Two Years Before The Mast : a personal narrative of life at sea

R. Dana, T. Philbrick

For many writers of the mid-nineteenth century in the USA, it seemed necessary to locate the desired partner of the same sex in a distant, exotic setting. Reports of the sensuality of the South Seas had been frequent since their "discovery" by Europeans. Dana recorded his experiences in Hawaii in this work, which was to influence Herman Melville (and later Charles Warren Stoddard) significantly. Dana's friendships with the English sailors fit quite well into a tradition of the handsome noble sailor (as in the works of Frederick Marryat). His friendship with Hope, his Hawaiian special friend (aikane), introduces the text's cross-cultural theme of self-exploration. Despite the abuse he receives, and the fact that he is dying of syphilis presumably contracted from a Western sailor, Hope remains civil, and Dana attempts to counteract the captain's racism by procuring medicine for him. Dana's journey to such a world is a kind of delayed adulthood, represented by the America to which he returns "in a state of indifference."