Two Years Before the Mast | Page 4

the public, I have been
encouraged to add an account of a visit to the old scenes, made
twenty-four years after, together with notices of the subsequent story
and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the
reader is made acquainted.''
The popularity of this book has been so great and continued that it is
now proposed to make an illustrated edition with new material. I have

prepared a concluding chapter to continue my father's ``Twenty-four
Years After.'' This will give all that we have since learned of the fate of
crew and vessels, and a brief account of Mr. Dana himself and his
important lifework, which appears more fully in his published
biography[1] and printed speeches and letters.[2] This concluding
chapter will take the place of the biographic sketch prefixed to the last
authorized edition. There is also added an appendix with a list of the
crews of the two vessels in which Mr. Dana sailed, extracts from a log,
and also plates of spars, rigging and sails, with names, to aid the reader.
In the winter of 1879-80 I sailed round Cape Horn in a full-rigged ship
from New York to California. At the latter place I visited the scenes of
``Two Years Before the Mast.'' At the old town of San Diego I met Jack
Stewart, my father's old shipmate, and as we were looking at the dreary
landscape and the forlorn adobe houses and talking of California of the
thirties, he burst out into an encomium of the accuracy and fidelity to
details of my father's book. He said, ``I have read it again and again. It
all comes back to me, everything just as it happened. The seamanship is
perfect.'' And then as if to emphasize it all, with the exception that
proves the rule, he detailed one slight case where he thought my father
was at fault,---a detail so slight that I now forget what it is. In reading
the Log kept by the discharged mate, Amerzeen, on the return trip in
the Alert, I find that every incident there recorded, from running
aground at the start at San Diego Harbor, through the perilous icebergs
round the Horn, the St. Elmo's fire, the scurvy of the crew and the small
matters like the painting of the vessel, to the final sail up Boston
Harbor, confirms my father's record. His former shipmate, the late B. G.
Stimson, a distinguished citizen of Detroit, said the account of the
flogging was far from an exaggeration, and Captain Faucon of the Alert
also during his lifetime frequently confirmed all that came under his
observation. Such truth in the author demands truth in illustration, and I
have cooperated with the publishers in securing a painting of the Alert
under full sail and other illustrations, both colored and in pen and ink,
faithful to the text in every detail.
Accuracy, however, is not the secret of the success of this book. Its
flowing style, the use of short Anglo-Saxon words,[3] its
picturesqueness, the power of description, the philosophic arrangement
all contribute to it, but chiefly, I believe, the enthusiasm of the young

Dana, his sympathy for his fellows and interest in new scenes and
strange peoples, and with it all, the real poetry that runs through the
whole. As to its poetry, I will quote from Mrs. Bancroft's ``Letters from
England,'' giving the opinion of the poet Samuel Rogers:
``London, June 20, 1847.
``The 19th, Sat. we breakfasted with Lady Byron and my friend Miss
Murray, at Mr. Rogers'. . . . After breakfast he had been repeating some
lines of poetry which he thought fine, when he suddenly exclaimed,
`But there is a bit of American prose, which, I think, has more poetry in
it, than almost any modern verse.' He then repeated, I should think,
more than a page from Dana's `Two Years Before the Mast' describing
the falling overboard of one of the crew, and the effect it produced, not
only at the moment, but for some time afterward. I wondered at his
memory, which enabled him to recite so beautifully a long prose
passage, so much more difficult than verse. Several of those present,
with whom the book was a favorite, were so glad to hear from me that
it was as true as interesting, for they had regarded it as partly a work of
imagination.''
In writing the book Mr. Dana had a motive which inspired him to put
into it his very best. The night after the flogging of his two
fellow-sailors off San Pedro, California, Mr. Dana, lying in his berth,
``vowed that, if God should ever give me the means, I would do
something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that
class of beings with whom