Yet the circle of passion was not to surround my fated steps for ever. Noble aspirations rose in my melancholy heart. I had seen the birth of true science, true liberty, and true wisdom. I had lived with Petrarch, stood enraptured beside the easel of Angelo and Raphael. I had stood at Maintz, beside the wonder-working machine that makes knowledge imperishable, and sends it with winged speed through the earth. At the pulpit of the mighty man of Wittenberg I had knelt; Israelite as I was, and am, I did involuntary homage to the mind of Luther.
At this hour I see the dawn of things to whose glory the glory of the past is but a dream. But I must close these thoughts, wandering as the steps of my pilgrimage. I have more to tell--strange, magnificent, and sad. But I must await the impulse of my heart.
[RICHARD HENRY DANA]
[Two Years Before the Mast]
Richard Henry Dana was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1815. He was the son of the American poet who, with W.C. Bryant, founded "The North American Review," and grandson of Francis Dana, for some time United States Minister to Russia, and afterwards Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Young Dana entered Harvard in 1832, but being troubled with an affection of the eyes, shipped as a common sailor on board an American merchant vessel, and made a voyage round Cape Horn to California and back. His experiences are embodied in his "Two Years Before the Mast," which was published in 1840, about three years after his return, when he had graduated at Harvard, and in the year in which he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. His best known work gives a vivid account of life at sea in the days of the old sailing ships, touches sympathetically on the hardships of the seafaring life, which its publication helped to ameliorate, and affords also an intimate glimpse of California when it was still a province of Mexico. "If," he writes, "California ever becomes a prosperous country, this--San Francisco--bay will be the centre of its prosperity." He died at Rome on January 7, 1882.
I.--Life on a Merchantman
On August 14 the brig Pilgrim left Boston for a voyage round Cape Horn to the western coast of America. I made my appearance on board at twelve o'clock with an outfit for a two or three years' voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes.
The vessel got under way early in the afternoon. I joined the crew, and we hauled out into the stream, and came to anchor for the night. The next day we were employed in preparations for sea. On the following night I stood my first watch. During the first few days we had bad weather, and I began to feel the discomforts of a sailor's life. But I knew that if I showed any sign of want of spirit or of backwardness, I should be ruined at once. So I performed my duties to the best of my ability, and after a time I felt somewhat of a man. I cannot describe the change which half a pound of cold salt beef and a biscuit or two produced in me after having taken no sustenance for three days. I was a new being.
As we had now a long "spell" of fine weather, without any incident to break the monotony of our lives, there can be no better place to describe the duties, regulations, and customs of an American merchantman, of which ours was a fair specimen.