Two Years Before The Mast: A Personal Narrative Of Life At Sea
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
In one of the most viscerally honest accounts of maritime life ever committed to paper, Two Years Before the Mast chronicles Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s harrowing voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to the California coast and back, undertaken not as a gentleman passenger but as a common sailor — hauling lines, scrubbing decks, and enduring the brutal realities of life before the mast. Written from raw, firsthand experience after Dana left Harvard in 1834 due to failing eyesight, the narrative presents a world of relentless physical labor, violent storms, capricious officers, and the sun-baked hide trade of Mexican Alta California with an unflinching clarity that no armchair traveler could replicate. Beyond its thrilling seafaring drama, the work stands as a landmark in American literature and social history, giving voice to the plight of common sailors at a time when their hardships were largely invisible to polite society — a mission that would later fuel Dana's career as a maritime lawyer and advocate. His prose is spare yet evocative, capturing the vast indifference of the Pacific with the same precision he applies to the petty cruelties of shipboard hierarchy. This Reader's Digest World's Best Reading edition, illustrated by E. Boyd Smith and with an afterword by Thomas Fleming, introduces a new generation of readers to a text that Herman Melville himself called the finest sea narrative in the English language — and once begun, it is impossible to put down without wondering what price true freedom really costs.
Author: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Format: Hardback
Genre: Maritime history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
In one of the most viscerally honest accounts of maritime life ever committed to paper, Two Years Before the Mast chronicles Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s harrowing voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to the California coast and back, undertaken not as a gentleman passenger but as a common sailor — hauling lines, scrubbing decks, and enduring the brutal realities of life before the mast. Written from raw, firsthand experience after Dana left Harvard in 1834 due to failing eyesight, the narrative presents a world of relentless physical labor, violent storms, capricious officers, and the sun-baked hide trade of Mexican Alta California with an unflinching clarity that no armchair traveler could replicate. Beyond its thrilling seafaring drama, the work stands as a landmark in American literature and social history, giving voice to the plight of common sailors at a time when their hardships were largely invisible to polite society — a mission that would later fuel Dana's career as a maritime lawyer and advocate. His prose is spare yet evocative, capturing the vast indifference of the Pacific with the same precision he applies to the petty cruelties of shipboard hierarchy. This Reader's Digest World's Best Reading edition, illustrated by E. Boyd Smith and with an afterword by Thomas Fleming, introduces a new generation of readers to a text that Herman Melville himself called the finest sea narrative in the English language — and once begun, it is impossible to put down without wondering what price true freedom really costs.