Two Years Before the Mast

By: Richard Henry Dana

Narrated by: Bernard Mayes

Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's Summary

Richard Henry Dana referred to this book as "a voice from the sea". It influenced Conrad and Melville, and has become a maritime classic that has inspired legions of men with a passion for the sea.

Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 aboard the brig Pilgrim on a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. (Hence the city name Dana Point.) Drawing from his journals, Two Years Before the Mast gives a vivid and detailed account, shrewdly observed and beautifully described, of a common sailor's wretched treatment at sea, and of a way of life virtually unknown at that time.

(P)1995 Blackstone Audio Inc.

Great Read!

This book really takes you back in time an teaches you the ways and lives of common sailors. Plus you get a rare look at California before it was fully settled. Exciting from start to finish. And its all real! Just an amazing work.

Two Years Before the Mast

An audiobook is unique in that a review requires two parts - a review of the book itself, as well as commentary on the audio delivery. In this case I would rate both as excellent.
As a California native, I consider Richard Henry Dana's accounting of life in early California as a must read. His narrative covers many aspects of life in California in the mid-1800's. He describes the coast, and its settlements in sufficient detail to make them recognizable. His descriptions of the daily life he encountered brings the book to life....you can visualize how things were, compared to our modern world.
Bernard Mayes does a fine job on the audio side. As the book is actually non-fiction documentary, there is minimal conversation, but he handles what there is well.
Experienced sailors and ship history buffs might notice that he uses the written pronunciations of the many maritime terms, as opposed to the actual working pronunciations, but that is a minor point, and doesn't detract from the reading.
All in all, an excellent way to spend an afternoon!!

The Uncommon Common Sailor in the Age of Sail

Two Years Before the Mast (1840/1869) is a slow-paced and absorbing book. In it Richard Henry Dana, Jr. recounts with the aid of his diary entries how he went to sea in 1834 on an American merchant ship called The Pilgrim, sailing south from Boston, going around Cape Horn, and then north to work in the cow-hide trade off the coast of California. He'd left his studies at Harvard University (and his status as scion of an elite Boston family) to work as a novice common sailor to improve his measles-weakened eyes.

Rather than a ripping sea adventure yarn (the only naval action ala Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin being a suspenseful moment when the Pilgrim eludes a suspicious ship flying no colors), Dana intended to fill a void in the sea literature of his day by authentically showing what it was like to be a "Jack before the mast" on a merchant ship in the age of sail, because the norm then was fictional and inaccurate accounts penned by former naval officers and civilian passengers. His “design,” as he puts it, "is to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is, -- the light and the dark together." So he devotes much of his narrative to detailing the workings of a ship in fair weather and foul on weekdays and Sundays, including accounts of the work done (reefing, furling, and maintaining the various masts, yards, sails, and lines, as well as keeping watch, cleaning the decks, mending clothes, stowing hides, etc.), the food and drink consumed, the power hierarchy obeyed, the indelicate masculine culture endured, the few leisure activities enjoyed, and so on. He also depicts the changing features of the lands, oceans, and climates of the different latitudes and longitudes through which he sailed during his two-year sojourn.

I confess to being unable to clearly visualize Dana's detailed accounts of managing the different parts of the ship's rigging (topgallants, studdings, royals, mizzens, hawsers, cleats, tackles, yards, etc.) and to daydreaming through them. I still don’t have a clue as to what a clew line is, but it's not really necessary to follow all the nautical details, because Dana so vividly conveys the challenging, skilful, and crucial nature of the work.

In addition to giving such factual information, Dana achieves by turns a sublime poetry (from endless oceanic vistas to gargantuan ice bergs), a comic touch (for human foibles and salty phrases), a suspenseful flair (during cataclysmic storms involving rain, hail, snow, ice, thunder and lightening, driving winds, and vast swells), and a sanely indignant tone (at the abuses of power by the captains directed at the sailors). And he believes that "We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice." Indeed, Dana’s younger self was open-minded, admiring uneducated but brilliant, handsome, or interesting shipmates and making fast friends with the Hawaiians who lived on the California coast to sell their services to the ships plying the cow hide trade there.

As a native of California, I was fascinated by Dana’s description of its coast in the first half of the 19th century. Places like San Francisco, Monterey, Santa Barbara, San Juan Capistrano, Los Angeles, and San Diego were all so different from what they are today, being sparsely populated, undeveloped, and colorfully and sleepily California-Spanish-Mexican. I'd always regretted America grabbing California from Mexico by war, but Dana reveals some unappealing aspects of Mexican-Californian culture, how it rigidly divided classes according to skin-color, with the aristocrats at the top being those with “purest” Spanish blood and the Indian serfs (at best) at the bottom doing all the hard and dirty work in return for poor food and shabby loincloths. Not to mention the related unfair application of justice, the need to convert to Catholicism to be able to live there, and the brutal use of horses and avid bull and cock fighting.

Two Years Before the Mast was first published in 1840, but this audiobook is the 1869 revised edition that includes a long epilogue in which Dana revisits California 24 years after he was there as a young man, describing the explosive growth of San Francisco and his feeling of nostalgia for the demise of the California cow-hide trade he loathed so much when he had to labor in it and bringing us up to date on the lives and fates of the ships he sailed on and the men he sailed and worked with.

I really liked Bernard Mayes' reading of Herodotus' Histories, as his gravelly, thin, and dry voice aptly evoked a witty and aged Herodotus, so I was looking forward to listening to his reading of Two Years Before the Mast, but I found myself at times wishing for a younger man's voice for this book, for Mayes' tended to crack and quaver when shouting ship-board orders. But he is in fine form through most of the book and in moments like when an enraged captain flogs two men, roaring with peevish tyranny, "If you want to know what I flog you for, I'll tell you. It's because I like to do it!-because I like to do it!-It suits me! That's what I do it for!"

There are two flaws in this audiobook: it lacks Dana's interesting footnotes and offers occasional faint microphone bumps.

Finally, brief remarkable moments like when Dana observes the white sails of his ship full of quiet breeze like a marble pyramid on a starry night or when he watches a solitary albatross asleep with his head under his wing, rising and falling slowly up and down the heavy swell of the waves make Two Years Before the Mast a classic.

The Most Amazing Read Ever

I have read this book at least 10 times. The history is pure time travel. The reader, Bernard Mayes, is in perfect pitch at all times. The human courage recorded here is almost unbelievable.

Two Years Before The Mast

What a great book describing the early days of California and life on the sea.

Not Bad For a Non-Fiction Story

What did you like best about Two Years Before the Mast? What did you like least?

It's hard to be completely fair to Two Years Before the Mast. Most of my "sea-faring" reading has been the likes of Patrick O'Brian and the Aubrey-Maturin series. That's obviously not a fair comparison since O'Brian's works of fiction and he was an author by trade while Dana was not.

There are parts of the book that are very interesting. The accounts of California in the 1830s are fascinating. At the end of the book he takes a return journey to California in 1859 and describes how many of the places had changed so dramatically in the short time-span. That too was fascinating.

Likewise, the descriptions of the peril and hardships of a seaman's life were sobering. The helplessness of a common sailor with respect to an overbearing and abusive captain is particularly striking.

Having said all that, at times the book drags a bit. As much as the peril and hardship I was impressed with the monotony of a sailor's life. In this case it wasn't just the sailing, but the mercantile act of gathering hides for years on end along the coast of California before returning home. As far as the sailing goes, for me it all started to run together. One rounding of Cape Horn sounded very much like the last, treacherous both times as it was.

Also, I would say a word about the narration. It was good, but not exceptional. I wouldn't seek out another book simply because of the narrator, but I probably wouldn't avoid the book because of the narrator either. I did notice more odd background "bumps" (like someone had hit the microphone) on this recording than I ever recall noticing before. It wasn't bad, but it was unusual in my experience.

All-in-all, I'm glad I listened to it. I don't think I would have made it all the way through in print. I don't know that I'll be queueing it up to re-listen to in near future but I imagine I will at some point.

Great as an audiobook, recording has issues

This book, a long favorite of mine, is even better as an audiobook. Somehow, rigging and reefing the top'sls makes more sense when read outloud--you can realize what action is taking place aloft. The story--well, it's amazing. And it's American history in a capsule that is incomparable; from the time of Andrew Jackson to the start of the Civil War and the founding of California. It is amazing to realize that from the 1830's to the 1850's, California went from a frontier to a vigorous, urbanized society --in 20 years! Astonishing. Dana covers the changes in his afterward written 24 years after his sea voyage as a youth. The only problem with Mayes' recording is that there is a lot of technical sloppiness--one part has background over-recording of some other voices, and in one part, the recording markers, to be removed, are left in. Mayes has a kind of fruity, British voice, yet he gets excited during the worst tales of storms and conveys the words of the author with emotion.

Nautical Dictionary required

A very important work that informed so much about the history of California. Keep a nautical dictionary at hand to be able to follow some of the more exciting parts.

My Most Favorite Audible Book

I may have listened to this ten times by now over 20 years. I know all the places mentioned from my youth and remember them even more foundly. Yet the work is just as valuable to a scholar.

Two years before the Mast

While spending time to listen my mind wandered to things I’ve done similar to what Mr Dana did as a youth. Also, I’ve read other history of California and New England, spending a summer as a young lad in the former and latter. My father would tease me for being smitten by several college girls a number of years my senior who worked at the resort the family stayed during that summer of enlightenment. There is a Two years before the Mast in every lad’s growing to manhood. Well worth the listen- db