A Harvard student's vivid memoir of two years as a common sailor rounding Cape Horn. Dana's influential account of life before the mast.
Books mentioned in Two Years Before the Mast (5)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: “Near this was a variety of huts or cottages, nearly an hundred in number, the best of them built of mud and white washed, but the greater part only Robinson Crusoe like--of posts and branches of trees.”
Mandeville, a Romance by William Godwin: “At last, when I thought that there were no more to be got, I found, at the bottom of old Schmidt's chest, "Mandeville, a Romance, by Godwin, in five volumes."”
Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “I accordingly overhauled the chests of the crew, but found nothing that suited me exactly, until one of the men said he had a book which "told all about a great highway-man," at the bottom of his chest, and producing it, I found, to my surprise and joy, that it was nothing else than Bulwer's Paul Clifford.”
Table Talk by William Cowper: “Then his lines to Mary, his address to the jackdaw, and a short extract from Table Talk;”
Erlking by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “"Ille et nefasto" from Horace, and Goethe's Erl King.”