Ultimately, the headlands and surrounding area are given the name Dana Point.ĭana’s experience with higher education serves him well as he learns the Spanish language from Mexicans in California and takes on the role of translator for the crew of the ship.
When some of the hides become stuck part way down the cliff Dana gets lowered on a rope to gather them. They need to throw the hides from the elevated area to the beach below. In one adventure along the way, Dana’s party is to bring cow hides from an area near the mission of San Juan Capistrano, but a headland area presents a geographic obstacle for the crew. He encountered and wrote about indigenous people along with their native cultures and the widely varying impact of immigrant groups and other traders.
The text describes these and other ports along the westernmost coast of America. Alta California was a province of Mexico after having once been Las Californias, a Spanish colony. Ports of call on the journey included San Diego Bay, Monterey Bay, and the San Francisco Bay. The Pilgrim was on a trade voyage bringing United States goods to the Mexican colonies in California. This mindset was likely inspired by his not only by his time spent among the sailors, but from having become one of them.Ī main goal of Dana’s was to show what the ordinary life of a sailor at sea entailed. Later in his life, he publically opposed slavery and was a founder of the Free Soil Party which opposed the expansion of slavery westward. As Dana’s time aboard the vessel continues he begins to sympathize with the lower social class of which he previously was not a part. The nautical term used in the title “before the mast” refers to the lodging area of the sailors in the forecastle, or the front of the ship. After that, he enlisted on the Alert on which his passage back from California took place.
The disease affected his vision and believing it would help the condition, he became a sailor on the brig Pilgrim traveling to South America, around Cape Horn, and to California. Dana was an undergraduate student at Harvard College when he contracted the measles. After the trek, in 1840, the diary was released as the memoir titled Two Years Before the Mast. The journey took place aboard a merchant ship and was chronicled in a diary Dana kept. A two-year coast-to-coast voyage to California from Boston, Massachusetts was undertaken by American Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
0 kommentar(er)
