Richard Henry Dana

author

Richard Henry Dana

1815–1882

Best known for the sea memoir Two Years Before the Mast, this American writer turned a difficult voyage into one of the classic firsthand accounts of life before the mast. He was also a lawyer who fought for sailors’ rights and supported the antislavery cause.

4 Audiobooks

Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast

by Richard Henry Dana

Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast

by Richard Henry Dana

To Cuba and Back

To Cuba and Back

by Richard Henry Dana

The Seaman's Friend Containing a treatise on practical seamanship, with plates, a dictionary of sea terms, customs and usages of the merchant service

The Seaman's Friend Containing a treatise on practical seamanship, with plates, a dictionary of sea terms, customs and usages of the merchant service

by Richard Henry Dana

About the author

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1815, Richard Henry Dana Jr. left Harvard after measles weakened his eyesight and signed on as a common sailor in 1834. The long trip to California and back gave him the material for Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, a vivid account that helped secure his reputation.

Dana later returned to his studies, became a lawyer, and built a career in maritime law. Sources also describe him as an advocate for seamen and an opponent of slavery, showing how closely his legal work was tied to the social questions of his time.

He spent his later years partly in Europe and died in Rome in 1882. His lasting place in American literature comes from the clarity and immediacy of his writing, which still brings 19th-century life at sea sharply into view.