California’s hide and tallow trade was big business from the early 1820s through the mid-1840s. Merchant ships of many nations, but primarily American, plied the coastline—sometimes for up to two years—stopping at various ports to swap their finished goods of all kinds for raw products to be made into leather goods and candles. Once back home, they issued glowing reports of the territory’s unexploited resources and balmy climate, igniting American interest in the Mexican-owned province.
Perhaps the most influential of these accounts—certainly the most widely-read—was Richard H. Dana’s memoir Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840. Dana, a young Harvard law student suffering from eye problems that were interfering with his studies, signed on as a common sailor hoping that physical activity in the fresh air might cure his affliction. Departing Boston on August 14, 1834, he arrived at Santa Barbara in January, 1835 aboard the Pilgrim, and left San Diego to return home in May 1836, aboard the Alert.
Dana’s vivid narrative includes his voyages around Cape Horn, the duties and hardships of a sailor’s life at sea; descriptions of landing at each port with its small settlements and surrounding large land-grant ranchos; the coastal indigenous peoples, the Mexican Californios culture, and the traders’ influences on it. He supplies specific details about the laborious process of tanning cow hides, then transporting them to a waiting ship. Homebound, Dana provides a classic account of terrifying storms, floggings by the Alert’s captain (which he believed unjust), and awe-inspired descriptions of “incomparable” icebergs.
Hubert H. Bancroft, California’s most famous historian, opined that Dana’s fascinating sea story was the charm that mainly caused the book’s immense popularity. But he also praised it as instructive, containing as it does a most realistic picture of sailors’ lives and treatment on American trading vessels, unequaled details of the hide trade, and intelligent observations on the places Dana visited.
Today, Dana’s oft-reprinted memoir still sells in bookstores and online retailers. An original, 1840 first edition (pre-owned) was recently offered for sale on Etsy at $895.
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