Named source · 1840

Two Years Before the Mast Quotes by Richard Henry Dana Jr.: Context & Meanings

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There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.

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“There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor’s life.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr.

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Dana remembers how bewildering the first hours of shipboard life felt to a novice suddenly surrounded by unfamiliar orders, sounds and tasks.

Source details

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.

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