Two Years Before The Mast

by Richard Henry Dana

Overview

This special edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST includes updates 24 and 76 years after the initial voyage. Richard Dana writes so that the reader can feel the icy Chilean waters, taste the hardtack, and feel whip upon your flogged back.

Take the voyage with him as he leaves Harvard to travel with a mad captain around South America to the coasts of California. Feel the same passions that influenced Herman Melville in writing his book Moby Dick and made D.H. Lawrence declare, "Dana's small book is a very great book."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945644054
Publisher:	Chump Change
Publication date:	01/01/1900
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Gary Kinder is the author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. He lives in Seattle.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Read an Excerpt

top hailed, and said he believed it was land, after all. " Land in your eye!" said the mate, who was looking through the telescope; " they are ice islands, if I can see a hole through a ladder"; and a few moments showed the mate to be right; and all our expectations fled; and instead of what we most wished to see we had what we most dreaded, and what we hoped we had seen the last of. We soon, however, left these astern, having passed within about two miles of them, and at sundown the horizon was clear in all directions. Having a fine wind, we were soon up with and passed the latitude of the Cape, and, having stood far enough to the southward to give it a wide berth, we began to stand to the eastward, with a good prospect of being round and steering to the northward, on the other side, in a very few days. But ill luck seemed to have lighted upon us. Not four hours had we been standing on in this course before it fell dead calm, and in half an hour it clouded up, a few straggling blasts, with spits of snow and sleet, came from the eastward, and in an hour more we lay hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail, drifting bodily off to leeward before the fiercest storm that we had yet felt, blowing dead ahead, from the eastward. It seemed as though the genius of the place had been roused at finding that we had nearly slipped through his fingers, and had come down upon us with tenfold fury. The sailors said that every blast, as it shook the shrouds, and whistled through the rigging, said to the old ship, " No, you don't! " " No) you don't! " For eight days we lay drifting about in this manner. Sometimes generally towards noon it fell calm; once or twice a round copper ball showed itselffor a few moments in the place where the sun ought to have been, a puff or two came from t...

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER I 4
CHAPTER II 5
CHAPTER III 8
CHAPTER IV 11
CHAPTER V 15
CHAPTER VI 19
CHAPTER VII 22
CHAPTER VIII 25
CHAPTER IX 28
CHAPTER X 31
CHAPTER XI 34
CHAPTER XII 36
CHAPTER XIII 37
CHAPTER XIV 42
CHAPTER XV 48
CHAPTER XVI 55
CHAPTER XVII 58
CHAPTER XVIII 62
CHAPTER XIX 68
CHAPTER XX 76
CHAPTER XXI 80
CHAPTER XXII 83
CHAPTER XXIII 85
CHAPTER XXIV 94
CHAPTER XXV 98
CHAPTER XXVI 106
CHAPTER XXVII 110
CHAPTER XXVIII 116
CHAPTER XXIX 122
CHAPTER XXX 133
CHAPTER XXXI 139
CHAPTER XXXII 150
CHAPTER XXXIII 155
CHAPTER XXXIV 161
CHAPTER XXXV 164
CHAPTER XXXVI 169
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER 173
SEVENTY-SIX YEARS AFTER 189

Reading Group Guide

1. Discuss Dana's motives for the voyage. What do you feel was the predominating factor in his decision to undertake such a journey? What were the risks involved, and how serious do you feel they were? What is your view of Dana's momentous choice?

2. What do you make of Dana's attitude toward religion, and religious instruction? Do you agree or not? Why? Is his a perspective that is anachronistic, or not?

3. How does social class play a role in the book? Discuss the implications of Dana's background. How did it affect his experience on the ship? Did you find it important, or inconsequential?

4. What is your opinion of the book's stark realism? Does Dana have an agenda in writing the book? If so, what is it? Do you think the experience was a positive one for Dana, or not?

5. What is the role of nature and the outdoors for Dana? How does he view the American West? How does his voyage attest to his view of the outdoors? Does this view change throughout his experience on the ship? If so, how?

6. Discuss the contrasts between Captain Thompson and Captain Faucon. How do their leadership skills differ? Who is more effective, and why? Discuss Dana's book on a political level. What do his portrayals of each captain reveal?

7. Discuss the considerable shift in Dana's perspective as evidenced in 'Twenty-Four Years After.' How do you account for this change? Do you agree or disagree with the author's decision to replace the original final chapter with this later account? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

"Dana's small book is a very great book." - D.H. Lawrence

From the Publisher