collegian. The necessities of life did not then demand so high a rate of ``living wage'' as to-day.

He entered on this sea experience with his eyes open. He had the opportunity of going on a long voyage as a passenger, but he refused it, and resolutely took the harder way of accomplishing his purpose of toughening himself. A little incident of his boyhood gives a hint of his pluck. His schoolmaster, angry at what he chose to call ``disobedience'' on the excuse of a ``pretended'' illness, told the boy to put out his left hand. ``Upon this hand,'' wrote Dana years afterward, ``he inflicted six blows with all his strength, and then six upon the right hand. I was in such a frenzy of indignation at his injustice and his insulting insinuation, that I could not have uttered a word for my life. I was too small and slender to resist, and could show my spirit only by fortitude. He called for my right hand again, and gave six more blows in the same manner, and then six more upon the left. My hands were swollen and in acute pain, but I did not flinch nor show a sign of suffering. He was determined to conquer, and gave six more blows upon each hand, with full force. Still there was no sign from me of pain or submission. I could have gone to the stake for what I considered my honor. The school was in an uproar of hissing and scraping and groaning, and the master turned his attention to the other boys and let me alone. He said not another word to me through the day. If he had I could not have answered, for my whole soul was in my throat and not a word could get out. . . . I went in the afternoon to the trustees of the school, stated my case, produced my evidence, and had an examination made. The next morning but four boys went to school, and the day following the career of Mr. W. ended.''

That Dana had a keen sense of injustice not merely when he himself was concerned, but whenever he was brought face to face with injustice, the reader of this book has discovered for himself, and that a high sense of honor and right was a controlling passion of his life will appear when one knows his career after he returned from his long voyage. It rendered his attitude toward his profession, that of a lawyer, very different from that of a man merely seeking a livelihood.

Beside his work for the sailors to which I refer later there was another class of peculiarly helpless sufferers to make even stronger demand upon his sense of justice. By his social relations and by his strong antipathy to violence of every kind, Dana would naturally have found his place amongst the men who in politics prefer orderly and regular and especially respectable associations. He came into active life when a small band of earnest men and women were agitating for the abolition of slavery. Some among them were also attacking the church, and proposing all sorts of changes in society. But Dana was a man of strong religious principles and feelings, and he had little faith in any violent change in the social order. His diaries and letters of the period show that he was annoyed by the temper of the Abolitionists. They were not his kind. Nevertheless he was not a man to steer between two parties. In a great moral crisis he was sure to take sides. He took sides now and came out as a member of the Free Soil party. He made a distinction, which was a clear one, between the Free Soil party and the uncompromising Abolitionists. But in the rising heat of political feeling, other people did not make a like distinction, and Dana, a young lawyer, married now, and with a family growing up about him, found himself put out into the cold by the well-to-do, the successful, and the respectable.

Dana had a keen scent for politics, and he looked with the strongest interest upon the great political movement which was stirring the country; but he did not espouse the cause of free soil because he expected to profit by it politically. On the contrary, he knew that he was shutting himself out from political preferment by such a course, and at the same time was imperilling his professional success. It was the act of a man who stood up for the cause of righteousness, without counting the cost. In like manner he now had the opportunity of illustrating afresh his attitude toward the law, for he held that law was for the accomplishment of justice, and that it was most glorious when its strong arm protected and defended the weak and downtrodden. By a natural course, therefore, he became a prominent counsel for those unfortunate negroes who, at this time, in Boston, were held as fugitive slaves. While the ingenuity of some was expended in putting the law on the side of the strong and the rich, Dana, who was convinced in his mind that the law of the state was honestly to be invoked in defence of the fugitive slave, gave himself heart and soul to the work of applying the law, and received no remuneration for his services in any fugitive slave case. Instead, he received at the close of one of the most important cases, a blow from a blackguard which narrowly missed maiming him for life. It is worth while to read what Dana wrote after rendering all the aid he could in the defence of Anthony Burns: ``The labors of a lawyer are ordinarily devoted to questions of property between man and man. He is to be congratulated if, though but for once, in any signal cause he can devote them to the vindication of any of the great primal rights affecting the highest interests of man.'' He was a member of the noted Free Soil Convention at Buffalo of 1848, and presided at the first meeting of the Republican party in Massachusetts.

It may be a source of wonder to some that Dana, who achieved a great literary success in the book which he wrote when a young man, did not pursue literature as an avocation, if not as a vocation. He published but one other book, a narrative of a trip to Cuba made in 1859, and he wrote a few magazine articles. The explanation must be found in the temperament and character of the man. His ``Two Years Before the Mast'' is a vivid representation of what he saw and experienced at a most impressionable age. He put his young life into it; he was not thinking of literature when he wrote it, and thus the book takes rank with those books which are bits of life rather than products of art. Afterward he was immersed in his law practice, and he was a prodigious worker. He saw with great clearness the points in the cases he took up, and he was untiring in his industry to cover the whole case. He did all the work himself; he did not lay the details on others, and avail himself of their diligence. His time, moreover, as we have shown, was very much at the disposal of those who could pay him little or nothing for his services, and he gave months of labor to the unremunerative defence of the fugitive slave. Moreover, his deep religious conviction and his high sense of legal honor often stood in the way of his profit. So it was that his life was one of hard work and little more than support of his family. There was scant time for any wandering into fields of literature.

Yet he left behind him some other writings which show well that the hand which penned the ``Two Years'' never lost its cunning. He made an interesting visit to Europe, and, later in life, in 1859-60, made a journey round the world. The record which he kept on these journeys has been drawn upon largely in the biography[2] prepared by Charles Francis Adams, who was in his early days a student in Dana's office, and there one finds page after page of delightfully animated description and narrative. He wrote for his own pleasure and for that of his family, and his writing was like brilliant talk, the outflow of a generous mind not easily saved for more common use. He published notes to Wheaton's ``International Law,'' several of which are quoted in all new works on the subject to this day.

The journey which he took round the world was for the purpose of restoring his health, which had been greatly impaired. He came back in improved condition, and entered upon the excited period of the war, when he held the office of United States District Attorney. During this time he argued the famous prize causes before the United States Supreme Court, and his argument was the one that turned the Court, which was democratic in its politics, to take the unanimous view that the United States Government had a right to establish blockade and take prizes of foreign vessels that were breaking this blockade. Had it not been for this decision, so largely influenced, as the Court itself generously states, by Mr. Dana's argument, the Civil War would have been greatly prolonged, with possibly another, or at least a doubtful issue. He afterward served in the Massachusetts legislature, and there made several noted speeches, among others his argument on the repeal of the usury laws, a bill for which was unexpectedly carried in that body as the result of this speech which has been reprinted for use before legislatures of other states.

He accepted a nomination to Congress, chiefly as a protest against the nomination of B. F. Butler, who was running on a paper money and repudiation platform against the principles of his own party, but Mr. Dana was defeated. In 1876 he was nominated by President Grant minister to England, but his nomination was not confirmed by the Senate, for his nomination had been made without consulting the Senatorial cabal and also he had bitter enemies, who carried on a warfare against him upon terms which he was too honorable to accept.