A return to California, and a lesson in romance

One of the great pleasures of Two Years Before the Mast, as I’ve noted, is its picture of California before there was anything there. As a historical document it’s really a treasure. I’ve never been to California, but I know there is more to San Francisco now than the presidio, and that hide-droghing has fallen by the wayside. And Dana was there in 1835-36—that is to say, not a terribly long time before the Mexican-American War, the gold rush, or Californian statehood.

Dana returned to California in 1859 and wrote a new chapter for his book, “Twenty-Four Years After,” which describes San Francisco as a city with a hundred thousand residents (with Protestant churches of every denomination! though the Pueblo de los Angeles is still a sleepier town of twenty thousand). Already the trade in hides up and down the coast is over—gold having changed just about everything—and the interior is beginning to be cultivated. As “a respectable-looking citizen on the wharf” tells him, “‘those old times of the Pilgrim and Alert and California, that we read about, are gone by.’” If only the citizen knew that he read about those ships in the book of his very interlocutor.

For Dana is famous in California. Nearly everyone has read his book, and there are still many people there whom he met his first time out. Acquaintances struck up and met again twenty-four years later, in the mid-early nineteenth century, on what was really a frontier, seem almost incredible. The poignancy of the whole thing is really too much, for me and Dana both.

The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream, the Alert, the California, the Rosa, with her Italians; then the handsome Ayacucho, my favorite; the poor, dear old Pilgrim, the home of hardship and hopelessness…. All, all were gone! … I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! … Why should I care for them,—poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever-climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck…

A melancholy thought, and one that is only magnified when Dana goes on to recount all he knows of the later lives of the men he shipped with. Some did very well for themselves. But even those that did…Mr. Brown, the wonderful first mate, ended up a favorite captain, and died one day when he slipped from a plank stepping from the wharf onto his ship. And so-and-so who died when all hands went down. And so-and-so of the fever. In the original concluding chapter of the book, in which Dana hands down many thoughtful and fascinating prescriptions for the future benefit of sailors, he said:

The romantic interest which many take in the sea, and in those who live upon it, may be of use in exciting their attention to this subject, though I cannot but feel sure that all who have followed me in my narrative must be convinced that the sailor has no romance in his every-day life to sustain him, but that it is very much the same plain, matter-of-fact drudgery and hardship, which would be experienced on shore.

I knew it to be true, after reading his whole memoir. But until I found out how Mr. Brown died, it was hard to let all the romance go.*

And as if Dana and his voyage didn’t already have enough interesting history connected with them, the Pilgrim, the ship he sailed out on, was years later caught and burned off the Azores by the Confederate steamer Alabama.

*Of course, this whole project is on the romance of the sea. Because in some way Dana is wrong, or at least only part right. Everyday life aboard ship is certainly not romantic, but man’s struggle with the ocean is a grand and wondrous thing. It just turns out that no matter how many grand and wondrous things you’ve done, you can still fall from a plank and die.