Dana's California

Photography by Cliff Wassmann

In 1834 a 19 year old Harvard student named Richard Henry Dana shipped as a seaman aboard the brig Pilgrim for a two year voyage to California. The book he wrote about his experiences, Two Years Before The Mast, was an immediate best seller and in the century and a half since has never been out of print. This classic description of life about a merchantman in the first half of the 19th century is also a classic description of California before it became a part of the United States.

Mexican Cattle Drivers in Southern California
by William Hahn (1883) could have been painted
fifty years earlier

In his third year at Harvard, an attack of measles left Dana's eyesight so poor he could not study. A sea voyage was not an uncommon recommendation for this ailment. Yet despite Dana's social and financial position (his grandfather had been chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court) he chose not to go as a passenger but as a common sailor—before the mast, as the phase went.

The vessel on which Dana sailed was the brig Pilgrim which was engaged in the hide trade on the California coast. The ranchos and mission in California raised cattle and traded the hides for most of the manufactured goods they needed. The Yankees took the hides back to Boston to make shoes. Since the only way to get from New England to California by sea was around Cape Horn, the tip of South America, the voyage was long and dangerous. The Pilgrim reached California in January, 1835, 150 days out of Boston.

First Impressions
The first "port" was Santa Barbara. Like most of the costal towns where they traded, there was no harbor so they anchored far offshore. They took the goods in and hides out on small boats through the surf. Since the storms, the south-easters, would drive the skips onto the beach if they stayed around, they had to pull out at the first sign of a storm. Dana's first impression of California was not favorable.

" the open roadstead of Santa Barbara; anchoring three miles from the shore; running out to sea before every south-easter; landing in a high surf; with a little dark looking town, a mile from the beach; and not a sound to be heard, nor anything to be seen, but Sandwich Islanders, hides, and tallow bags."
Yet over time Dana found California to be "a country embracing four of five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forests in the north; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of herds of cattle; blessed with a climate, than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases...and a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold."