Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast” | Hacker News Reader

Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast”

smithsonianmag.com

29 pointsdnetesn12 comments

I'm a third of the way through this at the moment. It might be of some interest to the West Coast crowd on HN to read about just how uninhabited California was at the time. The ship Dana was on, Pilgrim, spent time trading goods up and down the coast.

Dana went ashore in several places either to land goods or on liberty and the change between the pictures he paints and the present day is astonishing.

Dana was astonished by the change in his own lifetime (which spanned the gold-rush period). Some editions of the book include "Twenty-Four Years After." This is an epilogue written after Dana revisited many of the sites featured in the book. He finds flourishing cities where there were once lone missions and empty beaches.

The Project Gutenberg e-text is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2055/2055-h/2055-h.htm

I read this book around 10 years ago. It was a very good read, and the part at the end of the book where he visits California many years later was quite interesting.

Not only does Dana describe what California was like in the 1840s (very empty) and talks about the economy (based off of ranching and cow hides), but he writes a lot about ships and sailing. He started off the voyage as a Harvard University student who knew little about sailing, and he learned as he went.

I particularly enjoyed reading about the Hawaiian sailors that were crewing ships in the area. Hawaii is referred to in the book as the Sandwich Islands. It took a while before I remembered that the Sandwich Islands was what the Europeans named the Hawaiian Islands when they were discovered by European sailors.

The book became a best seller during the Gold Rush, as it was one of very few books about California available at the time.

I very much recommend it, especially since it's freely available on the Internet due to the copyright having expired.

There's actually a pop-culture reference to this early on in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. One of the characters replies to another that he did "two years before the mast" during one of the early cut-scenes. I assume they read it while researching for the game, and decided to reference it as an easter egg.

Great book, but the comparison to Moby Dick makes no sense.

Dana mentored Melville

If I remember correctly Two Years Before The Mast is referenced in White Jacket for its description of rounding the horn

Yes, but Moby-Dick is absolute fiction based on a sailor's experience, while Two Years was total non-fiction.

(don't get me wrong I love both books but they are very different at their core)

It's a very interesting book - starting by the fact that the easiest commercial route between Boston and California was around Cape Horn!

A wonderful book.

You can download an audio version free from librivox.

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