Richard Henry Dana Jr.

And, um- And that book was, uh, s- called Into the Raging Sea, uh, and the, really, uh, well, they had um, a device on the bridge that was only supposed to pick up the last six hours of c- conversation on the bridge between the officers, and it picked up the last 72 hours, and that was really interesting to, to, uh, hear how that, that unfolded and ended in tragedy.

Another good story, or a terrific sailing story, of course the classic one for the west coast is Two Years Before the Mast by Henry Dana, and just tremendous story about sailing up and down the coast.

Uh, uh, what they would do is pick up hides from the farmers, um, ranchers along the, up and down the coast in Monterey and places that you're familiar with, and, and trade finished goods from the east coast, pots and pans and forks and-

Yeah

It is milestoneed and documented all the way back, and the master of that wonderful trade, that complex and intricate trade, that awe-compelling trade has competent ways of knowing whether Shakespeare law is good law or not, and whether his law court procedure is correct or not, and whether his legal shop talk is the shop talk of a veteran practitioner or only a machine-made counterfeit of it gathered from books and from occasional loiterings in Westminster.

Richard H. Dana served two years before the mast, and had every experience that falls to the lot of the sailor before the mast of our day.

His sailor talk flows from his pen with the sure touch and the ease and confidence of a person who has lived what he is talking about, not gathered it from books and random listenings.

Hear him.

And icebergs were written about quite carefully and quite evocatively by early writers.

Probably the most famous of those is Richard Henry Dana Jr., who wrote his famous memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, which is a memoir by a common merchant sailor sailing, among other places, around Cape Horn.

I'm pretty sure that O'Brien would have had a copy of Dana on his bookshelf.

And Dana's account balances this aesthetic wonder with peril.

But the first book on our map rewinds the clock much further back.

We are looking at Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s book.

Ah, Two Years Before the Mast.

Yes.

Selkirk becomes Robinson Crusoe.

Richard Dana becomes Richard Dana two years before the mast, a Harvard graduate who spends time sailing around the world.

It was very exotic at the time.

And, of course, Herman Melville.

This moment begins a story of great adventure and also an origin tale of some of the great novels of the 19th century and travelogues.

For example, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is here, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is here, and Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mass is here.

But at this moment...

Mentor is headed into troubled waters around what we call the Carolines, the Carolinas Islands, an archipelago stretching many hundreds of miles.