The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum (SBMM) will host a Zoom lecture titled Hawaiians, Catholics, and the Town with a Bay in Front and an Amphitheater of Hills Behind: The Education of Richard Henry Dana Jr. in Santa Barbara, presented by Rick Kennedy, a professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.
The 7 p.m. webinar on Thursday, July 15 is free, but registration is required, and donations are welcome. Register at https://sbmm.org/santa-barbara-event/the-education-of-richard-henry-dana-jr/.
“More than any other port mentioned in Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast,’ Santa Barbara opened the author to a wider world than he had ever imagined and to more diverse populations than he knew in Boston,” Kennedy said.
The lecture will give listeners a glimpse into a past of sailing, hide-gathering, what Santa Barbara was like in 1835-36, who lived here then, who Dana crewed and worked with, and how his voyage and visit to Santa Barbara changed him.”
Dana was a Massachusetts-born writer and lawyer, descended from America’s earliest settlers, who championed the powerless in society, including seamen, fugitive slaves and freedmen. According to Kennedy, “The classic book, ‘Two Years Before the Mast,’ is his coming-of-age story.”
Having contracted measles during his junior year at Harvard (an illness that affected his eyesight), then 18-year-old Dana signed aboard a hide-and-tallow ship, the brig Pilgrim, bound for California, as a common seaman for a two-year term, and sailed into Santa Barbara in 1835 when it was the central port of the coast.
Dana arrived having grown up in a household picking sides between Trinitarian evangelicals and Unitarians during one of the Great Awakenings in America.
“I’m excited about taking a deeper dive into the stories behind Dana’s voyage and book and learning more from Kennedy about the author that we can incorporate into the Tall Ship Program,” said Greg Gorga, SBMM executive director.
Born in Salinas, Kennedy received his college degrees in Santa Barbara: BA in 1980, MA in 1983 and Ph.D. in 1987. He was a teaching assistant for Richard Oglesby’s California history class and earned his Ph.D. under Harold Kirker, who introduced him to historic preservation in Santa Barbara.
Kennedy teaches California history at Point Loma Nazarene University. From 2003-17 he taught a summer school sailing course on California history, in which he and students sailed up the coast and through the islands reading “Two Years Before the Mast.”
Every summer, Kennedy would also lead a walking tour of Santa Barbara, leaving the docks early in the morning and returning late in the afternoon.
The author of books and articles involving both California and New England, Kennedy recently published “Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Evangelical Consciousness, and the Colony of Hawaiians in San Diego,” in “California Dreaming: Society and Culture in the Golden State” (2017).
SBMM is at the Santa Barbara Harbor, 113 Harbor Way, Ste. 190. For more, visit sbmm.org or call 805-962-8404.