Near the end of a letter dated May 1, 1850, Herman Melville gave Richard Henry Dana Jr. a status update: “about the ‘whaling voyage’—I am half way in the work,” he wrote, adding, “it will be a strange sort of book, tho, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho you may get oil from it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree.” This is the earliest known mention of Moby-Dick, and it’s appropriate that the recipient of the news was Dana, who knew better than almost any other man that blubber was blubber.

Dana had set sail on the Pilgrim as a common sailor in 1834, when he was just nineteen, as a leave from Harvard. Melville, four years younger, first took to the sea around the same age as a cabin boy aboard the St. Lawrence in 1839. And when Melville was trying to get the sap running for the great American sea book, it was generally accepted that Dana had already written it. Dana’s autobiographical Two Years Before the Mast (1840) had been heralded on either side of the Atlantic as a book that finally told the truth about a sailor’s life. Melville didn’t offer a dissenting opinion. In White-Jacket, published shortly before his 1850 letter, he had stated, “But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you must have read it.”

The last bit is hyperbole, for sure, but it now much better approximates the standing of Moby-Dick, which wasn’t popular in the author’s lifetime. Like varietals, books age differently—sometimes well, often not. So has the “unmatchable” Two Years Before the Mast soured, and who was the author whom Melville, upon reading the book, felt tied to “by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy”?

If a ship was Ishmael’s higher education, Dana found his own education at Harvard lacking in elevation and it made him seek out a ship. About returning for his sophomore year in 1832—the thirteenth member of his family to attend the school—he wrote, “I went back to college recitations, college rank, college gossip, and college esprit de corps as a slave shipped to his dungeon.” The prison sentence lasted a year: the following summer at Plymouth, while enjoying “water expeditions,” he and his brother came down with the measles, damaging their eyesight. And so, with the act of study difficult and his interest in Cambridge confinement nonexistent, Dana decided to beef up and go to sea. It wasn’t unusual for boys from well-off families to gain their sea legs as a precursor to landing a position in the shipping business. Dana didn’t want in, however—he wanted out. He embarked for California in August 1834, wearing duck trousers, a checked shirt, and a sailor’s tarpaulin hat.

During his two years before the mast, he saw fellow Jacks flogged by a sadistic captain, cured twenty-five hides a day in San Diego for weeks on end, and sailed through alternating bouts of snow, hail, and rain that blotted out the sun for eight days while rounding Cape Horn. He put all of it and more, much more, too much—longitudes and latitudes, northeasters and southeasters, flying jibs and top-gallant masts—into the book in which he aimed “to present the life of a common sailor at sea as he really is—the light and the dark together.” In this goal, he was unmatchable; no “voice from the forecastle” had ever been heard until he spoke up.

He finished the book in 1840, working from the simple jottings he had kept in a single notebook. The extent of the entry for Monday, November 17, 1834, was:

At 7 a.m. George Ballmer, one of the crew, fell overboard from the main rigging and was lost. Lowered away from the whaleboat, and manned, but the man being heavily dressed, and ignorant of swimming, was never seen more.

And never was more dispassion seen in the description of a man’s drowning. Yet in the passage from Two Years Before the Mast, excerpted in our issue on The Sea, Dana observes:

A man dies onshore—you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot. You are often prepared for the event. There is always something which helps you to realize it when it happens, and to recall it when it has passed. A man is shot down by your side in battle, and the mangled body remains an object and a real evidence; but at sea, the man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancyshows his loss. Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much.

This is Dana’s version of a Takeaway Paragraph: a deft observation rises out from the narrative, revealing a truth of the human condition from a crow’s-nest vantage point. In Moby-Dick, on the other hand, Melville prefers to look down from the stratosphere. Writing on another sort of death, that of a whale whose carcass is stripped and left at sea, Melville added:

And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There’s your law of precedents; there’s your utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There’s orthodoxy!

Dana never allowed himself such liberties. In the sea Dana saw the sea, not “the image of the ungraspable phantom of life” as Melville made out. Dana didn’t have use for metaphor or allegory: he was too realistic, too straight-laced, qualities that in life led him never to seek another berth. He returned to college rank and college gossip, settled in Cambridge, and became famous for his book as well as his work as a lawyer and public figure advocating the abolition of slavery and of flogging at sea. He was so well-connected that Melville asked him at one time for an endorsement for a consulship in the Sandwich Islands, at another time for one in Florence. Dana’s sea life may have been, as he called it, a “parenthesis,” but it was a finely written one.

At the end of that 1850 letter, Melville added about the poetic sap that, “to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which form the nature of the thing, must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.” It’s never been clear exactly what the thing was for Melville, but he appears to have gotten the truth of it—that was his virtue. The thing for Dana was much clearer, and he nailed the truth of it—that was his.