Richard Henry Dana Jr. · 1840 · sea

Richard Henry Dana's 1840 memoir of the two years he spent as an ordinary seaman, sailing from Boston around Cape Horn to the hide-trading coast of Mexican California and back. Unsparing about the hardship and cruelty of a sailor's life, it became a classic of the sea and an invaluable picture of California before the Americans came. The route runs out and back around the Horn.

1. 1
   Boston

   August 1834, and a Harvard undergraduate whose eyes have failed after measles ships before the mast on the brig Pilgrim - not as a passenger but as a common sailor, which almost no gentleman had done and then written about.

2. 2
   Cape Horn

   South through the Atlantic and round the Horn in the southern autumn - ice, hail and men sent aloft to reef topsails in the dark, recorded in the plain unheroic detail that is why the book has lasted.

3. 3
   San Diego

   California when it was a remote Mexican province of missions and hide-traders. The crew live ashore at the hide houses curing skins - the cargo the whole two years is for, and which Dana calls California bank-notes.

4. 4
   Santa Barbara

   The open roadsteads with no harbour, where hides are flung off the cliffs and carried out through the surf on a man's head - and where Dana watches the captain flog two sailors and writes the passage that made him a lawyer.

5. 5
   San Francisco

   The great bay a decade before the gold, with a mission, a presidio and almost nobody - and Dana writing that whoever holds this bay will hold the Pacific, which turned out to be exactly right.

6. 6
   Cape Horn (return)

   Homeward in the dead of the southern winter, the worst possible season, with the ship iced up and the crew down with scurvy - the passage most readers remember, and the one Melville said no seaman could have bettered.

7. 7
   Boston (return)

   September 1836, home after two years, and he goes back to Harvard, becomes a lawyer and spends his career representing seamen - the book having been written, he said, to give an account of the life from the forecastle.