Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Richard Henry Dana Jr. was a Harvard undergraduate who, when measles weakened his eyes, shipped as a common sailor round Cape Horn to California in 1834 and back two years later, and wrote Two Years Before the Mast from the journal he kept. The book, an unsentimental account of life in the forecastle, floggings, the hide trade and the Spanish coast before the gold rush, sold enormously and was read by Melville before he went to sea. Dana became a lawyer for sailors and a founder of the Free Soil Party, and defended fugitive slaves in the Boston courts.