Revisiting Southern California with Richard Henry Dana


If you've ever been tempted to read the book "Two Years Before the Mast", I encourage you. Or not. If you're looking for a thrilling story, it will just be very long and tedious, without much happening. I'll sum it up for you: a young man in Boston takes a year off from college to be a sailor. There ya go.

If, on the other hand, you're like me with a fascination with Southern California, it's wonderful. He goes into wonderful detail about places that I'm familiar with, especially Santa Barbara, in 1835 and '36. And since I just finished reading it again, I've decided that he and I have a lot in common.

No, I wasn't a sailor, and I didn't go to Southern California in the 1830s. But I was a young man, and I spent a couple of years in Santa Barbara in the 1980s. By the way, the title "Two Years Before the Mast" doesn't mean that something is supposed to happen to the mast in that timeframe, it's just an old-fashioned expression which today we would say as "Two years on a boat, with a mast" - a mast being the thing that is used to hang a sail. He could have said "The two years I spent on a sailing boat", but it wouldn't have sounded as dramatic.

At the end of the book he adds what it felt like to him when he visited a couple of decades later. And his memories are a lot like mine, remembering when he was a young man, when he was seeking adventure, doing a job that he didn't particularly like, and while he was glad to have seen it, he was anxious to get back home.

In the book he spent a lot of time in an area that would have just been called California, when it was under Mexican rule. The names are the same for the most part, like San Diego, or Santa Barbara, but Ventura was still going by its full name San Buenaventura, and Los Angeles was still called the Pueblo. He spends time in San Pedro, and travels up to the Pueblo (LA) a few times, but remember that it was a long ride on a horse, and there were no freeways back then!

I can see Santa Barbara through his eyes. He naturally spent a lot of time outside (there were a few houses to visit in Santa Barbara, but not many, and besides he was a working man), and although I never did the type of strenuous work that he did, I spent a lot of time outside, too.

My memories are of people who wondered why I didn't really want to go into a building and sit there. I took my lunch to the beach, I walked along the creek with my neighbor's dog, I smelled the air, and I felt the ocean breeze. I was glad to leave, of course, like Dana was, and my memories are bittersweet.

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more