In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. became a common seaman, and soon his Two Years Before the Mast became a classic. Literary acclaim did not erase the young lawyer’s memory of floggings he witnessed aboard ship or undermine his vow to combat injustice. Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s determination to keep that vow.

These passages are taken from Two Years Before the Mast and compiled

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815-1822) was a writer and a lawyer specializing in maritime law who dedicated himself to helping improve the lot of the common seaman. Rod Scher is a longtime boating enthusiast, writer, and former English teacher.

The role of religion in early American literature has been endlessly studied; the role of the law has been virtually ignored. Robert A. Ferguson's book seeks to correct this imbalance. With the Revolution, Ferguson demonstrates, the lawyer replaced the clergyman as the dominant intellectual force in the new nation. Lawyers wrote the first important plays, novels, and poems; as gentlemen of letters they controlled many of the journals and literary societies; and their education in the law led to a controlling aesthetic that shaped both the civic and the imaginative literature of the early republic. An awareness of this aesthetic enables us to see works as diverse as Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and Irving's burlesque History of New York as unified texts, products of the legal mind of the time. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the great political orations were written by lawyers, and so too were the literary works of Trumbull, Tyler, Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and a dozen other important writers. To recover the original meaning and context of these writings is to gain new understanding of a whole era of American culture. The nexus of law and letters persisted for more than a half-century. Ferguson explores a range of factors that contributed to its gradual dissolution: the yielding of neoclassicism to romanticism; the changing role of the writer; the shift in the lawyer's stance from generalist to specialist and from ideological spokesman to tactician of compromise; the onslaught of Jacksonian democracy and the problems of a country torn by sectional strife. At the same time, he demonstrates continuities with the American Renaissance. And in Abraham Lincoln he sees a memorable late flowering of the earlier tradition.

The essays collected within this volume ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and also how they forge that experience. Individual chapters explore the literary worlds of naval ships, whalers, commercial vessels, emigrant ships, and troop transports from the seventeenth to the twentieth-first century, revealing a rich history of shipboard reading, writing, and performing. Contributors are interested both in how literary activities adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard experiences are structured through—and framed by—such activities. In this respect, the volume builds on scholarship that has explored reading as a spatially situated and embodied practice. As our contributors demonstrate, the shipboard environment and the ocean beyond it place the mind and body under peculiar forms of pressure, and these determine acts of reading—and of writing and performing—in specific ways.

Chapter Introduction -- chapter 1 Melville's Typee and the Development of the American Colonial Imagination -- chapter 2 The Colonizing Voice in Cuba: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage -- chapter 3 The Kings of the Sandwich Islands: Mark Twain's Letters from Hawaii and Postbellum American Imperialism -- chapter 4 Charles Warren Stoddard and the American Homocolonial Literary Excursion -- chapter 5 And Who Are These White Men?: Jack London's The House of Pride and American Colonization of the Hawaiian Islands.

Covers the social, professional, political and literary worlds of which Richard Henry Dana was a prominent participant, along with extensive observations from his voyage around the world in 1859 and other travels.

Drawing from some of California's best writers and thinkers, this anthology explores the relationship between animal and human in the Golden State.