SOURCE: “The Voyage in American Sea Fiction after the Pilgrim, the Acushnet, and the Beagle,” in Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 3-18.

In the following excerpt, Bender traces the transformation of American sea literature from its “golden age” of the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century.

You got to have confidence steering. 

—Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., “changed the face of maritime fiction” in America by publishing his “voice from the forecastle” in Two Years Before the Mast.¹ He influenced James Fenimore Cooper's last sea novels and prepared the way for many less significant books that immediately capitalized on the new value he had given to the actual experience of ordinary seamen (Nicholas Isaacs's Twenty Years Before the Mast, 1845, for example); he initiated “the genre of journey narratives...