Penguins on Parade: Two Years Before the Mast!

Some Penguin Classics prove a few of my Rules About Authors (not to be confused with my Rules For Authors, a very different though equally long list) rather handily, as in the case of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s rip-snorting 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast, issued as a Penguin in their American Library in 1981 and then as a full-blown Classic in 1986, edited by Thomas Philbrick. The main rule reinforced here is #117, “Old Salts Tell Great Yarns,” referring to the fact that men back from engaging with the sea can be relied upon to write up stories (fiction or otherwise) that landsmen will find enthralling.

Two Years Before the Mast, chronicling 19-year-old Dana’s voyage as an ordinary seaman aboard the merchant vessel (little better than a hide drogher, in this case) Pilgrim, begins with the small, griping ship’s departure from Boston in August 1834, follows its progress to California via Cape Horn, gives readers an extended view of California coastal towns during the Gold Rush boom years, and then follows the young man, now aboard the Alert, as he rounds the Horn again – this time in winter – and makes his way back to Boston in 1836, where he promptly went back to Harvard College and began writing up his adventures and unwittingly proving, indeed almost inaugurating, Rule #117. Two Years Before the Mast is, even now, a revelation of readability, so gripping in parts and so evocative in other parts that even in Dana’s own day, there were cynical souls who suspected his friend James Fenimore Cooper might have had a more active hand in the book than simply championing it.

Dana made the trip out of headlong adolescent impulse. His Boston bookselling acquaintances tried to dissuade him (“You’re taking a vacation to Pakistan?” they asked him incredulously – or words to that effect), but like so many 19-year-olds, he wanted to experience something real. Our editor Philbrick is quick to point out how much was at stake:

The decision entailed, moreover, the risk of the annihilation of his social identity, the possibility that he might be trapped irretrievably in a world of forecastles and waterfront boardinghouses. There was something suicidal about the decision to commit himself to a long voyage before the mast …

Dana had been a student of Emerson and a classmate of Thoreau; his father was a nationally-recognized poet, essayist, and editor; he knew such things wouldn’t matter in the alien world he was hell-bent on joining, but he joined it anyway, and Two Years Before the Mast is his report from that world. It’s full of well-turned episodes regarding his hapless crewmates and nefarious captain, plus the ordinary onboard tasks he had to perform, like tarring down the masts:

There he “swings aloft ‘twixt heaven and earth,” and if the rope slips, breaks, or is let go, or if the bowline slips, he falls overboard or breaks his neck. This, however, is a thing which never enters into a sailor’s calculation. He only thinks of leaving no holydays (places not tarred,) for in case he should, he would have to go over the whole again; or of dropping no tar upon deck, for then there would be a soft word in his ear from the mate. In this manner I tarred down all the head-stays, but found the rigging about the jib-booms, martingale, and spiritsail yard upon which I was afterwards put, the hardest. Here you have to hang on with your eye-lids and tar with your hands.

He bucked the slightly romanticized view of seagoing life by writing about its dangers, its jealousies and petty rivalries, and especially its tediums. During one of his protracted stays onshore on the West Coast, he finds himself desperate for something to read:

… anything, even a little child’s storybook, or the half of a shipping calendar, appeared like a treasure. I actually read a jest-book through, from beginning to end, in one day, as I should a novel, and enjoyed it very much.

And even when the voyage at last turns its eyes back to Boston, the adventure isn’t over, not by a long shot: the vessel must face rounding Cape Horn in winter with a reduced crew  – a harrowing prospect, as anybody who’s ever made that trip in a wind-driven vessel will attest. Dana recounts the dangers of that passage with thrilling skill, but he does equally memorable work showing his readers the human costs along the way. Who can’t read his account of leaving a stricken crewmate behind and not feel moved, just as Dana intended:

Our crew was somewhat diminished; for a man and a boy had gone in the Pilgrim; another was second mate of the Ayacucho; and a third, the oldest man of the crew, had broken down under the hard work and constant exposure on the coast, and, having had a stroke of palsy, was left behind at the hide-house, under the charge of Captain Arthur. The poor fellow wished very much to come home in the ship; and he ought to have been brought home in her. But a live dog is better than a dead lion, and a sick sailor belongs to nobody’s mess; so he was sent ashore with the rest of the lumber, which was only in the way.

Dana had planned all along to write up this foolhardy adventure he undertook, but nothing could have prepared him for the success it would enjoy – had he had any inkling of the vast hunger for his book, he wouldn’t have sold its copyright to a New York publisher (there’d been an earlier offer of royalties after the first thousand copies sold, which Dana turned down on the advice of his family and of Boston bookselling acquaintances who loudly told him the book wouldn’t sell a thousand copies in a million years). As it was, he had to nurse his draft of $250 while he watched Two Years Before the Mast sell like griddle-cakes and create something of a sea-change in the American literary scene (it profoundly influenced virtually every American writer then working, to one extent or another).

Dana went on to build a life for himself not substantially different from the one he would likely have lived had he never taken his trip. He got his law degree, opened a practice, married a shrew, raised a family, went on the lecture circuit, became the revered and generally loved “Duke of Cambridge,” and looked back more and more wistfully on the great adventure of his life. Once the copyright of Two Years Before the Mast reverted to him (a quarter-century after its original appearance), he immediately revised it, softening the tougher elements, pumping in plenty of old-man sentimentality into what he had somewhat disparagingly referred to as “a boy’s book.” Philbrick very wisely chooses to use the original version for his Penguin Classic, but Dana’s actions serve to prove another one of my Rules About Authors, #10: they shouldn’t be allowed within twenty yards of their finished works.