Fancy pants Richard Dana spent two years at Harvard when his weakened eyesight (really?) made it difficult for him to study so he embarked a journey of self discovery by signing on to a voyage for a couple years. As a sailor he learned how to furl sails and shed his privileged past. But he was privileged and it was money that got him out of serving more than his allotted time on the ship.
His journey took him to Mexican California where he was dubious about the morality and general worth of the residents, questioning their whiteness, believing them to be shiftless and slow, willing to take from the land what it offered them rather than to build it into something monumental. Two Years before the Mast came out in 1840, eight years before the Gold Rush and yet he captures the sense of California as being the ends of the earth, the end-game of manifest destiny.
Thoughts: As a native Californian, I’m always intrigued at what people from outside the State think and say about its people. The stereotype of the flaky, vegan, cultish residents, obsessed with looks and self actualization does exist if not in quite the reductive sense of the stereotype. Dana didn’t see those people as the “white” people attracted to the State came later, they weren’t the Californios that he saw and derided.
Our Spanish heritage now more than a century and a half ago remains a strong subtext, found in the place names, the red tiles, the worship of the missions that are sprinkled along most of the California coast. Is that because Anglo culture never formed its own identity because its people were too busy tending their own self creation to worry about the collective?