Richard Henry Dana (1815-82) | 2 Scripts

Whales

From Two Years Before the Mast, 1840

Popular with sightseers are the many whale-watching opportunities up and down California's coast. The awesome majesty of these fascinating creatures was also noticed by one of California's earliest travel writers.

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana was only nineteen years old when health problems led him to leave Harvard to join the crew of the brig Pilgrim. His 1840 chronicle of that journey, Two Years Before the Mast, was a best-seller, thanks to Dana's detailed description of California and the wonders to be found there.

This being the spring season, San Pedro, as well as all the other open ports upon the coast, was filled with whales, that had come in to make their annual visit upon soundings. For the first few days that we were here and at Santa Barbara, we watched them with great interest, calling out "There she blows!" every time we saw the spout of one breaking the surface of the water; but they soon became so common that we took little notice of them. They often "broke" very near us, and one thick foggy night, during a dead calm, while I was standing anchor watch, one of them rose so near that struck our cable, and made all surge again. He did not seem to like the encounter much himself, for he sheered off, and spouted at a good distance.

After his sailing experience, Dana became a successful attorney and wrote more books, none of which approached the success of Two Years Before the Mast, which Dana once described as merely "a boy's work."

A Dim Tradition

From Two Years before the Mast, Second Edition, 1869

California has seen more than one major industry expand rapidly like a bubble before bursting into thin air. Rare, though, is the sentiment good riddence evoked by the collapse.

Richard Henry Dana arrived in California in 1835 as a common sailor aboard the brig Pilgrim. Dana lived first hand the miserable conditions endured by sailors aboard vessels engaged in the hide and tallow trade. A return visit twewnty-four years later evokes in Dana memories of the "hated business."

In one of my walks about the wharves, I found a pile of dry hides lying by the side of the vessel. Here was something to feelingly persuade me what I had been, to recall a past scarce credible to myself. I stood lost in reflection. What were these hides—what were they not?—to us, to me, a boy, twenty-four years ago? . . . The entire hide-business is in the past, and to the present inhabitants of California a dim tradition. The gold discoveries drew off all men from the gathering or curing of hides, the inflowing population made an end of the great droves of cattle; and now not a vessel pursues the—I was about to say dear—the dreary, once hated business of gathering hides upon the coast, and the beach of San Diego is abandoned, and its hide-houses have disappeared.

Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast was published in 1841. A subsequent edition, published in 1869, included an account of his later visit, "Twenty-Four Years After."