I'd long heard of this book as being used as source material for other texts. I can see why... Dana's clear and compelling prose transported me to the age of sail. I felt myself tasting the salt of the sea and many other details so wonderfully woven into this tale. The epilogue of his return to California after the transformative 24 years of the late 1840s and 50s is a real treat. I am a lover of first person histories un-interpreted by succeeding years. This text hits the mark squarely. I knew it to be a book about life at sea and of the merchant trade in the late years of sail, but the description of the sparsely populated Alta California coast with its Missions and Presidios in the years before the Mexican - American war were a great treasure