Two of the greatest sea writers, both Americans (and best friends to boot), were both born #OnThisDay: in 1815, Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of the classic memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and in 1819, Herman Melville, author of many works, the most famous being Moby Dick (1851).

Dana was a sailor and afterwards a lawyer, politician , and prominent abolitionist. In Two Years Before the Mast, he provides a highly realistic, unsugar-coated depiction of the lives of sailors—the awful conditions, the mistreatment from superiors, and then great peril of the open sea. The merchant ship Dana was on made a journey from Boston around Cape Horn in South America and on to California, a place which Dana describes with a level of detail heretofore unknown to the American public, which gave the book a unique appeal to those traveling to California during the Gold Rush. Dana learned Spanish and worked as the ship’s interpreter as they interacted with people native to the land. Upon the ship’s return journey the crew experienced a terrifying ordeal. Melville gives this section of the book this endorsement: “But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana’s unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. … His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle.”

(Fun story: at one of the first book auctions me and my mom went to, we were considering bidding high on a first edition of Two Years Before the Mast because we saw them listed for $10k online, but we chickened out at around $600. “What–it’s only money!” the auctioneer exclaimed.)

This Google nGram tells the story of Melville’s periods of fame and obscurity. He was briefly a hot commodity with Typee and Omoo—do you like adventure stories about two sealads who abandon ship and get captured by cannibals, while one of the lads falls in love with a beautiful cannibal maiden, and then they flee in a boat while said heartbroken cannibal maiden looks on forlornly? Read Typee! It’s a great yarn and based on the true story of Melville’s time with the Typee people on island of Nukhuhiva—then, as Melville’s work became more experimental, he lost a lot of readership with Mardi, sunk into obscurity with Moby Dick and Pierre, and (while he did during these years of obscurity produce such classics as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd, he also produced mountains of by all accounts unreadable poetry like the civil war poems of Battle-Pieces and the massive but almost never read Clarel) finally was “rediscovered” in 1917 by Carl Van Doren, Raymond Weaver, and D.H. Lawrence, which led to a resurgence in his popularity as Moby-Dick resonated with an audience reoriented by modernism and world war. (so the story goes)

The truth, though, is that Melville was never completely forgotten–he was just extremely underappreciated. He appears in the Additional Authors list in one turn-of-the-century history of American literature I’ve read as “an author of amusing sea-tales.” (something to that effect; the book’s lying in storage somewhere)

The author of the Herman Melville entry in the 1903 edition of Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, for example, seems to know quite a bit about Melville (and what’s more, to have read his works!) So it’s not quite true to say that Melville was “forgotten”; he had a few readers. (Incidentally, “flaws of style and construction” was also my first impression of Moby Dick. Certain parts read like some Shakespeare-quenched grad student groping blindly after modernism in the dark—which is incredible, because we’re talking about a book published in 1851!)