It’s Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s birthday Saturday. But don’t even try to fit all the candles on his birthday cake – he’s turning 200.
Dana, born into an affluent Massachusetts family but always a free thinker and a bit of a “problem child,” boarded the Pilgrim in 1834 as a merchant seaman, Dana Point Mayor Carlos Olvera said.
Dana was hoping to improve his worsening eyesight, but the voyage would change his life in more ways than one.
“What he saw happening on board the ship, he didn’t like,” Olvera said. “And he started to keep a journal of it. It ends up being his sole career when he gets back to Boston two years later, that what the captains on these ships were doing wasn’t right. They were judge, jury and executioner. So he made it his quest to change U.S. maritime laws.”
Dana’s journal soon became his most famous piece of writing, “Two Years Before the Mast,” which he sold to a publisher for only $250. Throughout his life, Dana also worked to change maritime laws, often defending common merchant seamen in court.
That wasn’t all. Dana also helped found the anti-slavery Free Soil Party in 1848, served as a United States attorney and successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the Union could blockade Confederate ports during the Civil War.
Dana’s support for the underdog was probably influenced by some of his own experiences, said Dana Point Historical Society President Barbara Johannes. His mother died when he was young, and he was often mistreated by his teachers as a child.
“I think he had empathy for people who suffered,” Johannes said.
‘THE MOST ROMANTIC SPOT’
Dana spent only a day and a half in what would later be Dana Point. But when the ship sailed through Capistrano Bay, Dana described the breathtaking cliffs that would later mark Dana Point and San Juan as “the only romantic spot on the coast.”
Despite his love for its coastline, Dana wasn’t the one who gave Dana Point its name. That was the California Geological Survey in 1884, Olvera said. They called it Dana’s Point at first, but the name was shortened to Dana Point in the 1920s.
Although Dana Point’s connection to Richard Henry Dana started off “very innocuously,” it soon transformed into something significant to the city, Olvera said.
Dana Point will celebrate its namesake’s bicentennial Saturday with a program on the Ocean Institute’s replica of the Pilgrim. An exhibit at the Historical Society museum in City Hall also pays tribute to Dana, with photos of him, maps of his voyage and letters he wrote to friends and family while he was sailing on the Pilgrim – a “cross section of his entire life,” said Elizabeth Bamattre, chairwoman of the Dana bicentennial program.
His was definitely one extraordinary life, Johannes said.
“People keep going back and reexamining his contributions, and they have stood up over the past 200 years,” Johannes said.
Contact the writer: mjaros@ocregister.com or @madisoncjaros
