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  • Sailor TalkReading Within and Beyond Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast
  • Matthew Taylor Raffety (bio)
Jeffrey L. Amestoy. Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. x + 365 pages. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00 (hardcover).
Paul A. Gilje. To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xviii + 390 pages. Figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.99 (paper).

In recent years, historians in growing numbers have turned their attention to the significance of America's maritime past. This proliferation had led to studies pointing in so many directions at once that Daniel Vickers famously worried that the field grew more disconnected as it grew more popular, likening to scholars "sitting in a circle," but "facing outwards."1 In Paul A. Gilje's ambitious and valuable To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America 1750–1850, the author offers scholars a variety of approaches to reading primary records of the maritime world. By contrast, Jeffrey L. Amestoy's rich and thoughtful Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr., asks readers to examine not merely the maritime writings that brought his subject fame, but the entire life of a complex and influential man whose fame may have come from his time on the water. Ultimately, Amestoy argues, although his time as a seafarer informed both his personal and professional outlook for the rest of his days, Dana's non-maritime accomplishments are due far greater consideration than historians have thus far credited.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these two decidedly different works both center on Richard Henry Dana, Jr. in exploring the maritime influence on the early United States. Ultimately, every historian of the maritime United States must wrestle with Dana's impact. Dana's 1840 memoir, Two Years before the Mast played a central role in turning the world of American letters and culture toward the water. Describing his adventures as a regular tar during a voyage around the horn to California, Dana's depiction of maritime life caught the [End Page 399] public fancy. His successful and oft-imitated maritime memoir served as an inspiration for both highbrow and popular tales of the sea.

At once essential and influential in its own time and for later scholars, Two Years is also a problematic text. Those complexities inform and, at times, bedevil both of these scholarly accounts. How did Dana, a maritime neophyte, a young man seeking healthful adventure on his gap years from Harvard, produce the most influential depiction of the life, travails, and work of "regular" tars? Moreover, even beyond Dana's exceptional class and educational background, Dana's original journals kept on board the Alert "vanished with his sea chest from the Boston wharf in 1836," so his famous account had to be reconstructed years later from eight sheets of notes and some letters home (Amestoy, p. 61).

To Swear Like a Sailor builds on Gilje's earlier scholarship about waterfront culture in the age of revolution and the early Republic. Many of the themes explored in his previous works, especially Liberty on the Waterfront (2004) and Free Trade and Sailors' Rights (2013), intersect with the burgeoning literature on the Anglo-American maritime world. Initially devised as "a series of semi-autonomous essays on how historians can gain insight into the world of Jack Tar … through creative readings of the types of documents at our disposal," Gilje sketches a rich, if by design not fully developed, exploration of how we can think about the sources for maritime history (p. 1). Thus, his primary contribution is to propose and flesh out useful "methodologies in 'reading' maritime culture" (p. 1).

As befits the culmination of two decades of research, To Swear Like a Sailor is a richly expansive work, seeking to "articulate a generic maritime culture—identified with the ubiquitous Jack Tar and to trace how his world reflected, intersected, and integrated with the rest of society" (pp. 2–3). In fact, the muddled qualities of Dana's book are precisely why Dana's work is so important to Gilje's. Dana's memoir sought to describe the seafaring culture...

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