Two Years Before the Mast, 1840

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Fall 2014

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Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882) Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea New-York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff-Street, 1840

In a May 1850 letter to Richard Henry Dana, Melville colorfully described the uniqueness and complexity of Moby-Dick: “It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves.”

_{The purchase of this book was made possible through the generosity of the Julia Stearns Dockweiler Foundation}