Two Years Before the Mast

In this nineteenth-century nautical memoir, a Harvard man sails around the tip of South America to California—and returns with this classic tale of adventure.

In 1834, nineteen-year-old Richard Henry Dana left Harvard University to enlist as a deckhand on a brig sailing from Boston to the California coast. For the next two years, he recorded the terrifying storms, awe-inspiring beauty, and dreadful hardships of the journey in a diary he would later expand into this riveting memoir of "the l...