Two Years Before the Mast · Chapter
XXXI explained
The chapter describes the ship's approach to Cape Horn, with worsening weather, shorter days, and colder temperatures.
What happens
The chapter describes the ship's approach to Cape Horn, with worsening weather, shorter days, and colder temperatures. The crew faces a massive wave that sweeps the deck, destroying the galley, pigsty, hen coop, and sheep pen. The narrator also discusses the hypocrisy of temperance on ships, where grog is denied to sailors but freely available to officers. The ship considers passing through the Straits of Magellan but is forced to abandon the attempt due to a gale and fog, instead heading south toward Cape Horn.
Themes in this chapter
Hardship and Endurance
The crew endures freezing temperatures, violent seas, and the loss of equipment and livestock, highlighting the physical and mental toll of life at sea.
Authority and Discipline
The temperance policy is enforced unequally, with officers allowed rum while sailors are denied, reflecting the arbitrary power of the captain and the class divide aboard ship.
Class and Social Inequality
The hypocrisy of temperance ships—saving money for owners while depriving sailors of comfort—underscores the economic and social exploitation of the crew.
Characters to notice
- Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Describes the harsh conditions and the wave that sweeps the deck; reflects on temperance policies and the crew's suffering.
- Old Wilson
Crawls out from under the galley after the wave, having been nearly smothered.
- Bill Jackson
Standing at the galley door with the kid of beef when the wave hits; loses the beef but holds onto the kid.
Key passages
“Jack, who has to stand through everything, and work in wet and cold, can have nothing to wet his lips or warm his stomach. This was a 'temperance ship,' and, like too many such ships, the temperance was all in the forecastle.”
The sailors, who endure the worst conditions, are denied any alcohol to warm themselves, while the officers can drink freely—a common hypocrisy on so-called temperance ships.
Highlights the injustice of selective temperance policies.
“Our ship rose slowly over a few of the largest of them, until one immense fellow came rolling on, threatening to cover her, and which I was sailor enough to know, by 'the feeling of her' under my feet, she would not rise over.”
The narrator senses from the ship's motion that an enormous wave will overwhelm her, and it does, sweeping the deck clean.
Demonstrates the sailor's instinct and the power of the sea.
“The galley, the pigsty, the hen coop, and a large sheep pen which had been built upon the forehatch, were all gone, in the twinkling of an eye—leaving the deck as clean as a chin new-reaped.”
In an instant, the wave washes away all the deck structures, leaving nothing behind.
Vivid imagery of the wave's destructive force.