Stu's April Read-of-the-Month
I'm reading Two Years Before The Mast, a non-fiction account of a Harvard drop-out who gained berth on a sailing ship headed for California...via Cape Horn! In other words, there was no Panama Canal when my man, Richard Henry "Dickie" Dana decided to take the trip. I have had to wade through some serious nautical lingo to get the meat out of his big adventure, for example:

"We got it wrapped around the yard, and passed gaskets over it as snugly as possible, and were just on deck again, when, with another loud rent, which was heard throughout the ship, the fore-topsail, which had been double-reefed, split in two athwartships, just below the reef band, from earing to earing."

This natty, nautical jargon-filled narrative becomes understandable the more I read, even though I ignored the illustrated glossary in the appendix that explains what-sail-goes-where. It's amazing to me that this landlubber adjusted to the seafaring life so cleanly and quickly in just a few months. He goes into detail about the coast of California, Mexican-owned at the time, where the main trade was hides—cattle hides, that is. And he still has a year left, and I, the final half of the book. But I love the familiar English he paints with, such as:

"A painter could not have painted so clear a sky. There was not a speck upon it. Yet it was blowing great guns from the northwest. When you can see a cloud to windward, you feel that there is a place for the wind to come from; but here it seemed to come from nowhere. No person could have told from the heavens, by their eyesight alone, that it was not a still summer's night...when the great mainsail gaped open, and the sail ripped from head to foot."

This preceded the worst gale he encountered, that lasted 3 days and blew the ship out so far to sea that it took them 22 days to sail back to the original position of the ship! And that's the sort of reading I'm doing this month, fresh from San Francisco where I discovered this work. Ahoy!