I just started reading Two Years Before the Mast. It was written by Richard Dana, a high class, student from a well established east coast family. He dropped out of an ivy league school in 1838 due to poor eye sight. So, he decided to take a low position on a Man o War ship traveling around the tip of southern America to California and back. He kept journals the whole time, then turned it into a story and published a book immediately after he returned. It was the first published account of life on a ship, it inspired several other books, and provoked change in the conditions and pay of sailors all around the world, much like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle did for factory workers during the industrial revolution in America, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did for the anti-slavery cause in the 1850s.
I'm really enjoying the book so far, as this seems like something that I would really enjoy doing in real life. I thought that it might be a droll read, but it's quite lively. I read the following quote by the author in the introduction to the book. It gave me a larger reason for reading the book. I think that it's something more of us should learn, as modeled by the God, who "became flesh."
He had left for a little while the company of those who have “ never walked but one line from their cradles to their graves. 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.”
-Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast
And, yes,
I am back in the market for a sailboat.
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