author
Richard Henry Dana
1815–1882
Best known for the vivid sea memoir Two Years Before the Mast, he turned hard-won experience as an ordinary sailor into one of the most enduring firsthand accounts of life at sea. He was also a lawyer and public advocate whose career reached from sailors' rights to major Civil War litigation.
4 Audiobooks
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana
Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana
To Cuba and Back
by Richard Henry Dana
About the author
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1815, he left Harvard after illness damaged his eyesight and signed on as a common sailor for a long voyage around Cape Horn to California. That experience gave him the material for Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, a book admired for its sharp observation and plainspoken realism.
He went on to become a lawyer, using his knowledge of maritime life to defend sailors and argue for fairer treatment of working seamen. He was also active in antislavery causes, and later helped represent the United States before the Supreme Court in the Civil War Prize Cases.
Dana died in Rome in 1882, but his reputation has lasted because he wrote with unusual honesty about labor, discipline, and daily life aboard ship. For many readers, his work remains both an adventure story and an important record of 19th-century American seafaring.