ABSTRACT
With the 1840 publication of his seafaring narrative Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., established what critics have called a distinctly American literary genre: “the voice from the forecastle narrative.”1 In this bestselling work, Dana unceremoniously illustrates with careful detail his experiences as an ordinary sailor aboard the brig Pilgrim sailing from Boston to California and back. Dana’s attention to California’s burgeoning trade, natural wonders, and developing cities-such as San Diego and San Francisco-provides an interesting description of California life during the early to mid-nineteenth century.2 Moreover, because of its faithful depictions of maritime activity and its unwavering attention to a typical sailor’s life at sea, the narrative was an important precursor to later treatment of seafaring by American writers such as Herman Melville and Jack London. Due to this wide-ranging influence and “bestseller” status,3 Two Years Before the Mast has been the subject of numerous literary studies and has received the brunt of Dana criticism.4 Dana’s 1859 narrative, To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage, on the other hand, has remained absent from the imagination of modern critics and readers alike. This oversight is regrettable, because To Cuba and Back provides a worthwhile glance into the life of this important American author and a useful resource for the study of both mid-nineteenth-century American foreign relations and antebellum literary production. The actual motivation for Dana’s “vacation voyage,” was unexceptional. In February 1859, feeling overwhelmed by the strain of his legal practice, Dana elected to leave Boston for New York and a leisurely voyage to Cuba aboard the steamer Cahawba. While he relates the details of his maritime journey and subsequent overland tour of Cuba in clear detail, the narrative is laced with significant subtexts that Dana does not treat fully, but which must be addressed. My aim is to situate this “minor” work from a well-known nineteenth-century American author within its antebellum culture in order to examine Dana’s treatment of “race” and simultaneously assess his role in the American colonial/literary project.
