We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths for the by-ways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought among our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice.
Perhaps it was some such notion as that expressed above that has driven me temporarily from the tidier worlds of Trollope and Austin to a trio of nautical adventures. I have read, in quick succession, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, and Typhoon by Joseph Conrad. Actually, that’s not quite true: I didn’t finish The Perfect Storm. A book has to be pretty bad for me not to finish it, and I found Junger’s tale of a doomed swordfishing vessel a choppy and unsatisfying read. Maybe some day I’ll rent the movie and see if Hollywood, which will presumably have no inconvenient scruples about strict veracity, as did Junger, can make it more interesting.
Typhoon was little better. Of the three books, it is the only work of pure fiction and is the only one by a man actually known as a writer, though I fail to see why. I remember reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in high school and being amazed that a writer could make such a darkly compelling story into such a dull novel. In Typhoon Conrad accomplishes a similar feat, rendering a life-or-death struggle against the sea in a manner that, frankly, made me sleepy. In order to stay awake, I would sometimes amuse myself by searching for antecedents to his ambiguous pronouns.
Speaking of ambiguity, the quote at the head of this post is from Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, the only work of the three that I take any pride or pleasure in having read. Dana was a junior at Harvard when he decided to take some time off to see the world (and hopefully get some relief for his weakening eyesight) by embarking on a voyage around Cape Horn to California aboard the brig Pilgrim in 1834. The voyage lasted two years. Actually, the Pilgrim stayed longer in California, but Dana, not wanting to make a career out of sailing, got a ride back earlier aboard the Alert. Dana’s account of his two years at sea is engaging and well-written, although not always riveting in its details. There were times, I confess, when I longed for some pirates or a giant squid to make an entrance and liven things up a bit.
Dana’s primary motive, however, was not to entertain, but to describe in detail the life of a common sailor. He shows us a life not only subject to vacillations of weather, but also to the sometimes cruel whims of ship captains. His account of a vicious flogging aboard the Pilgrim is one of the book’s most memorable scenes. He also details the extremely laborious process of curing hides and hauling them aboard for transport back to Boston. The edition that I read was closed with his “24 years after” essay in which he visits the modernized California to find that both the hide trade and sailing ships are things of the past. Overall, Two Years was an enjoyable read and I think that its place as a minor American classic is well deserved.