Product Description: Richard Henry Dana referred to this book as "a voice from the sea." Influencing such authors as Conrad and Melville, it has become a maritime classic that has inflicted legions of men with a passion for the sea. Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 on the brigPilgrimfor a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California...read more

Product Description: Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision...read more

Product Description: A sailor's observation of a younger, wilder California In this excerpt from Richard Henry Dana's around-the-Horn masterpiece, Two Years Before the Mast, we experience the wonder Dana felt when beholding the California coast for the first time, in 1835: ''[T]here was a grandeur in everything around, which gave a solemnity to the scene, a silence and solitariness which affected every part! Not a human being but ourselves for miles, and no sound heard but the pulsations of the great Pacific!'' The passages taken from Two Years Before the Mast and compiled here reveal what California was like before the gold rush...read more