This plaque is located on Santa Barbara's Stearns Wharf. It has a relief depiction of Dana and reads:
"Richard Henry Dana Jr
1815-1882
American Sailor, author and lawyer first arrived in Santa Barbara Harbor in 1835 on the Brig Pilgrim after 150 days at sea from Boston. Best known for his classic work "Two Years Before the Mast", Dana, a Harvard graduate, vividly recalled life in California's pre-American coastal communities. He was active in anti-slavery and seamen's rights movements. President Lincoln appointed Dana U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts in 1861.
Presented 150 years later
by the 5th and
6th grade classes,
Cleveland School,
Santa Barbara.
1985"
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 – January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of an eminent colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the American classic, the memoir Two Years Before the Mast. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves...
Selected works by Richard Henry Dana
1840. Two Years Before the Mast. Revised 1869 by the author; revised 1911 by his son.
1841. The Seaman's Friend: Containing a Treatise on Practical Seamanship, with Plates; A Dictionary of Sea Terms; Customs and Usages of the Merchant Service; Laws Relating to the Practical Duties of Master and Mariners. 1st edition; 6th edition, 1851
1839. Cruelty to seamen: being the case of Nichols & Couch. American Jurist and Law Magazine, October 1839, 22:92–107. This magazine was published in two volumes per year. Dana's article was republished in 1937 under the same title at Berkeley, California: The hand press of Wilder and Ellen Bentley. The original source is often miscited with the truncated name, American Jurist.
ca. 1842. An autobiographical sketch.
1859. To Cuba and back.
1859–1860. Journal of a Voyage Round the World. Reprinted in the Library of America volume on Dana and "records the 14-month circumnavigation that took Dana to California, Hawaii, China, Japan, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Egypt, and Europe. Written with unflagging energy and curiosity, the journal provides fascinating vignettes of frontier life in California, missionary influence in Hawaii, the impact of the Taiping Rebellion and the Second Opium War on China, and the opening of Japan to the West, while capturing the transition from the age of sail to the faster, smaller world created by the steamship and the telegraph."
1869. Twenty-Four Years After. Now included in subsequent editions of Two Years Before the Mast
1968. The journal. Robert F. Lucid, editor. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press."