A CLASSIC OF THE SEA
Introduction to “ Two Years before the Mast .”
Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for its own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries. Such a book is Dana’s. When Marryat’s and Cooper’s sea novels are gone to dust, stimulating and joyful as they have been to generations of men, still will remain “Two Years Before the Mast.”
Paradoxical as it may seem, Dana’s book is the classic of the sea, not because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but for the precise contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal man, clear-seeing, hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate education to go about the work. He brought a trained mind to put down with untroubled vision what he saw of a certain phase
