Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.”
- Date
- 1840
Meaning of “There is not so helpless and pitiable an…”
Dana remembers how bewildering the first hours of shipboard life felt to a novice suddenly surrounded by unfamiliar orders, sounds and tasks.
Where does it come from?
Two Years Before the Mast, Chapter I, “Departure,” Project Gutenberg #2055. Dana describes his own bewilderment on first going to sea and calls a landsman beginning a sailor’s life uniquely helpless and pitiable. It is first-person maritime memoir shaped by rhetorical exaggeration, not a literal universal ranking of helplessness.
